Exciting news – I am ready to record my song!

The next hurdle to jump through has become how to record the song. There are many different audio recording platforms that exist, some of which are rather expensive (but powerful) such as Ableton Live. The standard version of this program costs 479$ per year at full price, but includes nearly all of the tools a professional audio mixer and/or musician would want to create a polished, professional track. It also comes with a steep learning curve and is not set up very well for beginners (as are many of the other industry standard recording platforms!)

I, however, am both an amateur, and not desiring to use music recording software for professional purposes. I am not coming into this with extensive background knowledge, nor the finances for these expensive programs. As much as I would love to create interesting sounds, for where I am right now, this is out of scope. However, learning these things is definitely a future goal (and you will hear more about this in my upcoming blog posts!)

As far as equipment goes, I do have a few tools at my disposal. I have been interested in music since I was very young, and have amassed some equipment over the years. I have an acoustic guitar and capo, electric guitar and small amp, a midi keyboard (borrowed from my partner), a podcasting microphone and a small recording microphone and stand with an audio interface (which admittedly is very old, has only two input channels, and a bit buggy, but I got it for 100$ on Used Victoria, so I’m happy with that!)

One option that is very easy to use for beginners and has all of the basic tools I am looking for is Garage Band, but this doesn’t work for me as I am not a Mac user, unfortunately.

Another option I have learned about is Reaper, which is free (ish) and quite powerful. It includes many features that a professional musician or producer would desire including multiple channels, 64 bit processing power, integrated MIDI hardware, and lots of built in effects as while as support for plugins. I won’t be using many of these features in the scope of my song, but these features are things I am looking at learning! It costs nothing to download, but if you use it enough the developers gently remind you to donate to them (much like WinRAR file extraction/zipping software does).

The final option is a program I have used before and am somewhat familiar with, called Audacity. It is free and open source. It has less features than Reaper does, but still has all the basics I need, including being able to record over multiple tracks, basic MIDI support, and some basic audio effects like reverb. For the purposes of my song, this program would do just fine.

The decision comes down to two factors then. First is time. I’m already familiar with Audacity, and it has much less of a learning curve for me than Reaper, which could take hours to learn the basics of. Second however is features/growth/production quality. Reaper is a much more “professional” DAW and can take me further in the long run if I familiarize myself with it than Audacity.

Given these things, I have decided to record in Audacity, but keep Reaper in my mind as a learning goal for the future. I do not have enough hours in my week to learn Reaper for this project, but in the future it will definitely be an avenue I explore, especially if I really end up enjoying the recording process.

Below is a youtube video I learned from (and still reference!) for how to use Audacity when I started dabbling with it about a year ago.

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Photo by Ivan Jermakov on Unsplash