How to Record a Song in Audacity | Overdubbing Basics

[Music] hey this is Justin again thanks for tuning in to another tutorial here on the demonic sweaters YouTube channel today I've got a cool one for you this is more audacity lessons and basically what I'm going to show you today is how to use audacity as a full-blown multitrack recorder and I've mentioned that it can do that in a couple other posts on my channel here but I finally got around to having enough time to actually try to put this together so I'm gonna keep it pretty simple I'm not going to get super advanced but what I am gonna do is basically show you how to create a click track first because that's we're gonna play our basic tracks along with ya sorry I keep getting phone calls so yeah I'm going to create a click track and then create a track that basically allows you to snap events to the click track and then I'm gonna create a base track and then I don't think I have my guitar here I think it's at my studio so I might put on a ukulele track or something like that just to give you an example of how you can do this stuff so basically the main points that I want to cover is creating a grid because audacity doesn't have a grid feature like a lot of recording software but you can actually make one pretty simply in audacity and if you don't know what a grid is it's basically like something that tells the program what tempo you're playing in so that way editing if you want to like overdub certain parts and things like that is much easier when you have a grid for things to basically align to so let's go ahead and get started with that so in order to do that what we're going to do is first generate a click track and to do that we just go to generate we go to click track now here you'll have you'll see several options you can do your tempo and I'm just gonna leave it at 120 for this tutorial which is you know basic mid-tempo beats per measure this is gonna be your time signature so most songs are in 4/4 so we're just gonna leave that but you may want to do something like you know more advanced you can change that there 74 or 75 or whatever but let's just leave it at 4-4 for now number of measures this is how long like the click track is gonna be once we generate it you know this is gonna change depending on how long of a song you want to do so you just have to experiment with that and see how many measures you're gonna end up needing if you make it too short you can always copy the click track that you generated and just paste it at the end of the old one but for this one I'm just gonna make it 32 it's just twice as long as the default and then you have your sounds here ping noise tik I'm just gonna leave it at ping because you can hear the difference here I just hit preview stop that noise I don't know why anybody would use this actually it's not as bad as I thought or it's not as bad as I remembered tic that's the one I don't like yeah it's like super ear piercing so okay let's just go back to ping and just click OK and now you see you have a click track here so the second step that gives us a click track but it doesn't really give us a grid for things to stick to if you want to put in loops or things like that or samples but that is also very easily done on audacity just by going to analyze and then we go to beat finder just leave this at 65 click OK now this looks kind of crazy but don't worry about it it's not that crucial to how it look or how it looks isn't that crucial it's really just a function and so what all these are these are basically markers that audacity created with that beat finder and the bead just means beat so if we zoom in a little bit we can see those and the right on the clicks so the reason why we would want this is if like the pointer that you're trying to highlight things you see that little yellow line that appears that only appears on markers and the end of waveforms and things like that but that's how you snap basically you can snap to the rhythm see now that we created markers on all of the clicks so now we have a grid because when you just have to click here this won't snap the cursor won't snap to just the grid like the the click track you need the markers in there so anyway without explaining that forever I think you probably understand what I'm talking about but this just basically gives us a grid to work with so now let's go ahead and save this save project as then I'm gonna go into it doesn't really matter where you save this but I'll put it in my music audacity tutorial and multi-track okay so now that I have that set up first thing I'm going to do is record a bass track so I'm just gonna go ahead and pause the video for a second and record a little bit on my phone so I could show you how I'm doing that okay so here's my audio interface and it's just a alesis USB interface and is plugged in on my computer here and all I'm gonna do I mean this part I probably didn't need to really show you but I'm just gonna show you anyways I'm gonna plug my bass in to the input of the audio interface my bass is over here I can't really do both of this while I'm holding the camera but I just wanted to show you basically I have this running into my computer if you were not using a USB audio interface and you're using your built-in interface which is over there but I'm that I'm recording the mic for my tutorials and that's how I can do it and do this the same time but I'm getting sidetracked but anyway if your were using the built-in interface you would need some type of adapter that would adapt basically quarter-inch which is this size to the smaller eighth inch size but chances are most people can afford a a USB interface these days that you can find some pretty cheap ones out there but if not I mean there's nothing wrong with the built-in interface - they can be a little noisy sometimes but I have gotten good recordings with the built-in interface before so whatever you have just go ahead and use it hook that up and let me go back to the audacity screen and we'll record some bass all right so now I have my bass hooked up and we have our click track so now we need to get a recording level for the bass so in order to do that all you have to do is click this little bar now first actually before I do that let's switch this if you haven't switched this area here to mono because you're just recording a bass or a single line input so you don't need stereo or you'll have an extra blank channel in there also here this little my your phone guy will show you which audio interface you want to use so if you select that I'm using my i/o for which I showed you a minute ago and once you have those selected then you can just click this little bar here and this will give you your recording input level and as you can see my voice is picking up there but let me play some bass okay so yeah base level looks good let's go ahead and record a little bit and put it in with this click track okay so now we have that let's go ahead and listen to it back alright so you know this recording is a little bit noisy just because I have so many things running into my interface right now so ignore that hopefully this