So first you will need the reading light, I got mine from the Dollar Tree, your local dollar store might have different stuff, but these ones already came with batteries, a switch, a clip and everything so they were perfect.
The only other thing you will need is an electret microphone, some wire, a female 1/4″ phone or XLR jack, and maybe some aluminum tape. You can get an electret mic from radio shack for like $3, and depending on how much you want your project to cost either a female 1/4″ phone (cheaper) or XLR (more expensive) jack from radio shack also, or you could shop around online.

Anyway now you want to take the light all apart. Just unscrew the top, and use a tiny screwdriver to take the bottom part off.
Then just snip off the LED, solder a couple of wires to the two battery terminals at the bottom, and hook up either your 1/4″ or XLR jack.

You’ll then want to solder the mic on, be careful because it does matter which way it goes, make sure to align the positive and negative terminals correctly. Also the reason I solder the mic last is because you can ruin it with your soldering iron if you apply the heat to it for too long.

After that you just gotta put it all back together, I used a piece of poster putty to hold the mic in at the top to keep it from rattling around, another thing I did was use some aluminum foil tape and wrapped it around the flexible part to shield it, it’s kinda expensive though so if you have a better idea go for it, I just happened to have some so I used it.

That’s pretty much all you need to do to make a cheap recording mic. You could also add a capacitor and resistor to the circuit to keep the switch from popping when you turn it on, but good luck trying to fit it in the already tiny space by the batteries, of course it might fit at the top where the mic is. If you want to try here is the website that I got most of my information from: http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/microphone_powering.html

Ok now we have a song using nothing but samples, I like to record the guitar first since the samples for it sound worse than the bass. So now you have to plug your guitar into your computer’s sound card somehow, this can be done a ton of different ways. Since this is just a rough draft recording you can just do what I do and get a 1/4″ Mono to 1/8″ stereo adapter like in the picture below. Then just plug your guitar cable into the adapter then plug the adapter into the line in of your sound card (it’s usually the blue jack, if you don’t have one you’ll have to use the pink mic in jack).

Of course if you wanna get fancy you can plug a mic into the mic input of your sound card and mic your amp, but then you’ve got a bunch of other things you have to do like get an XLR to 1/8″ adapter, set up the mic in front of the amp correctly so that it sounds best, and probably a bunch of other stuff. Since this is just a rough draft recording I’m going with the direct in approach I talked about above, if you wanna do the mic thing go for it, it’ll probably take longer and be more work, but it’ll probably sound better. I just found an article about guitar amp recording with examples, it seems to be pretty good check it out here: Guitar Amp Recording

Ok so now click the guitar MIDI track in reaper and press the delete button on your keyboard then click the R button on the guitar track to arm the recording. Next click the red record button right above the master volume and Reaper will start recording.

After you record the guitar part click stop and then hit the rewind button (or hit Home on your keyboard), then click play to listen to it. You can use the volume control to bring it up or down with the drums then just do the same thing as above to record the bass and vocals.

Next you’ll want to mix all the instruments to try to make them sound better together. I’m not that good at doing this but I found another article that seems to explain it well, plus has some pretty good visuals.
Check it out here: Getting your mix to…mix

Anyway don’t forget you can use the pan sliders to try to space out the guitars, or backing vocals if you have them, so that’s pretty much it for doing just a rough draft recording, feel free to experiment with different drum samples or effects to find a sound you like best.

Now I suppose you think you can press play and it will work, well sorry, guess again. Now you have to click the little io button on each track and under MIDI Hardware output select your MIDI device, if you don’t know which one to pick just try one until it works.

Now you should be able to press play and hear the midi file. If it doesn’t work at all their could be a problem with the way MIDI is set up on your computer, check and see if you get sound with Tabit. If sound works in Tabit works then go to Tools > Options and click the play tab, then see what’s selected under MIDI Output Device and select this in Reaper. If sound doesn’t work in Tabit then their’s probably something wrong with the way MIDI is set up on your computer, but really it doesn’t matter for this article, just read on below.

Now that you’ve done all that you need to undo it to continue the tutorial using samples in place of the MIDI instruments. So click the io button again and choose <no output> for each track and continue on from the last tutorial.

