It's Finished!

Sorry for the delay for this post, but at long last, my song is completed.

                                                                                Bam

This seven weeks or so paid off, in that now I have a completed song to my name. Pretty good, if you ask me.

The final stuff I had to do, once I finished, was to mix everything and take all of the raw recorded stuff and make it sound good. Most of it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be: it was mostly adjusting the volume for individual parts to make everything even, as well as adding other things such as adjusting the pan setting and double tracking some stuff. There was also some things that I wanted to be EQ’ed, which I would then export that part, open it in audacity, and adjut the EQ using it. There were some parts where, if I didn’t like the take that I did, or found an easy way to adjust the sound using my amp or effects, I might just rerecord that part. Pretty effective, if you ask me.

As such, I can, and have now started to work on my presentation. My presentation will mostly be focused on how you should not back down from something just because it looks intimidating. Instead, you should keep pushing forward. That intimidation is why I didn’t start recording for a while. However, I eventually decided to try to record a song, and I managed to succeed in learning how to record and produce a song.

For my demonstration, I will feature a 30-second excerpt from my song (I can’t show the whole thing, as it’s over six minutes long) that will play at a certain point during my presentation. I’m not going to be actually bringing in a guitar because the point of my project was not to learn a song on guitar, but to record a song. Considering this is probably my last blog post before my presentation, I might as well give you guys a recap of all of the stuff that I used.

Software:

• Presonus Studio One 2 (A DAW with a very easy-to-use interface. It costs 100 dollars, however, it comes bundled for free with the audiobox seen below) http://studioone.presonus.com/

• Hydrogen Drum Machine (A drum machine software designed for linux with betas in mac and windows. It requires you to manually place where each note is play in a pattern, so while this makes it harder to get the drum beat right early, it pays off in the end, with it being 100% prescise. It’s also free)  http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/

• Audacity (A free Audio Editing program that I used to EQ some parts. Pretty optional) http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Hardware and stuff like that:

• Presonus USB Audiobox (A device that converts your microphone or guitar input so that it can be recorded onto your computer without it sounded awful. Also comes with Studio One 2, as mentioned above. Costs around $150) http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/AudioBoxUSB?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=none&device=c&network=g&matchtype=&gclid=CNXLmI6xqrYCFVGf4Aodxy0A5g

• Audio-Technica ATH-m50s (I probably forgot to mention this: Good-quality headphones are pretty essential, as they can help determine wether your song sounds good or crap. I also use these specific headphones for more than just recording, but I was fortunatley able to get them for under 120) http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATH-M50S-Professional-Monitor-Headphones/dp/B004ZG9TMA

• 1/4” – 1/8” Audio cable and/or Microphone (The ¼’-> 1/8’ Audio cable is what I used so I could capture my amp’s output directly to the audiobox, using the headphones input on the amp. This is probably  not a good idea if you’re not using a guitar amp, so you should probably get a microphone to use instead)

And there you have it: a way to record your own stuff. While I’m at it, I might as well post my song itself: