June 25th, 2010
I recently (Wednesday) got a new toy: The M-Audio Fast Track Pro, and I think it’s pretty awesome. I can’t believe it took me this long to get an audio interface, as it’s going to make life immeasurably easier when it comes to recording and brainstorming songs.
Anyway, to test out using it with the free (mostly-awesome but has some real weird side-effects) music editing software Audacity, I decided to try and get a better recording of one of my more ambitious covers, Waltz # 2 (XO) by Elliott Smith. It took plenty of takes, as I was not as brushed up on the song as I had hoped I was, but I was able to make a recording that sounded as good (and likely better) then anything I’ve made on my own before. My direct recordings are not really very listenable I find, but it is an idea of what I’m doing, and I hope to use them as the starting point to demo some of the upcoming Severe Bass with band stuff I’m working on.
Anyway, here’s the mp3 in shoddy 128 bps quality – I haven’t figured out how to export different mp3 sizes from Audacity yet, if it can be done (I’d assume so, but there are some very unusual and unexpected things with the program that can be worked around). BTW, if you are hearing some weird feedbacked-like sounds, they might be avoided by downloading the mp3 directly and playing – it sounds better in winamp to me then it does on the web. Either way, it’s definitely a marked improvement on the video I got of this song almost 5 years ago at Jammin Java in Vienna, VA, that inspired plenty of haterage from the teenaged myspace community. I don’t remember doing so, but I apparently took it down a few years ago b/c I was so unhappy w. the quality.
Anyway, considering the only things I used to make this recording are my laptop, the Fast Track Pro, Audacity, my bass guitar and a Shure SM-58, I think it’s pretty promising. Of course, I probably should have been doing stuff like this a couple years ago, but I’m admittedly behind in a lot of areas.
Why did it take me so long to embrace musical technology?
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[…] Decisions band practice!!!!. This was recorded at our practice space with two mics directly into my Fast Track Pro into REAPER. The quality isn’t great (the vocals are really quiet unfortunately), but […]
[…] bare-bones – literally two random microphones hanging from the ceiling, plugged into my Fast Track Pro, into REAPER (ie, pretty much the only way I know how to record right now). The performances were […]