Alright so you’ve downloaded, installed, and opened Reaper. Now what you want to do is close the little window that pops up and go to File > New Project; if you want you can listen to the sample song first, it’s pretty catchy.
Also before I forget, if you downloaded Reaper 3.0+ yours will probably look different than mine unless you downloaded one from version 2. All you have to do is go to Options > Themes > Default_2.0. You can use the black theme if you want but I got used to the other one, so the black theme looks weird to me.

Now your screen should be blank and their should be no audio tracks up. Now go to Insert > Media File… or just hit your insert key (Not literally of course! Put down that hammer.)

Now go find where you put Sonador – Bangs.mid and open it.

Reaper will ask you if you want to import the file on separate tracks, this should already be checked, so go ahead and click OK.

Now use the scroll bar at the bottom to adjust your screen so you can see all the tracks and your screen should look like this:

I’d recommend renaming the tracks so you can tell which one is which, do this by double clicking the text TabIt MIDI – Track 1 – Sonador – Bangs on the upper left or bottom mixing console. Remember Track 1 is Guitar, Track 2 is Bass, and Track 3 is Drums.

Now if you push play you won’t hear jack shit, why? Because you have to tell Reaper what you want to use to play your MIDI file first. I made a page on how to do this, but for this tutorial I’m going to use samples because I think they sound better, but if you’re curious and want to know how to get MIDI to play through Reaper you can check it out by clicking here.

Next click the fx button on the guitar track and in the filter list box at the bottom begin typing reasam. This should bring up ReaSamplOmatic5000, you can select it and click OK if you want to add it to the fx list and figure out how it works yourself, but I’ve already made some files with all the settings you need. You can download a zip file of them here. Make sure when you unzip them you use ‘extract here’ and put the extracted FXChains folder in C:\Program Files\REAPER\ or it wont work.

So now click cancel to close the Add FX window and select FX > Add FX Chain… and browse to C:\Program Files\REAPER\ then select Guitar.RfxChain.

Now your screen should look like the one below. If you didn’t extract the zip file in the REAPER folder like above you’ll probably get some error message about not finding E.wav, but you can fix this by clicking browse and opening E.wav from wherever you extracted the zip file.

Now do the same for the rest of the tracks, and hopefully you extracted the zip file to C:\Program Files\REAPER\ because the drums will be a bitch to sort out (Sorry to the non-windows users who have to do this, I wish Reaper was better at handling it . Both bass and guitar use E.wav and below is a chart of which files go to the drums).

Alright now press play and you should be able to here this:

bangs-midi.mp3

In Part 3 we’ll record over the guitar and bass parts with real instruments so that they sound better.

When you open Tabit your screen will look like the photo below, if it doesn’t then quit playing solitaire and open up Tabit

Using Tabit is pretty simple and it’s pointless for me to explain it in detail here since you can find anything you want to know in the help menu. What I will tell you though is that you use the key pad to type in the notes and if you wanna add more tracks just go to ‘Song’ and select ‘Add Track’ from there you can add another guitar, bass, drums, piano, banjo, etc track. Just play around with it and you’ll have it figured out in no time.

Now the reason I said Tabit can pretty much be used solely as your rough draft recording is because you just create the tracks you want and Tabit will play it back exactly as if you had recorded it…well almost. Tabit uses MIDI to play back the notes so it sounds kinda shitty, especially the guitar, it sounds more like a piano, but the bass and drums almost sound real. Even so, this is pretty much what a rough draft recording is anyway. With Tabit you can refine your ideas until it sounds like you want it to, then when you’re done you can go to File > Export MIDI and import it into your multitrack recording software and recorded better sounding guitars.

So for example here’s a song I made in Tabit and will be using as my example in the rest of these tutorials, and if you don’t wanna export it to MIDI yourself for whatever reason (the most likely reason being you installed Tabit started reading this article forgot about it then came back to it after 30 days and now your version of Tabit is expired) you can download the MIDI file here.

Alright that’s it for now, in the next article I’ll show you how to import the MIDI file into a Multitrack Digital Audio Workstation to use as a template to record better sounding guitars/bass so your band mates wont look at you funny when you try and play back the weird sounding Tabit file.