will all be okay when you actually do yours and it's not gonna be a big deal I never actually on this version actually let me check something now it seems to be okay oh I guess I did configure the audio latency on this but anyway if you if you record something and this is not in time with your click what you just recorded and you know you played it on time then you have a latency compensation adjustment you need to make in order to do that you can watch one of my other videos where I showed you how to do that which you can just click right here and check that out and then that'll fix that problem so if you see this little arrow here that means that it has been latency corrected and so this is on time at least for mine so what I'm gonna do is zoom back out a little bit let's just go if you click this and then if you right click that zooms out now remember before when I made this little grid up here that's going to come in useful right now because what I'm gonna do is actually select part of this baseline not all of it let's go to Lake right there let's make sure that this is on the grid if you see that yellow line that means that it's on the grid now if you hold down the shift shift key I think it's a shift yeah hold down the shift key and then press play and that actually loops it but I didn't quite get a correct loop there so let's go a little bit further and listen to that again hold down shift you can press space to [Music] okay so loop that sounds you know pretty good I'm not saying it's great but it's good enough for this tutorial so let's go ahead and copy that so in order to do that all you have to do is just hold down ctrl on your keyboard and press the letter C now let's go to the next point after this first measure and this ctrl + V and that will paste the new are basically a copy of that baseline to the next measure now if we just click the write up sorry press the right arrow on the keyboard and actually before we do that let's delete all this extra stuff over here so let's click on that measure right at the end and delete this somehow just deleted everything let's not do that all right I need to listen to this again I lost my spot okay let's just delete everything after that first measure now let's try this again let's just highlight this whole area make sure you have the yellow snapping indicators on both ends copy it ctrl see if you press the right arrow key on your keyboard it will automatically go to the end of that wave and now you can just do ctrl V repeat control V control V okay so that got us to the end of our click let's go ahead and save and let's just listen to that back right that's good enough now since I don't have many instruments here in my actual apartment most of them are at my studio but what I do have is just a little frog shaped woodblock so I'm going to use this as percussion to put over that bass line so let's go ahead and rewind back to the beginning and then with audacity you don't need to actually make a second track every time you hit record it'll just automatically create a new track for you so let's go ahead and hit record okay that should be enough of that let's go ahead and listen back to that first part all right now let's delete our extra stuff there and then let's highlight this first section basically the same way we did the base so we're just creating loops now of course you don't have to do it this in loops I'm just doing this you know to show you that you can do this if you are a more competent musician or if you just want to you know play something more natural you can just go through and just play all the way through to the end of the song obviously I don't really have to say that so let's copy this paste it just like we did before oops went too far that's alright save it again ctrl F saves by the way go back to the beginning now just so you can hear what this sounds like without the click let's just go ahead and mute those for a second unfortunately the way I have my setup configured here to record the mic for the screen capture software it's basically always going to be recording so even the click when I play it back it's being recorded onto other tracks which I didn't realize that before I started making this tutorial so you're just basically gonna be stuck with a click through this whole tutorial but it doesn't really matter so that's basically it that shows you how to create a click how to create a grid and then how to record and then overdub other audio on top of another track so you could do this with basically anything you could use real drums guitars basses since whatever you have from you could you know record and overdub now once you are ready to finish this song up so you had a lot of tracks in there and you're ready to mix it down due to me using my screen capture software it seems like the click is getting over recorded or recorded again on all of my other tracks so even when I do mix this down it's still going to have a click track in it but for you in order to get rid of that click track when you did your mix just hit mute right here on your click and then when you export these tracks they will be you know without a click so before we do that though I just want to show you one more thing one thing if you do end up using a lot of tracks will be useful is the mixer so if you go to view and you go to mixer board now here is basically faders it's a very basic mixer but if you have a lot of tracks that still is useful to use you can do your panning and your mutes and solos and they're all right there easily accessible via mixer so let's go ahead and mute our click track and say we recorded some guitars and all kinds of stuff on there and it sounds really great alright so now let's just go ahead and export the wave go to export audio just go ahead and put this on our desktop for the time being multitrack test is what I'll name it then click Save you can put in all of your song data there if you want and click OK now here it is so let's go ahead and give that a listen all right so like I said the click track is still there on mine because of it getting basically bled over into my other tracks from using my microphone for this tutorial but if you muted your click track when you were doing yours it should be gone at this stage so again thanks for watching and hopefully that helped you and will allow you to create some music and audacity if you have any questions or anything like that just post them in the comment section and please subscribe check out my other videos and thanks for watching have a good day

Channel: Demonic Sweaters

Views: 216,206

Keywords: audacity recording, overdubbing, recording music with Audacity, how to overdub in audactiy, audacity tutorial, audacity, audacity tutorial for beginners, audacity (software), audio editing software, how to use audacity, audacity tutorials for beginners, younghalfington, podcasting in audacity, healmytech, record a podcast on pc, how to record a podcast in audacity, podcast editing tutorial, audacity for podcasts, podcast editing, how to edit a podcast, audacity autotune tutorial

Id: d0Vvlhf0i6M

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016