I’m recording a new song today. It’s almost finished, only the vocals are left to do, but I can’t finish it right now because the dishwasher is on.
I record all my songs at home, mostly in the living room. Recording equipment is not very difficult to come by these days, and it’s not horribly expensive either anymore. It’s quite handy, I can record everything I want without needing to worry about paying a fortune for studio time. On the other hand, a normal house is usually not completely soundproof, and there are always things that make noise that can prevent you from recording. Like dishwashers and really loud birds.
Here’s a list of the stuff I use to record my music, in case anyone is curious.
- A computer. I bought a fairly decent PC second hand for just under 100 euros. It’s a pretty basic box and some of the parts are pretty old, but it has a decent processor, plenty of harddrive space and 2 Gb of ram, so it does what it needs to do well enough.
- An external Presonus Audiobox USB soundcard. The soundcard in the PC was one of those integrated super-cheap and crappy ones, so I needed something better. This Audiobox works quite well, I think. It has pre-amps, phantom power, and two channels. I can plug in microphones of any kind, and plug in my electric guitar or bass directly without an amp in between.
- Microphones. No cheese without some of these. I have two MXL v67 large condenser microphones. At about 100 US dollars a piece they are low-budget mics and quite cheap compared to other brands, but they are still “serious” microphones, and I think they sound quite good. Definitely good enough for my purposes, which is mostly recording vocals and acoustic guitar. I also have a CAD GXL1200, but I haven’t really found that much use for it yet. I’ve played around with it a bit for recording guitar, but I’m not convinced about the results.
- Software. There are tons of digital audio workstation programs, so it’s mostly a matter of taste which one you use. There are some free ones too, if you’re on a tight budget. I’m using Cubase LE 4. It came with the soundcard and seems to work well enough. It’s missing some features that I would like to have, like the ability to do some more advanced editing of an individual wave file. It also came with a really crappy manual that they could just as well have left out since it didn’t really explain much at all. I downloaded an open source program, Audacity, to use for more in-depth editing and for converting wav files to mp3. For drums, I use the Linux open source drum machine Hydrogen, along with free drum samples that I downloaded from the net.
- Instruments. Gotta have some of these. I have a Cort M520 electric guitar that I got quite cheap. It was a demo instrument in a music shop, but in very good condition. I have no clue where Cort guitars are from, I had never heard of the brand before I bought this one. It’s a nice enough guitar, though. I also have a Yamaha RBX374 electric bass that I’m quite happy with, and a steel string acoustic guitar that doesn’t have a brand and a nylon string acoustic guitar too. I also have a peculiar old Landola 12-string mandolin. Regular mandolins usually have 8 strings, 2 in each chorus, but this one has 3 in each chorus, which makes it incredibly hard and painful to play since you have to press so much harder on the strings. I removed one string from each chorus to make it playable, so now it works OK. I also have some flutes of different kinds.
That’s about it. I improvise if I need anything else. For one song I needed something like maraccas, so I put some couscous in a tin can with a lid. For another song I used the bottom of a Pringles potato chip container as a kind of middle eastern-sounding drum. It worked pretty well. 
Overall, I think I have pretty much everything I need to record the stuff I want. Of course, there’s always room for improvement, there are always nicer toys out there… But that will have to wait until I have some money to spare.
