How To: Recording an Electric Guitar or Bass without an Amplifier.

Introduction

I'm Neil Stoker, from Washington in the North East of England.

This lesson is for week 1 of Introduction To Music Production at Coursera.org. I am going to do a brief How To on recording an Electric Guitar without an amplifier.

I am going to describe recording a traditional guitar track, House of the Rising Sun, using my electro-acoustic guitar and include some audio clips during the process. For the examples, please focus on the quality of the audio and try to ignore the quality of the playing.

Lesson

Before you can record an electric guitar, you need to be able to convert the signals from the guitar or bass into signals that the computer understands. I have an instrument to USB adaptor that performs this conversion, and also have the use of a mixing desk with a built in USB interface.

You also need some audio recording software. I use a program called Audacity for the recording, this has the advantage of being free software and is available on PC, Linux and OSX machines.

A nieve solution using a built in microphone

It is possible to record audio using a built in microphone on a computer, but there are several problems with the audio. You can clearly hear additional noise in the background of the playing. Clip 1 

Using a USB Interface

An Instrument - USB Interface

In these examples I am using a USB interface to connect between the guitar and the computer. I am still using Audacity to carry out the recordings.

The adaptor is simple to set up, and converts the analog guitar signal into the digital signals that a computer understands.

This is a cheap and effective method for a solo guitarist to create a recording, however a significant amount of work will be required for a multi-instrument version to be created.

This is the recording of the track using the USB interface, the audio levels are similar but without the background noise.

It is possible to create a multi-track recording by laying down additional tracks, in Some Folks Do I recorded two guitar tracks using the USB interface and the two singers were each recorded in separate sessions. I don't remember the number of takes, but it did take several hours of recording and re-recording until we were satisfied - or just possibly we'd had enough!

Forlorn intentions

Alto ZMX164 FX USB Mixing desk

I had planned on using a mixing desk to produce a version and talk through the steps taking to record the guitar track, however I had some technical difficulties with getting the audio to record at a reasonable level from Audacity over the USB interface.

What I didn't think about in time for completing the main part of the assignment was to use the phono (RCA) tape mix outputs to feed into the microphone socket on the laptop. I am hoping that I will get some time on Monday evening to finish this off before the deadline.

The general steps I would be taken would have been:

• Make sure all connections are made with all equipment powered off. This is to prevent sudden noises from potentially damaging your speakers and amplifiers.
• Turn all gain and level controls down, and mute all channels if possible
• Power equipment up in the following order
• Instruments
• Mixers
• Amplifiers
• Adjust the gain for the input to get to the +4 line level. Don't rely on gauges, use your ears. You can hear transient distortion long before it will appear on a meter.
• Adjust the studio and main mix outputs to get the desired listening levels.

Reflection

What have I learned?

• You need a really good quality signal to get a decent recording
• It's hard to do a solo recording session
• I can see why good sound engineers are highly sought after, and the most important single skill that they have is their listening
• Batteries fail at the most inopportune time (as if I didn't already know that from my photography)
• Learn at least the basics of how to equipment before wanting to use it for real

Oh, yes: the most important thing would be not to leave important work until almost the last minute.

Thank you's

I have spent a lot of time on reviewing, rewriting and rerecording the sections of this work, the hardest part was cutting out unnecessary sections. The finishing was done in a rush, I had given myself a set of challenging and interesting scheduling conflicts by taking on a new job and signing up for new courses all around the same time.

I'd like to thank everybody that has reviewed my work, and receiving feedback is the best way to learn and develop new skills.