Leonardo said:
Possessed said:
It's actually more raw than it sounds.
I record the guitars and bass with audacity, connecting the "line out" cable on the back of my amplifier to the input on my computer and recording directly. Most people say mic'ing it is better, but honestly I don't see how. Seems like it would sound fuzzy and unclear that way.
I process all the recorded tracks with audacity as well. High pass filters, low pass filters, eq, dynamic range compression, levelling, noise removal, all that in audacity.
I make the backing tracks in midi form with Anvil Studio. Just a free midi authoring studio I found some years ago.I use synthfont to render the midi's into .wav forms with soundfonts I found on the web to make them sound like real instruments.
Then I mix it all together with Krystal Audio Engine.
All of this software is freeware.
Oh I guess most of the sound is in the actual hardware, then.
What guitar(s), bass, amp(s) do you have?
I use Audacity regularly but I had never heard of K A E before. Looks like I found myself a new toy! :)
It isn't in the hardware so much, you just have to know how to process the recording. It makes much more of a difference than you might think... you could have a recorded track that sounds great by itself but if you don't process it right it will be impossible to get it to blend in... it will either be buried or it will bury everything else.
The guitars and amps I used for these recordings are all very cheap. Most of my tone comes from my fingers... I take the Stevie Ray Vaughan approach to playing which is to play hard, play loud, and floor it. My sounds sound so sharp and loud because I strum really hard and bend really far.
I don't keep track of which guitars go to which tracks in a song, it's usually on the spot decisions. But the guitars I use and the cheapness involved are approximately as follows:
A red fender squire strat-$100
A blue pevey raptor plus exp-$150
A black and red BC Rich Warlock-$100
A black Ibanez Gio-$300-400 (the most expensive yet I use it probably the least... no real reason for that it just seems to be the one I think about the least)
The bass is a nameless 5 string bass I bought for like $70 (seriously... no brand. No stickers on it or anything. It came brand new that way too... and I lost the box it came in and there's no way to tell on the instrument. . . guess they don't care about advertising XD) It's nothing fancy and very cheap but it works well enough.
I use a Fender Vibrotone XD amp, it's like 5 or 10 watts. Not very powerful at all, but it is my experience that when it comes to recording, less powerful is usually the way to go as it fits into the sonic picture best. Plus since I use line out I can wire it to another sound receiver and make it as loud as I want... I don't understand why people don't use this method cuz when I have friends over it sounds like this huge wall of sound and then they freak out when I show them it's a little bitty amp hooked up to a surround sound system.
I use this amp for the bass as well. You should never play bass with a guitar amp as it will damage the speaker, but since I have the actual speaker on the amp disable in order to use line out it's fine.
So you see, I use very cheap hardware. It's all in how you utilize it! I don't have any real mixers or anything like that, I do all that with audacity and krystal.
I forgot to mention I use a DanElectro "METAL" distortion pedal, but that doesn't influence sound quality, just tone.