Recording Audaciously.......

When I started recording in my home studio (or as some people refer to it, the bedroom), I wanted to test the waters without spending a lot of money. A friend purchased a dedicated recorder for about $800 and while I thought it sounded great, $800 was not in my budget. I stumbled across a recording program on a CD on Ebay for $15 which claimed to do everything you could want using your computer. I could afford $15 so I purchased the CD and went to work.

I soon discovered that the CD contained a version of the free software called Audacity along with some sample recordings and a few extras. I could have downloaded the software for nothing, but the seller was within his rights to re-package and sell Audacity and it was worth $15 to me to discover that it existed. It is available here....http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Since then, Audacity has been revised and updated and is still the program I use for all my recordings. If you are interested in using your computer as a recording studio, I recommend giving Audacity a try. The quality of the recordings is the same as you would get from any purchased recording program. Since Audacity is free and is developed by "h0bbyists", it is simpler than most of the other programs. Audacity is probably not the program to use if you want to use a lot of MIDI samples or use loops to make rap "beats". But if you just want to record actual music and overdub as many tracks as you like, Audacity works very well. You can perform all kinds of operations to the recorded tracks, like adding reverb or delay, equalization, compression, etc. You can cut and paste tracks after they have been recorded and so on. This free program can do in five minutes what the Beatles' engineer would spend days doing.......and it does it with higher fidelity and more control.

Isn't technology amazing?

(note to all recording artists - this does not mean your songs will be better than those of The Beatles!).