I've been playing the guitar for a while now, but up until now I
really did nothing with the skill. I just played it as a hobby;
something to do when I was bored. But then I decided that I should
make up an album.
The first question was whether to write my own songs or do
covers of other people's songs. If I decided to write my own songs,
I'd probably end up spending more time on the lyrics and music than
getting down the process for making my own album, so I decided for
the first one I'd do covers of other people's music, and I'd write
my own for a future album. I thought it would be fun to do acoustic
covers of punk rock music, so I set about finding some songs to
cover. I chose nine songs by artists ranging from The Clash to The
Unseen.
But what's this all have to do with the Mac?
Ten years ago, if you wanted to record your own music, you
either used a cassette recorder to record it or had expensive
multitrack equipment in order to put it onto a CD or LP. While I do
like cassettes, I thought it would be too complicated a process to
redo a song if made a mistake, and it's a lengthy process to make
copies of the tape.
Luckily, with today's software and hardware anyone can make a CD
of their own music without having to have any ultra-expensive
equipment.
The first thing I did was made sure I had the necessary
equipment. I found the microphone that came with my beige G3 and
connected it. While I probably should be using a better quality
microphone, I figured this one would be fine for my purposes - and
I wouldn't have to spend any extra cash for new equipment. The CD
burner in either my PowerBook or my Pentium III tower would
suffice. For recording, there's a whole bunch of expensive software
you can choose from, but there's also some simple and free (or low
cost) software you can check out.
I used Sound
Recorder 1.0, which only works in Mac OS 9 and earlier
(version
1.1 works with OS X, ed.), but Audiocorder
would also complete the task, and it's Mac OS X compatible.
These applications don't have the extensive features of the others,
but they get the job done for little or nothing, and I wanted to
spend as little as possible on this project. If you're going to
record a band, I recommend looking into better equipment and
software, as my method only really works well for a solo
project.
So after gluing yet another crack in my acoustic guitar, I set
about to start the album with "Barry Prudom" by Combat 84. Once I
was done, I copied all of the AIFF files that had been saved to the
desktop into an iTunes playlist window, where I established the
order of the songs. I then copied them over to my PowerBook via our
home network and burned a test CD.
I listened to it carefully and determined the songs I had to
redo - and that's where I am now, where I will redo several of the
songs using Sound Recorder and copy them over to my PowerBook to
create the final version of the album, which a friend has helped me
name, quite randomly, "Goats in Toyland" (You can visit my page
< http://home.earthlink.net/~adamg587/music2.html>
about it for more information)
Making an album is something I have always wanted to do, and
using my Mac to do the recording part of it made things
ridiculously simple. I ended up worrying more about the various
problems my guitar kept having (and, in fact, I switched guitars
halfway through the album - and I think next time I will end up
using my Telecaster with the distortion switched off) than lost or
corrupt files and problems with the application.
My experience just proves that anyone can record an album
themselves - all you need are some skills on an instrument, a Mac,
a microphone, SoundRecorder, and a CD burner.
