Stepping Up from Audacity

DaveLeeNC

New member
I am pretty new to home recording. Right now my recording is limited to just a single (stereo) track of classical guitar (sometimes with Webcam video and sometimes not). All audio is captured with a Yeti Blue Pro mic USB'ed into a Dell XPS (Windows 10) laptop running Audacity. Right now about all the audio processing that I do is some noise reduction, maybe a bit of EQ (or maybe not), volume normalization, and it is done.

If I were to do 'more' it might be related to simple effects (like adding reverb) or I can imagine a bit of multi-track stuff where I might add a backing track. Nothing more complicated than that seems likely to me.

Am I really missing anything here by not going to a 'real' DAW like Reaper?

If it matters I work in a small space (11x12' bedroom), carpeted, full of furniture, and do have a pair of decent JBL near field, powered, 5 inch monitor speakers. My 'sound card' comes from a USB attached Line 6 Pod HD500X guitar amplifier simulator (this also drives the speakers).

Thanks.

dave (new guy, even by the standards of the 'Newbie Subforum')
 
I think once you get used to the workflow required for any DAW, you'll regret the time you spent doing these things in Audacity.

Like many around here, I use Audacity fairly routinely for a quick listen/inspection or even the occasional editing of audio files, but I never record or mix with it anymore.

There are few recordings that wouldn't benefit from a tiny bit of compression and reverb to make them a little more "radio ready" and the tools for things like reverb and compression in even the most basic DAWs are so much more intuitive, and I'll say probably sonically more authentic/better than the Audacity ones. (Very much my opinion, of course.)

I haven't heard your before/after tracks so maybe it's fine, but "noise reduction" shouldn't need to be a routine process in your record/mix steps, unless it's just trimming ends or such. if it is more than that, there might be some mitigation of another sort that needs to be done.
 
Keith, thank you for the very helpful response.

Regarding the noise reduction thing, when I am doing a video I am pretty much stuck with whatever laptop fan noise exists. Unless my Dell XPS decides to go on hyperdrive fan mode (which I can typically avoid), the low speed fan noise is not much. I just have a habit of always leaving 5 or 10 seconds of silence at the start (or end - it depends) of the recording and my first step is always a noise reduction thing - fan or not. It takes very little time. My thinking is that even with the fan not on (in which case there is probably little other ambient noise) this cannot hurt.

Am I wrong in my assumption?

Thanks.

dave
 
I am pretty new to home recording. Right now my recording is limited to just a single (stereo) track of classical guitar (sometimes with Webcam video and sometimes not). All audio is captured with a Yeti Blue Pro mic USB'ed into a Dell XPS (Windows 10) laptop running Audacity. Right now about all the audio processing that I do is some noise reduction, maybe a bit of EQ (or maybe not), volume normalization, and it is done.

If I were to do 'more' it might be related to simple effects (like adding reverb) or I can imagine a bit of multi-track stuff where I might add a backing track. Nothing more complicated than that seems likely to me.

Am I really missing anything here by not going to a 'real' DAW like Reaper?

If it matters I work in a small space (11x12' bedroom), carpeted, full of furniture, and do have a pair of decent JBL near field, powered, 5 inch monitor speakers. My 'sound card' comes from a USB attached Line 6 Pod HD500X guitar amplifier simulator (this also drives the speakers).

Thanks.

dave (new guy, even by the standards of the 'Newbie Subforum')





Audacity keeps getting better and better. And there are a lot of add ons too.
Plus you can not beat that price !!

If you want to step up why not try Sonar?

Also free now as I understand. I bought an earlier version of sonar and hope to move up to the newer one when I get my win10 PC working right.

The deep pocket folks and the golden eared snobs will put down a lot of us with low end gear so they can feel better about spending too much on their GAS.

From what I have seen you may see easier ways to do some things in a new DAW but you will be hard pressed to hear any real sound difference because of your gear. Now how well you or I use our gear is always another issue.

The real question for you is whether audacity is limiting you in any way that a newer DAW would be worth the effort to learn let alone pay more money to acquire.

I am not sure how a single instrument is really stereo on playback although I do see how you can track it in stereo on audacity.
 
If you can do what you want in Audacity, there's no real need to use another DAW.

The two main differences between DAWs are what they can do and how they do it.

The 'how they do it' is important. You will feel more comfortable with a DAW that does things in a way that you would expect them to be done.

It is possible that Audacity does everything you want. It's also possible that another DAW can do that same thing more easily, or more logically.
 
On the observation/question

I am not sure how a single instrument is really stereo on playback although I do see how you can track it in stereo on audacity.

The Blue Yeti has several mic patterns that you can select and one of those kind of mimics two mics pointed 90 degrees from the sound source (opposite directions). It does provide something of a stereo effect, FWIW.

dave
 
I note the Yeti's capacity to deliver a stereo effect. Being connected via USB, the Yeti is its own interface, so it's a perfectly reasonable function to have. I admit to being surprised to discover this, and would have made the same assumption as mr average.
 
I note the Yeti's capacity to deliver a stereo effect. Being connected via USB, the Yeti is its own interface, so it's a perfectly reasonable function to have. I admit to being surprised to discover this, and would have made the same assumption as mr average.

