Home recording for idiots!

[JPS]

What's the easiest way to make home recordings/demos?

I'm not looking to record ground breaking, professional studio quality tracks, just mess around with a few half-arsed and half-baked ideas when the inspiration bites. Ideally I want to be able to record bass, guitar (electric and acoustic) and vocals live. I'd also need some sort of programmable drum kit + other instruments e.g. piano.

Last time I even attempted to record any songs was about 15 years ago using a bum basic 4 track. I've looked at a few different types of software e.g. Protools, Cubase and Cakewalk. Money is very tight and it's purely for fun so I don't need 64 tracks and 34 different types of compression.

Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed, Oh and the easier and more intuitive to use the better as I'm a bit of a techophobe.

Thanks

JPS.

[maxrossell]

[quote name='JPS' post='662102' date='Nov 22 2009, 08:41 PM']What's the easiest way to make home recordings/demos?

I'm not looking to record ground breaking, professional studio quality tracks, just mess around with a few half-arsed and half-baked ideas when the inspiration bites. Ideally I want to be able to record bass, guitar (electric and acoustic) and vocals live. I'd also need some sort of programmable drum kit + other instruments e.g. piano.

Last time I even attempted to record any songs was about 15 years ago using a bum basic 4 track. I've looked at a few different types of software e.g. Protools, Cubase and Cakewalk. Money is very tight and it's purely for fun so I don't need 64 tracks and 34 different types of compression.

Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed, Oh and the easier and more intuitive to use the better as I'm a bit of a techophobe.

Thanks

JPS.[/quote]

Reaper is just about the best free multitrack DAW you can get, and it comes loaded with enough plugins to get started with. It also supports MIDI, which you'll need for drums. For drums I recommend EZ drummer, it's very intuitive and quite straightforward. Most good piano VSTis are quite expensive, and the free ones are usually terrible, but I'm sure you'll find something to suit your budget if you look around.

If you want to record several tracks live I'd recommend some sort of USB audio interface. Something like this: [url="http://www.guitarampkeyboard.com/en/80721"]http://www.guitarampkeyboard.com/en/80721[/url]

It has MIDI inbuilt so you can plug your MIDI keyboard in, and it has four audio inserts, and you can monitor through it as well.

All of these things come with a learning curve that you might find a bit steep to begin with, but once you click you'll be on your way with no issues. I'd say to get yourself set up with the most basic multitrack studio and still get something worthwhile, without pirated software, you're probably looking at a starting setup cost of about £300.

[JPS]

Thanks a lot mate. That's great advice and sounds just what I'm looking for.

[TDM]

I'm not a huge fan of EZDrummer (for the stuff I do), I think Toontrack's Superior Drummer 2.0 sounds better, as does Addictive Drums. But for Pop/Rock etc the EZdrummer kits are actually pretty good. As for a piano VSTi, the only one decent free one I know of is called CV piano

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sl3kfx6GR8"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sl3kfx6GR8[/url]

It's not amazing, but for a free vsti it does the job.

[lowdown]

Plenty of free stuff here.
Just pick out the ones you fancy.

[url="http://www.vstplanet.com/index.htm"]http://www.vstplanet.com/index.htm[/url]


Garry