Right, where were we?
In the previous part, we laid down a very simple MIDI drum part and bass line for a 6 bar ‘jingle’. Next it’s time to get some real instruments on there. For this example I am going to use my guitar, I have plugged my guitar into the back of my PC through the Microphone-In port using an 1/4 inch to 1/8th inch mono adapter.
If I had used a pre-amp or effects pedal, I would have used Line-in.
Make sure that the sound card is set to record and is at a reasonable level, you can do this by double clicking the little speaker in the taskbar bringing up the ‘Volume Control’ window.
Now click options > recording
Select Microphone. Click ‘Ok’
Make sure that the Select box is checked and the volume is around half way (you should adjust this depending on how loud a signal your instrument gives). If it sounds even slightly crackly then turn it down because it will ‘Clip’. Clipping is digital distortion which happens when a signal coming into the device is too high and unlike analogue distortion, it sounds nasty. The best way to set the level is to play as forcefully as you can, and adjust the volume so that it does not crackle.
Now we can get on with recording our guitar part.
So far our little tune goes like this: like this
But when we record the guitar, we will need some sort of count-in. I therefore selected everything we have done so far, and dragged them one bar forwards, then copied an extra bar of drums in at the start until it looks like this.
Now, grab your guitar, press the big red RECORD button and play your part. In this example I’m playing the chords C, F and G and this is the result.
and sounds like this guitarbassdrums.mp3
Note that the waveform of the guitar does not touch the edge of the grey box, as this would have resulted in clipping.
Now there is plenty of things you can do with the guitar part now, but to start, I am going to talk about Compression / Dynamics. This is the single most important thing you can do with your tracks in my opinion. A good knowledge of compression will make the difference between a song that sounds professional and one that, simply, doesn’t.
In layman’s terms, Compression is an automatic volume control. You specify the maximum volume you wish a sound to be, and anything over that volume will be turned down. You then use what is called ‘Make-Up-Gain’ to turn the whole thing back up again. This is a very important tool, because volume is an incredibly dynamic thing. Try getting a drummer to hit a snare drum twice at exactly the same velocity and you will see. If you look at the Waveform for the guitar, you can see that the peaks and troughs are all over the place, louder in the middle and quieter at the end. I will add some compression to this guitar track and you will hear (and see) the difference.
There are several ways to add compression. One is by using what is called ‘Inserts’ (my preferred method) which does not alter the original data, but ‘inserts’ the effect before you hear it in real-time. For this purpose however, I have just compressed the audio by right clicking the Waveform and selecting ‘Plug-ins’ > ‘Dynamics’ to get this window.
The little graph at the top shows you Input volume against Output volume. When measuring volume we use negative numbers. 0dB is the loudest and quietest would be ‘minus infinity’. From the diagram, you can see that anything above -24dB is reduced by a certain value. This is what’s known as the ‘Threshold’.
The ‘Ratio’ dial next to it specifies how much the volume will be turned down. I use between 3:1 and 6:1 depending on the sound that I’m after, and also how dynamic the track is in the first place. If a synthesizer plays every note at the same volume, you may not need any compression at all. But a vocal part will and so will most other instruments. Use your ears as a judge.
At the bottom is the ‘Make-Up-Gain’ this tells the PC once it’s turned down the loud parts, to turn the whole thing back up. One problem with this is that if you use a low threshold and a high make up gain, it will cause all the background noise / sound-card hiss to be turned up too, so go easy on it if it causes a problem.
Afterwards my guitar sounded and looked like this:
guitarbassdrumscompression.mp3 compare with the uncompressed version guitarbassdrums.mp3
I then went back and inserted some compression into both the drums and bass tracks respectively. (If you were to record a real drummer, you would have to compress every drum/cymbal individually, but using MIDI saves a lot of time) and here is the result:
allcompressed.mp3 again, compare it to the uncompressed version: guitarbassdrums.mp3
You can hear the music is exactly the same, but everything sounds a little bolder, more confident and warm. This is why compression is the key to making your music stand out. There is yet another level of compression which should get added right at the end of the recording process in the ‘Mastering’ stage. We will come to that in a later chapter, but for now we’ll carry on with our guitar parts.
Overdubbing:
This simply means ‘Recording a part while the other parts play back’ We have already kind of overdubbed on top of the MIDI parts, but I feel that overdubbing in its true sense has to involve 2 or more audio tracks. For this example, I add another audio track and record a second guitar part. I then compressed it as before and here is the result:
Panning:
This is a very important part of the whole recording process. So far we have only dealt with a mono sound (both speakers playing exactly the same thing) but placing certain instruments at different spacial points in the mix will add space and depth to your music, reducing cluttered sounds and making the whole thing much more interesting. In cubase you pan instruments to any point between left and right by pressing F3 to bring up the mixer and dragging the dial / bar for the track to the position you want the sound to be located from. Most other sequencers will have a very similar method, so check the manuals / documentation.
Here you can see that ‘Guitar 1′ is panned 62 Steps to the Right and ‘Guitar 2′ is 65 to the left. This will sound like this:
It’s advisable that you do not pan things 100% left or 100% right unless you are working with double tracking or it will sound unnatural (no matter how close you get something to one ear, you will usually always hear some of it in the other one). Panning can be automated too so that sounds move from left to right or vice versa, but we’ll discuss automation in a later episode.
Right that’s just about it for this instalment! See you next time for more tips and tricks including reverb and delays, double tracking, recording vocals and much more.
Any questions… lessons.music@gmail.com
Enjoy 
more articles by James Mulvale
- Killer Finger Exercises 1
- Get your licks and riffs up to speed!
- More Music Stationary (Manuscript / SATB / Piano / Strumming Charts)
- Blank Stationary for Guitar / Bass / Mandolin / Banjo
- How Music Works part I
- Home Recording Techniques part I (Setup/Sequencers/MIDI basics)
