Home Recording

My first attempt at home recording was made using Audacity and a basic computer microphone. Clearly that wasn’t going to work to well so I upgraded to a condenser mic and added a Blue Icicle in-line digital audio interface to lick it to my PC. This improved the preocess but was still quite limiting.

Next the purchase of a 2 port Alesis iO2 interface introduced me to MIDI recording using Cakewalk for MSDOS software!

Digital Audio Workstation

Around 2006 a colleague and gigging musician suggested that I investigate recording using the Cockos Reaper software. Doing so readily led to that becoming my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of choice. I also bought a Presonus Studio24c interface to capture both the audio and MIDI. 

Adding Toontrack EZ Drummer and EZMix software plugins along with some sampled instruments for Bass, Piano and Synth completed my workstation.

In reality I barely scratch the surface of Reaper’s capabilities, also the Toontrack plugins, but it’s very engaging to try!

Workflow

I’m now doing all my songwriting in Musescore Studio, sometimes as guitar tab, sometimes as traditional music notation.

Besides paper score I have also used Mobile Sheets software on a Samsung Tablet to perform from, however only once so far in a live open mic setting.

Having recorded and mixed  in Cockos Reaper DAW I then publish to my modest creations and covers to YouTube, Soundcloud, social media and this website. 

I’ve tried various video editing tools but mainly settled upon using Cockos Reaper and Microsoft Clipchamp.