My son Garrett and I love to play guitar and write and record music. Lately we have been working on some acoustic guitar work and we do most of our recording right in our kitchen. There is something about the wood floors, wood cabinets, and good old Minnesota granite that makes getting the right sound much easier. Usually we just plug in the mic, take a deep breath, hit record, and go. Our biggest problem is trying to keep from laughing and spoiing a track. It's a lot of fun.
In case you're curious, here is a word about our recording process. For microphones we use a couple of condenser mics (Audio Technica AT3032 and MXL 990) otherwise we use my 25 year old SM57. The actual recording happens a couple of different ways. At first, when we only have a drum and bass track, we record direct to our Macbook Pro with GarageBand or our HP running Windows with Mixcraft. We're doing more and more on the mac because it's faster and we don't have to worry about blue screens as much. We run the condensor mics through an M-Audio AudioBuddy for phantom power and pre-amp with the USB interface to the computer being a M-Audio FastTrack unit. Once we have a few tracks, latency can become a problem. When it does, we record to our Fostex 4 track and just grab the wave file on the compact memory card and copy that to the computer and drop it in as a track. After that, we just mix it the best we can and we're done.
Right now we have two tracks with more in the works. We hope you enjoy our work as we sure like creating it.
Comin' Home This is a little 'ditty' we whipped up mostly to check recording levels in the studio. I'm playing the instruments and G is running the studio. Garrett and I like the sound enough to make it our first production on the CD. The whole thing was done without any cutting, splicing and simply captures a Saturday afternoon with the mic recording.
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Don't Need This Anymore (DEMO)Garrett wrote, sings, and played this number. It's taking longer than we thought (tough key C#m is indeed). In the mean time, here's the demo track.