How to Record a song – Part 3: Rough Draft 2
I’ve decided to change this article from how to record a song to just how to make a rough draft recording and make it sound somewhat decent.
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.
