How to record guitar

I'll go record guitar a simple question with maybe a more elaborate answer than you thought but these 1 2 3 4 5 6 tips will tell you all about what's important to know we can either record the guitar with microphones for instance by putting it in front of an acoustic guitar or a guitar amplifier or we can plug our guitar straight into the computer and for electrics use software to emulate guitar em for instance but let's start with the microphone situation since that's probably the most common practice we need to 1 capture it I'll make another video about mics but for now let's quickly distinguish three types the ribbon condenser and dynamic microphones all three use different methods of capturing the sound which by itself is just moving air and turn it into electricity all three types are different pros and cons but in the end you can use all three to record guitars and it's up to your taste which one you choose if we start recording electric guitars I recommend you start with a dynamic mic the shure sm57 for example and if you just record acoustics or may you want to add vocals to it you might want to consider a condenser mic for example the as the electronic x1 a condenser mic needs power to function dynamic and ribbons do not despair is called phantom power which runs through the cable into the mic more on this later so what to do with the mic to connect it most microphones are connected with the so-called XLR cable this is the industry standard for mics so it will be pretty handy if you can plug it straight into the computer right but the first thing we need to overcome is that a signal that is coming out of the microphone is analog but the computer only understands digital signals basically just a bunch of zeros and ones for that we need an ad or a d/a-converter analog to digital or digital to analog also known as a deck haven't heard of that well you're using one right now you can't hear me right when you play a song or a video which is in digital format on your phone or on computer it comes out as an analog signal as sound we can hear through the speakers the DAC converted it from ones and zeros to an actual analog audio signal to record guitars or any audio signal we use it the other way around we need to convert the analog microphone signal to a digital format the computer understands but before we turn it into something digital we need to three make it louder because the signal that comes out of the microphones is really really weak for this we need a preamp we need to add a lot of game which is the amount that the preamp amplifies a signal to the microphone mostly somewhere between 30 and 60 decibels we need an ad converter a preamp geez that's a lot already wait don't worry often these two things are combined into one device especially the more affordable units here's one the mellow audio TS mini which is just one preamp and costs around 120 bucks here's one which I use for recording which is the rme fireface ucx which is two microphone inputs and a whole bunch of line inputs these things are called audio interfaces or sound cards and are connected via USB firewire or Thunderbolt to your computer so now we make sure the guitar signals captured made louder with the preamp and turn it into a digital signal by the ad converter great it's now being sent through the USB cable into the computer what and now it's all up to the software you want to use - for record it and again we have a lot of options the software used to record stuff is usually referred to as a doll digital audio workstation because mostly when you record something you also want to edit or process it to turn it into exactly the thing you want the first commercially available software on the market was Pro Tools nowadays are over 20 notable dolls on the market and here are the most used ones Ableton Live my personal favorite Cubase that I also use 3 semanas 1 Pro Tools logic pro in the beginning because it really doesn't matter which one you use but here's a golden tip a lot of audio interfaces are shipped with a copy of light versions of DAWs for instance the focusrite scarlett 2i2 which is a perfect beginner interface comes with Ableton Live lights and a Pro Tools version and in the beginning all the light versions will be more than enough to get you going where you're hooking up the mic to a sound card it's important to use the right amount of game this can either be set up in the interface itself or you need to open the driver of the sound card to control the inputs and outputs play as loud as you go and adjust the game so that you're maxing out somewhere between minus 12 or minus 6 dB if you have too much gain the signal will clip which is the worst thing that can happen remember we talked about phantom power this is the place where you can turn it on or off it's 48 volts knob nowadays the noise levels are really low so there is no reason to record it as hot as possible so now we need to tell the software on what channel the guitar is coming in this could be any of the inputs from the sound card I put my guitar which is now my vocal into input 1 so that's the one that's selected and there we see my vocal coming into the doll hello hello hello in your software you've got the option of recording multiple tracks on top of each other so if we would record guitars and vocals simultaneously with two different mics we could select two different inputs on two different tracks and now arm the track which means the track we're recording on will start recording from the selected input and there we are and that's it the audio is now recorded into the computer congratulations you made it through the most boring video you are great but we can't really quit this video before we talked about ticks more boring stuff a few crucial things to know when recording our sample rate and bit depth because the audio is stored digitally we can specify the quality of it the higher the quality the larger the file size and the more effort it takes for computer to work with audio is a waveform and the more precise we draw the waveform the better the quality let's start recording with a sample rate of 44 point 1 kilohertz and a bit depth of 24 if you ever start recording proper songs and know on what medium you're about to share it you may bump it up to higher values if you're planning to play with modeling software there is a really bad word need to talk about the l word latency this is basically the moment between when the DA receives a signal and outputs it again so you can hear it so when you play guitar the signal has to go through the amp and the effects in the computer and then it comes out speakers if the latency is more than just a few milliseconds this can be real annoying key is to have the right balance between keeping the buffer size low but not so low that the audio starts crackling and popping on some systems it's unfortunately unpossible to get latency below the annoying threshold and I gotta say and never really get used to this even if latency is just big mass somewhere between 4 or 8 milliseconds you can still feel it when you play this was one real big downside of the whole software emulated guitar plugins I didn't really talk about it in my previous video because it wasn't just about the plugins it was also about the hardware part but I do want to raise the question about when this problem will be overcome I started recording stuff around 15 years ago and to my experience it hasn't really developed that much everything is much more stable certainly for Windows system but still the latency this makes me worry a bit about where it's going but yeah let's end on a happy note recording guitars is one of the best things you can do to get better you have to keep time you have to listen to yourself over and over again so you think twice before making that mistake again it also teaches you about when you really master some I know I used to record way and way too early way before I really knew the part it's to me countless of takes after which I just was too frustrated and just gave it up luckily I know better now so share your experience with gear are the tips and tricks and questions of course in the comment section and I'm sure we'll help each other out right you are invited to see a sneak peek from my upcoming guitar course a video about how to choose the right guitar you get all the advice I'm sharing with my students about which guitar will be the best to start out on the difference between nylon or steel strings etc you can access this video for free at learn practice play calm if you like this video make sure to just press the thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't done it already I know if you really like this channel please hit the notification bell if you want to be notified by our videos or check out my patreon page where you can support me if you really really really dig what I do anyways have a wonderful day Cheers [Music] it's now being sent through the USG people [Music] it's now being sent through the USA people great it's now being sent through the USB game great

Channel: Paul Davids

Views: 846,490

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Keywords: how to record guitar, audio interface, sound card, digital, analog, microphones, video, tutorial, guitar, record, paul davids, software, daw, xlr, cable, phantom power, 48-volt, dynamic, condensor, ribbon, sample rate, bit depth, ableton, cubase, DAW, digital audio workstation, preamp, theory, easy, lesson, latency, buffer size, amp, acoustic guitar, acoustic, cabinet, mic, guitars

Id: awzXNl30lKg

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018