On Fri July 25 2003 5:54 am, Chris wrote: > Hello. <snip> > My friend recently purchased an "all-in-one" unit from Roland, a 24 > track 24 bit digital recorder, that cost him about $2,500 I think > (excluding cabling, mics etc). He says he goes direct -- and not only > direct but totally clean. All effects, including distortion are added > after the fact. He goes from his guitar into his recorder! This sure > seems strange to me, although I can understand the logic there. Is this > what you guys do? > > I would love to hear how you all handle this. :0) > Well, for a couple years I was able to do recording with my old Soundblaster but that was very limiting, one channel in, not much luck with full-duplex (recording while playing a previously recorded track). I bit the bullet and bought an M-Audio Delta 44 (about $250 last year I believe) and a Behringer project mixer. Since I can't really even turn my guitar amp on in my apartment (Mesa/Boogie has 2 volumes - off and *LOUD*) I do most of my project recording plugged through an effects pedal, such as: guitar --> fx pedal --> mixer --> Delta44 --> PC I've also done a fair amount of live tracking (mic'd amps) with this same rig. It sounds great. For the neophyte PC recorder I suggest Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) as it has a very lightweight learning curve. I've done a great deal of multi-track recording with it. There are quite a few Linux apps for multitrack recording (notably Ardour) but Audacity was the easiest one to get started with. A drum machine helps too. It allows me to write songs, record the skeletons, mail them (on CD) to people I play with who are 2 hours away, meet up with them and play, then do proper mix-down of all the live tracked material afterwards. All with Slackware, ALSA and Audacity. Several of my friends have the all-in-one recording rigs (like the Roland you mention above) but I like the PC solution - it's much more flexible. YMMV. HTH - JB
