Why do my recordings sucks?

S

scotter140

New member
Its been nearly a year since I blew a whole bunch of money on a 15" Macbook pro, and a recording kit that included a Steinberg UR22, a microphone and and Cubase LE AI Elements 7

Cubase is just way to hard to use. I can barely figure out how to get a guitar to make a sound in that thing... And after I do an hour of googleing about it and somehow make it work I can never remember how I got there because it was like a 20 step process.

Garageband is OK. But all the amps and microphone settings are terrible


I found Reaper to work the best for me.

But all the programs sound terrible. I can never get to the point where I feel like I am playing in really time. Also, sometimes the audio just freezes and glitches.

I think things are broken. Maybe the interface, the cables, the mic...

I've tried recording guitar directly into the interface, I've tried going through an amp with guitar cable going from the headphone jack as the input and Ive tried micing the amp. All sound like crap and result in out of timeness.

I've been stuggleing with this a long time please help before swing a guitar at my laptop and forsake ever playing again.
 
Hey man,
There's a learning curve with any audio suite. The reason, I guess, that Garageband is 'fine' is because it's an intuitive toy.
The amp sims in it seem to be hit and miss. That's the case with any suite, in my limited experience.
The gain knob and the suck knob are usually tethered.

If Reaper seems to suit, cool. Stick with that. :)

As Robus says, any timing issues like that are most likely latency.
In Reaper go to Reaper>Preferences>Audio>Device and set block size to 128 or 64.
I don't use Reaper but I think that's all you need to do. Same with any DAW.

You said you've miked up as well and that sounded crap too?
The Daw and interface will be largely transparent so that points to your guitar, amp, mic and environment.
Given that you think the sims suck too, maybe your guitar just sucks? What have you got?
 
I would just mike my amp and forget about plugging directly into your interface through headphone jacks and stuff like that. You don't want latecy which is a huge problem.
 
also is your guitar set up properly because I have a les paul ephipone and the pickup was too high and it made it sound terrible and the strings needed to be changed. and now that I have fixed those things it sounds really good to me
 
I have getting in and out from home recording as I have time for this for the last five years. I have recorded and mixed around 18 tunes and I barely scratched the surface. All this thing is a big mystery for me. All that I can say is: keep trying and you will start to get some results.

About freezing and glitches, well, it may be hardware problem (lack of memory, throttled CPU, etc) probably caused by wrong configuration of your software. Sometimes a full reinstall can fix problems.

About recording guitar, well... I wouldn't even TRY to play and monitor through the AI. For me the minimum latency screws all my feel. When I record my guitars I just use a crazy setup: I plug the guitar into my preamp, then I stretch a cable from the output of preamp to the AI and a SECOND cable from the other preamp output to my small Vox guitar amp. It allows me to record the clean guitar signal but hear all the cool sound from my Vox. The monitoring of my AI remains eternally off.

About software, Reaper is a great DAW, I have used it since I met it and never regret. I don't have any intention on move to a different one.

Anyway, I use a simple PC equipped with an Intel i-5 CPU running at 3Ghz, 8 MB of RAM and Windows 7 64 everything attached to a simple Steinberg UCA 222 AI that mostly here will say is a piece of crap. What I mean is: if I can do things that put a smile in my face with such poor equipment I don't see why you can't with your boutique stuff.

Just rock on!

:)
 
scotter140 said:
But all the programs sound terrible. I can never get to the point where I feel like I am playing in really time. Also, sometimes the audio just freezes and glitches.

I've been stuggleing with this a long time please help before swing a guitar at my laptop...
Click to expand...
So- I'm not up on the latest everythings'- but in 2016 I guess a plain ol' rock solid audio computer isn't trivial'.. just yet.
 
YanKleber said:
About recording guitar, well... I wouldn't even TRY to play and monitor through the AI. For me the minimum latency screws all my feel. When I record my guitars I just use a crazy setup: I plug the guitar into my preamp, then I stretch a cable from the output of preamp to the AI and a SECOND cable from the other preamp output to my small Vox guitar amp. It allows me to record the clean guitar signal but hear all the cool sound from my Vox. The monitoring of my AI remains eternally off.
Click to expand...

Isn't there a mix control on your AI that lets you monitor the signal going in? Should give you pretty close to zero latency--least it works for me. It's when I record a signal into the DAW while trying to monitor that signal back out from the DAW that I will notice some latency.
 
Robus said:
Isn't there a mix control on your AI that lets you monitor the signal going in? Should give you pretty close to zero latency--least it works for me. It's when I record a signal into the DAW while trying to monitor that signal back out from the DAW that I will notice some latency.
Click to expand...

Yes there is... I've been keeping it all the way to the DAW side. Is it better to keep the monitoring turned off and the mix in the middle?
 
Yes, if you are having latency problems, give that a try. It's probably taking those milliseconds for your DAW to process the guitar track and send it back out to your AI for you to monitor. The mixer will let you monitor the guitar as it goes in. It should reduce or eliminate latency. You've got the right ASIO drivers for your AI installed, right?
 
I didn't see this mentioned, so sorry if someone already said this, but are you running on ASIO drivers? That will make a huge difference to latency. It would also facilitate freezing and glitching. I see Robus mentioned it above, but be sure your DAW is utilizing the ASIO driver and not another. Seems to me that I had to set Reaper to ASIO as it defaulted to something other with my US1800...I'm not real up on Reaper, though, so this could be a false memory...:) Where did I hide those Easter Eggs?
 
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