Recording your own music is a true game change if you ever want to get anywhere with your band.
It’s a totally different process than typing everything into Guitar Pro.* (Nothing bad about Guitar Pro, it’s a great tool, it’s just a DIFFERENT way)
The creative juices somehow just flow differently and much more spontaneously.
It is also vital to learn to properly record your playing and make decent demo versions if you have your head full of ideas that you want to get out so that you can then look for band members who want to share your vision!
If you don’t have any audio samples of your music to show for, you will have a hard time attracting anyone who is capable at his instrument and easy to work with.
They will simply skip you over.
Listening samples is the first thing I check for once a band search announcement got my attention.
If that piece does not exist, I move on.
Read here if you are just about to start a band.
So start to record NOW
The good news:
It does really not take much to get started.
I will tell you first about my current setup.
I have a Avid Fast Track C400 audio interface to connect my guitar and microphone via USB to the computer.
It’s quite an old model, so you will probably find something more modern now.
I also use a pretty cheap version of Cubase that I got for about 20 €.
But there are also free versions out there to get you started but they will be a bit limited.
I could stop here because this will take you very far already but I will go a little bit more into detail.
For the right guitar sound you could use your interface to hook in a guitar amp with a Line Out.
But if you go into the audio interface directly with your guitar, there are very good guitar plugins out there.
Don’t ask me about them, I never used them on my computer.
I just know they exist 🙂
I also have a midi keyboard and a stage piano to create more sounds with that so I don’t have to compose them with point-and-click for every note individually.
Here is how that all looks like:
(picture of studio)
If you want to create drum tracks the easy way, I can recommend to you the MT Power Drumkit.
It has a lot of ready made drum beats in MIDI format that you just need to plug and play.
Most of my old recordings on my soundcloud are recorded just with this setup 🙂
Feel free to check them out!
If you want to become better as a guitarist overall to produce higher quality music, I strongly suggest you check out the Online Guitar Lessons from Tom Hess:
