Setting up a Home recording studio for guitarists - Part 1

This article(and others in the series) is about setting up a home recording studio at home for Beginner Musicians(Guitarists for the most part) , enthusiasts & those aiming to produce music at home for commercial purposes. Especially the one man army music makers (like me ;) )

If you had started learning guitar/composition months back with an acoustic guitar, and have no idea about scales & such, this might not be that useful at the moment. Still, its prolly good to know.

If you are going to buy your first electric soon.. Then its a must read.

If you already have an electric, can glide your fingers across the fret board & thinking of getting 'proper' instrument.. Then you are going to thank me at the end of this series :) LOL..

Ok. Lets begin.

I have been intensely into learning Music theory, Guitar, Song writing ( Instrumental Rock ) & Recording for about an year now..

I bought my first electric guitar rig in October, 2005. Well, I bought the purpose of learning rock solo stuff (lead guitar) and had no plans whatsoever to record songs.. Everything was fine until I learned stuff to a level & started recording my own songs.

Here is my first decent song I recorded with the above two gear, PC, and a couple of other software which I detailed out below.

http://www.4shared.com/file/6099269/1422ecaa/myworld_full.html

Now, all the equipment / tools used to make it.

GB&A Electric guitar ( Rs. 8,500 )



This is a Korean made, straight clone of the Fender Stratocaster Guitar. I bought this in Hyderabad and I heard you can get this for 7,000 in Bombay.

Its more than enough for learning purposes & is far better than Indian made shit like Givson, etc.

It got decent tone for its price.
- 3 Single Coil pickups
- 4-way pickup selector, 1 volume knob
- 2 Tone Knobs
- 6 String, 22 Frets

Its got a Tremolo bridge, which is Unusable because of its
tuning instability.

I will get to the problems a little later..


Digitech RP200A ( Rs. 10,500 /- )

This is quite a successful product from Digitech, and is made in USA. I must say its worth it for the price, but for one major fuck up.

Seemingly a very simple interface with just 3 knobs, it has a wide range of Effects & Amp models. With about 40 Presets, 40 free slots for user configurable presets, this can be used to get
any kind of sound reasonably close. Metallica, Satriani, GnR, and lot of popular stuff.

Its body is Rock solid Steel. Robust.
The Expression pedal is just awesome.

But, the two up-down blue buttons at the bottom, are made of plastic, and at the moment of writing this both of them arent working. Its impossible to access presets now. I can only modify sounds manually using the turn knobs.
I recommend this for any beginner, casual player, but be careful with the preset selector knobs.

Software ( Recording & Mixing )
My Guitar is connected to RP200A, its' output to PC through Line-In Jack. I recorded & Mixed the tracks using Acoustica MixCraft

It has an easy & simple interface with lots of recording & mixing options & supported features.

While its UI has major scope for improvements, & comes with a bunch of effects, it supports VST & DirectX Effect plugins which means you can do A LOT of other stuff which the application cant natively. I used a cool VST effect pack that is a lot better than default effects of MixCraft. They are free to download here ( Kjaerhus Audio Classic Series )


Software ( Drums )
Composed & Generated the Drums track
using Acoustica BeatCraft.

It is an extremely easy to use & kick ass Drums Pattern/Loop/Track editor. It comes with live
recorded samples of each individual item in a drum kit. Like Foot-Bass, Snare, Cymbal, etc.
of various drum kits from Funk, Ambient Rock to
Hard Rock genres.

It also supports VST / Dx plugins just like Mixcraft. So there is room for a lot of creativity.

And the problems begin..

Taking the song MyWorld as example, lets see what fucked with my mind..

1) Significant amount Noise & distortion in the song.

2) Acoustic guitar track sounds anything but Acoustic.

3) Lead guitar don't have the Rocking punch in them. They sound 'obviously synthesized'

4) In the guitar solos, especially the second solo, sometimes it sounds like I was playing Off-scale wrong notes. In fact, it was irritating to listen that I had turned down volume of the
lead guitar at some locations near song ending.

( to be continued )