Line 6 Guitar Port Price : $99.00 US

In my opinion, the best bang for your buck if you want the closest thing to a professional sound for a good price. If you really feel like puting a preamp and a $200 mic into the input on your PC mic'ing up a $2000 dollar amp rig + FX, be my guest. If you already own that stuff, chances are you won't be needing to read this anyways! We're on a budget remember? So on to the guitar port...

Line 6 makes a few really interesting toys that allow you to create just about any tone you want. The guitar port is one thats been out for a few years that offers a large number of amp models, mic's, FX, all at your disposal. I've heard about and seen a few other interesting things they've come out with since then*, but this one I'm the most familiar with.

*Note - These items I refer to are the tone port and the variax. I'm not very familiar with each, but I believe the tone port comes with recording software. I've always been pleasantly surprised by line 6 products.

All you gotta do is plug this bad boy in a USB port on your computer, hook up a few audio cables, plug in your guitar and you're good to go. Comes with everything you need to set it up and usually goes anywhere from the $99 - $125 range last I remember. Its a lot better than plugging your Metal Master 2000 guitar pedal into your sound input and getting something that sounds like buzzing hot cheese flatness.

Drumsite Price: $50

If you've got a drummer handing you drum backing tracks, you're very lucky, if not, then you're like me and there are alternatives. The best program I've found so far is called "Drumsite". Very simple to use drum program that uses actual drum samples for about the most realistic sounding drum tracks you can create. Very easy to use. Point and click where you want the drum hits. You can also adjust the volume/panning of each hit by right clicking and going into the properties of a hit. Also allows you to export the finished product to a .wav file. You can also import wavs into the drum kit for more sounds. Check out www.powerfx.com for more drum samples.

Recording Software
$200 - $350 US

Theres several to choose from. Cool Edit pro, which is now called Adobe Audition I believe, Acid Pro, which is now owned by Sony and goes by a newer name also. I recommend Cool edit/Adobe audition because its what I use and its never given me any problems. Acid Pro is better for creating music using loops as it seems to lag really bad when trying to record live into it. Now there might be other cheaper alternatives out there, but these are the only ones I know of off hand. Now I don't recommend it *cough cough* but some people chose to find these programs other ways. *cough* Geez must have a frog in my throat...

Adobe Audition
Fairly simple to use. Offers FX, EQ, mastering capabilties... pretty much everything you'd need. Its like having a studio/mixing board on your computer.

Also as noted before I believe the tone port comes with recording software.

How To / Tips

Once you've got everything set up, you're ready to create some masterpieces. You got your guitar plugged in (obviously), you've got some tones crankin' through the guitar port you like, and you're ready to go. You can set your output levels on the guitar port for recording so its not too loud.

I usually start off with the drums first. After you complete your tracks in drumsite, or drum program of choice, you can export them to wav and then import them into your recording program.

Once you're in your program and ready to lay down bass and guitar parts, make sure you select the guitar port as your recording input device so that you can actually record what you're doing. Through cool edit pro this is done by selecting the recording input on each individual track. Once you do that its pretty much just time to press the record button and let the magic happen.

After the drums are in I generally lay down the bass parts using the guitar port, and then come back with rhythm, then lead guitars.

Make sure your levels aren't peaking and clipping, because this creates a crappy sounding finished product. You want the sound waves to have a little bit of head room. If you're going to adjust your mid's, hi's and low's, I suggest doing it at this stage, to each separate track, rather than trying to compensate for this later during mastering. Your best bet though is to get the exact sound you want coming directly in so you don't have to tweek it much, if at all.

This is where things get interesting... after you've got all your tracks recorded and your levels adjusted, its time to mix it all down. You don't want each track at full blast or your going to get a messy heavily saturated mix with all kinds of fun happy clicks and pops. Get your levels right and then mix it all down to one track. Its best to turn everything down just a tad, and then when you're mastering, thats when you bring up all the overall levels collectively.

Once you're ready to master you mix down, open the mixdown up in its own track. Its all really subjective from here because producing is up to the individual and what sounds best to that person. I suggest already having done your eq's before this stage, because adding EQ at this point could muddy up the mix. Like I said, if you get the EQ's right from the start, you don't have to mess around with it later. At this point you should just be more concerned with volume and fullness. You can
put a hardlimiter on the track which will boost the volume by the amount you select, and limit the peak volume of each track from clipping. Theres also other things you can do like pan/expand which really bring out the sound. Just experiment with each and see what you like and what sounds good to you. From there do your final mixdown. You can mix down to several different formats. I recommend WAV's for CDs and mp3's if its something you want to share online.

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Well, thats all for now. The more in depth you chose to go, the more complicated it gets. This is just a really basic overall idea of a few options. I urge to read up on each program you get and understand its full capabilities before you jump off into things because theres always new things to learn and implement into your recording. I did everything the hard way and learned it all by trial and error and creating a lot of crappy recordings.

Feel free to ask questions because I just pretty much skimmed over everything to give an idea of what you can do. Once again, these are just a few of many recording options out there. I'll answer any questions to the best of my ability to try and help. Now go get started!!

-Matt
webmaster@metalmatt.com

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