Tag Archives: recording

Don’t fear the Reaper 64

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I’ve been looking for a better way to record my guitar and bass-based music. FL studio is great for MIDI and VST instruments, but I don’t like how it records audio. Conversely, Audition is great for multitracking audio, but the system chokes if I try and feed it MIDI. I had dicked around in Abelton Lite yesterday after work to see if it was viable, but I didn’t like the interface and poor usage of monitor space. I was looking into running Pro Tools M-Powered on my Delta 1010LT, but M-Audio is still struggling with compatibility with a 64 bit system. Cubase 5 looked ideal in every way except for the pricetag. There had to be something that would fit my needs a bit better without breaking the bank.

Enter Reaper.

What surprised me most is the fact that the program fits in such a small package. The PDF documentation was about four times bigger than the five meg download for the installer. The program is sleek, uncluttered, and customizable.

Reaper screenshot

Download it now and try it out, and if you like what you see, the licenses come as cheap as $60.00!

Guitar themes update

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I’m just putting the finishing touches on the last couple of tracks from Themes for Guitar and Voice – Volume 2. I should have the tracks finalized and uploaded sometime tomorrow or Wednesday.

In other news, I’ve just acquired a Line 6 X3 Pod the other night. It’s quite a change playing through either a Peavy practice amp or recording direct from the guitar, as I’ve never really been in a place where I could crank the volume high enough to get some of the extreme distortion and saturation from some of these models. It can record 24 bit/96k digital right to my soundcard, which is infinitely more high-tech than some of the methods I’ve been using to record for Guitar Themes. Speaking of which, I need to stop playing with the new toy and get this album finished.

I’m not sure if I’ll have it before the end of the year, but I do have a new instrument coming. It has twelve strings and will probably turn out to be bigger than my car.

New toy: the H4 Handy Recorder

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I’ve just gotten a new recording gadget, the Zoom H4 Handy Recorder from Samson. Although the menu layouts can be frustrating, this thing has remarkably good sound from the built-in microphones and even comes with lots of on-board effects. I tried to record some guitar and bass to test its 4-track recorder functions but I was having trouble getting any signal from the inputs. I guess I’ll probably have to read the dern manual.