Audio Recording

This is an important tutorial on how to record guitar on your personal computer. The objective is to get a professionally recorded guitar sound without needing to buy highly expensive recording gears. This tutorial allows you to record your guitar without the use of microphones and guitar amplifiers. Also this tutorial assumes you will be using your computer soundcard to record.

What you need:

1.) Electric Guitar or Acoustic Guitar
2.) Digital tuner (e.g. Matrix Digital Chromatic Tuner SR1060)
3.) Electric guitar effects
4.) DI Box (your guitarist SHOULD have this gear)
5.) A small home mixer (e.g. Behringer 502 5-Input Mixer).
6.) Lots of guitar cables for your effects and connecting to your computer.
7.) Personal computer with professional recording sound card. Large hard drive sizes are important.
8.) Adobe Audition recording software (this tutorial is using version 1.5 although it is applicable to more recent versions).

What you will do outside of your computer?

Step1.) Tune the guitar first with digital tuner. A lot of recording newbie mistakes at home is failing to tune the guitar before recording. You cannot fix an out of tune guitar during the mixing process.

Do not just rely on your ear; use a digital tuner to get the most accurate tuning.

Step2.) Connect the guitar to your effect box. This can be as simple as a distortion or overdrive pedal. Of course, you need a guitar cable.

Step4.) Connect the output of your guitar effect pedal to a DI box. The purpose is conditioned, clean-up the guitar signal and amplify the weak guitar signals. If you directly plug your guitar to the sound card input or the mixer, you will get a poorly recorded guitar sound –noisy and weak.

Step5.) Connect the output of the DI to a small mixer. Behringer Xenyx 502 has around 5 inputs so you can even record more than 2 guitars at the same time (if your studio speakers/monitors can handle it). If you are doing multi-track (one at a time recording), then you will only use one input. One input corresponds to one guitar, so you will be recording in mono!

Step6.) Finally connect the output of the mixer to your soundcard.

What you will do inside in your computer?

Step7.) Now make sure that the soundcard recording type is set to Line input. For example in SoundBlaster Audigy:

Step8.) Launch your recording software. If you are using Adobe Audition, go to Options – Device Properties, click “Wave In”; you should see your sound card:

Step9.) Now go to Options – Device Order in Adobe Audition. Make sure that the multi-track device preference order is using the sound card like in Step8.

Step10.) Now click “Multitrack View” in Adobe Audition. Go to Options – Settings. Make sure that under “Defaults”, the “Track Record” is set to “32-bit” and “Mono”. This will give the best recording results.

Step11.) Go to File – New Session. Select a session rate higher than 44100 Hz depending on whether your sound card can handle. If you have large hard drive, use 96000.

Step12.) Go to Options – Monitor Record levels. Try playing your guitar. Did you see the volume level meter moves on multi-track? Can you hear the guitar on your studio monitor/speaker as you play it?

If NOT, then make sure all gears and equipments are turn on. This means the mixer, effects pedal, DI box, etc. If they are turn on, make sure they are properly connected to each other.

Try adjusting the volume knob on your guitar, effects pedal, DI box or the mixer. Tweak it until you can hear the strong guitar sound coming out from the studio monitor.

Check if you are not recording it too loud (using “Monitor Record Level”); try to play the loudest part of the guitar tracks to be recorded. Make sure it will NOT clip! The volume meter has a red sign if it is clipped.

Step13.) Once all “sound tests” are done, hit the record button. Do not record if the sound is weak, noisy, etc. You need to adjust you mixer, DI box, etc to get as clean guitar sound as possible.