I don’t think I’m very good at recording yet, but I know some of the stuff I’ve recorded is (recording quality wise) better than other stuff I’ve heard on myspace. An example of what I’m talking about is like this song I recorded on a boom box with Billy playing drums (kinda). Although don’t misunderstand my comment as saying songs recorded this way suck, they don’t, one of my favorite Iowa City artists, Samuel Lock Ward records in this way and I think it’s brilliant. He even has an album called Boombox by Bedside in which he recorded all the tracks on a boom box with all the wonderful tape hiss included . (I should also note that he’s also in another great band called the Miracles of God which don’t specifically record using Lo-Fi methods, though I read somewhere that their first album was recorded on a cassete 4 track, but it still sounds pretty damn good to me). Another awesome Iowa City band that records this way is CroKane, they are a two piece that plays old style blues. Because they record this way their recordings sound almost like they were recorded in the 50′s like Johnny Lee Hooker or Leadbelly, you know like when they used to have just one microphone and have it record straight into a device that cuts the record as it’s recording. So like I said, don’t think I’m knocking down this way of recording or anything, It definitely serves it’s purpose when that’s what you’re going for.

Anyway my point is many people who are recording their own songs and are trying to get sounds like on commercial records by recording this way just don’t seem to know what they are doing. Another thing is that some people who are using quality recording devices like an all in one console or a computer still don’t have very good recordings because they don’t know or understand how to mix a song properly to get good results.

This brings me back to my trip to the library and an idea I had. When I went to they library I specifically wanted a book that came with a CD with examples of how to mix a song properly, because like I said above I still don’t think I’m very good at it. Only problem was my library only had one book that came with a CD it was called The Complete Idiots Guide to Home Recording. I absolutely hate books with these kind of titles (like the dummies series) because they insinuate the person reading it is a moron. Since my library lacked any other book with a CD I checked it out. After I started reading it I was very surprised though, it is a very good book with lots of great information and examples, it just has a very stupid title. Anyway the only problem with this book (besides the stupid title) is that it uses Pro Tools Free which only runs on Windows 98/ME and you can’t download it anymore anyway (unless you look reaallly hard). So the info is good but since the software is outdated it’s somewhat useless to learn from. So I went off to search the internet for something similar, but I couldn’t find anything close to detailed articles with example sound files (I found a ton of articles on the subject but no example files, then I found some example files but no details on how the person mixing the song got those results).

So this brings me to my idea, I decided I’ll try myself to record a song detailing every aspect of it with pictures, sound, and maybe video. Like I said a few times before I’m not the most experienced when it comes to recording and mixing but maybe by doing this I’ll be able to learn what techniques work best and which don’t. Perhaps maybe I’ll even get feedback from people more experienced than me saying how they would have done this or that differently to make it sound better. Anyway I don’t wanna fall into the same trap as the Author of the book I just mentioned with outdated software. I’d like to try to find some kind of free software (preferably GNU GPL so that I know it will always be available for free even if I have to offer it on my site). I know of a GPL’ed program called Traverso that would work, but it has some latency problems so it’s out of the question for now. I also know of one called Kristal that is free but has a limitation of 16 tracks (which isn’t bad) and doesn’t support midi. Plus it’s not GPL so who knows if it will ever get outdated (the website says the current download is from 2004, so it’s already 5 years old). I know of a really nice one called Reaper but it’s not free and you’re suppose to buy it after 30 days for $60 (unless you want the commercial license which cost $225). The good thing about this one is that it doesn’t expire after 30 days, it just continues to give you a message that you should buy it and still works as a full version. Only problem is since it’s not free GPL software it’s unpredictable, you never know if the author of the program will decide that he wants to revoke this generous offer to keep it a full version even after it has expired.
I know of another program called Ardour which is free GPL software and looks really nice, only thing is it’s only available for GNU/Linux and Mac (I’ve read theirs a Windows version that was developed but won’t be released because of complicated issues).
Lastly theirs Audacity, but while it’s an excellent audio editor, is multi-platform, and free under the GNU GPL, I also think it’s a terrible multitrack DAW. The way it saves project files totally sucks, plus the fact that you can’t use the effects in real time, you have to preview them first, also makes it a poor choice.
So before I do anything I’ll need to do some research, if anyone knows of a good multi-platform GPL multitrack program leave me a comment, or send me an email at moc.xobni@emptyzedlavijneb and let me know.
Well I think that about does it, if I’m able to pull this off hopefully it will come out as a quality article that will be of good value to anyone wanting to make better sounding recordings. Perhaps if it comes out okay I’ll also make a pdf of the articles available for offline viewing.

Recording Sheet ODS Format

Recording Sheet PDF Format

Recording Sheet XLS Format