It was not audacity or the yeti that made me ask the question.

My point was that stereo is a left right wider view of the music,
while a single instrument is essentially coming from a point.

You can record it in stereo but the sound is essentially mono although not exactly mono.
 
On the observation/question

I am not sure how a single instrument is really stereo on playback although I do see how you can track it in stereo on audacity.

The Blue Yeti has several mic patterns that you can select and one of those kind of mimics two mics pointed 90 degrees from the sound source (opposite directions). It does provide something of a stereo effect, FWIW.

dave

I understand that stereo pattern but if you only have one instrument it still comes out essentially mono on playback doesn't it.

Now if you had two guitars then you can have real stereo music on playback.
 
It was not audacity or the yeti that made me ask the question.

My point was that stereo is a left right wider view of the music,
while a single instrument is essentially coming from a point.

You can record it in stereo but the sound is essentially mono although not exactly mono.

Well . . . there are endless debates on this topic, so I don't think you will find a definitive answer.

However, here is my take.

No sound sources are mono or stereo. They radiate sound in pretty much all directions from their source. Some sources are effectively a single point (e.g. a snare hit), while others are broad (e.g. a piano or an earthquake).

Stereo or mono refers to how a sound is perceived, rather than how it is produced. It's a function of input rather than output. Our ears operate in stereo. The space between our ears (and the consequent differences in perception between left and right) allows for perception of a sound in a 3d space. Thus even a point-source sound is placed in a stereo field by the way our ears work.

This, then, is what stereo miking and reproduction endeavour to replicate. The stereo mike replaces our left and right ears, and the stereo playback system recreates (in theory) the stereo field as if we were there.

But, essentially I do agree with your observation that "the sound is essentially mono although not exactly mono." That is exactly what you hear, and what a system reproduces, when you are listening to a point-source sound. But it is still in stereo.
 
Hi Dave, the word "stereo" does not, as is often thought, mean "two" it means "solid". A stereo recording attempts to give dimension to a sound source. A sound does not exist in isolation, it fills the room and all sorts of complex reflections come in and out and give "life" to the sound. Then the guitar sound does not just come from the soundhole, one of the most common techniques used to record acoustic guitar is a mic at about the 12th fret then one "looking at" the lower bout. Two tracks to mix and match but that is NOT stereo!

True stereo recording means two mics arranged in a specific way and some say the purest form is the so called "Co-Incident" arrangement, I think the capsules in the Yeti could be so arranged. But, to get a good stereo recording with C-I you need to back off! Some say find the best seat in the house and put the mics there. In practice this is rarely convenient and in concert halls a pair is usually "flown" well above the audience's heads.

Does your monitor system have a Mono button? So many do not these days but if you make a stereo recording with the mic well back then flip to mono and back I am sure you will understand some of my waffle!
Also listen to some good stereo recordings of say string quartets or small jazz ensembles? You should be able to place the instruments in space.

Audacity is good but there are now SO many free DAWs and even more you can try free for a month that it would be daft not to look!

A small point about laptop noise? Consider a wireless kbd and mouse, then you can put the laptop several mtrs away from the mic.

Dave.
 
I'm glad you got decent responses to the stereo question. It's also made me think about a potential problem - the sound field in our studio space makes the mainly classical and orchestral content easy to do. We might take a guitar, recorded as a single audio track, pan it to slightly left of centre, and a little reverb to widen it a bit and call that a done deal. However, I've just had a thought. The users of our music are dance teachers and it gets played in big spaces. However, it means that nobody bar perhaps a couple of people are in the right place to make sense of 'stereo'. All the music played in oddly sized and big venues are not hearing what we intend at all, and stereo in the usual sense doesn't exist. Yet nobody complains in a 1000 capacity club that when they play The Beatles early music recorded in stereo that the people on one side don't hear one of the guitars or the drums, and when they do a Big Band World War 2 dance in an aircraft hangar, the doo-wop big band sound between the trombones and the woodwind travels 100m across the hangar! They people who record a guitar with two mics and then pan them to create a bigger sound in the studio with width have created a guitar bigger than an aircraft in that aircraft hangar. Unless the listener has the same speaker distance from the listener and the same width between them, stereo in the usual sense is distorted, so maybe reality has become and effect, and it's the effect people like not the 'stereo' Maybe we should go back to mono?
 
In fact Rob I am told many, if not most PA engineers run mono rigs? There might be two speaker stacks either side of the stage but the result is mono for just the reasons you stated. The people on the extreme left say, of the auditorium will get little or nothing of instruments or voices panned right (stage left? Ooo! my head hurts!)

The directional effects used in cinemas of course use multiple speakers and amp channels.

Stereo was invented basically as a means to create an illusion of "space" in a domestic setting. A "well to do" living room might be 6000cu ft and it would back in the early days of recording be pretty dead. Big sofa, chairs rugs and carpets reproducing mono in such rooms was pretty flat. Proper stereo placed a good deal of the concert hall acoustics in the room with you. Google "Haffler" and if any of you have an old fashioned hi fi amp and a spare speaker or two, investigate listening to the Difference Signal.

And if you want to hear THE best sound capture system try dummy head recording..Bloody scary that!

Dave.
 
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