Hello Experts
A number of years ago (quite a lot of years as I now think back), I was a reasonably competent guitar player and gigged a little bit. I gave it up, apart from the occasional rusty strum and sore fingers, in the intervening years but would like to get back into it again. I found some old cassette tapes of songs that a friend and I laid down in his garage studio,and some jam sessions, and I realise now that I had a reasonably good singing voice back then.
I have started practicing again and would like to try and record onto PC and produce some reasonably high fidelity audio files to burn to CD as a present for my parents. They never really got to share in this period because I was too busy pandering to my time consuming ex who didn't appreciate my musical virtuosity as much as she should have :-) If I feel in the end that my talents return after some practice, I may try and get into gigging again and multi-tracking would be useful for sharing ideas.
What I would be looking to do now would be mostly acoustic guitar and singing. I know someone with a basic but reasonable good sounding rhythm machine, and I would no doubt also want to mix some electric guitar stuff.
Unfortunately bank balance stands no chance of improving at the same rate of my musical skills after some practice, so I have no way of buying any higher tech equipment than what I currently have.
If I give you some details of some of the hardware I currently have, could you perhaps give me an idea of whether I am likely to realise what I hope to achieve?
- Windows XP Pro, but an install Linux if there is better software for these purposes.
- Highest spec PC is a 2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (333 MHz bus).
- 1GB PC 3200 DDR Memory, but I can put it up to 1 GB with spares I have.
- 2 x 160 GB 7200 rpm IDE hard drives.
- Radeon 9520 AGP 8x Graphics card with 128MB DDR.
- Creative Soundblaster Audigy2 (Platinum?) sound card. PC still has the onboard audio chip, but I have the card and intend to install it soon.
- Acoustic guitar with under-saddle transduce, Electric with standard pickups
- Dynamic SM58 clone microphone and a small clip-on broadcasting type microphone.
- Guitar combo amp with line-out, effects out, and headphone out, but no speaker simulation out or XLR output.
- Zoom 606 multi-effects pedal with no USB connectivity or dedicated output designed specifically for recording straight to PC. All I might really want by way of effects would be a mild chorus effect for the acoustic guitar, and a bit of crunch for the electric guitar.
I have used Audacity for various basic audio-related functions like voice recording, trimming audio files, etc, but I believe that it doesn't support the use of ASIO drivers and any attempts at over-recording my voice on recorded guitar track on playback caused intolerable latency to the point of impossibility. Those attempts, however, were on my 2GHz Pentium 4 PC with integrated audio chip, and I would hope that the SB Audigy card with ASIO drivers should address that issue
I downloaded the free Kristal Audio Engine (
http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/) a long while ago, but it felt very complicated in use because of all the free floating dialogs like Gimp image editor. I suppose I could learn to use it if it is any good.
So, I would be grateful of your opinions as to what angle I should really be aiming towards with the equipment I have, or might just be able to scrape together if cheap enough. It looks like I have one of two choices:
Try and use what I have with any suggestions of software you may have,
OR
Buy a 20 buck old mini 4 track microstudio that saves to Flash Card, do all the mixdowns on that, and then copy files from there to PC Hard Drive
I would value any suggestions you may be have about the need for some kind of Audio interface to the PC other than just plugging guitar lead (for acoustic), amp out (electric), and mic out straight into the Sound Blaster Audigy card. I saw some small cheaper devices by M-Audio, Edirol, and Creative that take standard input and send it to PC via USB cable. I MAY at a push be able to buy one of these if it is really a necessity for my proposed use and I could wait for a bargain on eBay.
Thanks for your time, but please remember that I cannot affort to upgrade this PC or invest in expensive software or hardware.
Bill
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