Help

[Jason64]

My husband has an acoustic guitar, mandolin and microphone and has starting writing his own songs I would love to get something for our computer which apparently has a 3D sound card to enable him to record his guitar and voice and edit it. A friend has offered to give me a program called cakewalk ?? I have absolutely no idea where to start and was hoping someone could help me ???

 

[manning1]

i would get a better sound card if possible. consumer sound cards can be quite noisy. maudio have something called a revolution (90 bucks ?)thats cheap.
but make sure you can return it in case it wont play well in your pc.
also suggest (christmas perhaps ?) .....
1. a cad gxl condenser microphone. about 60 bucks if i remember.
2. a little yamaha mixer . about 100 bucks. this will feed the signal of the mic to line in on the soundcard and my favorite pc software for multitrack
recording (powertracks) 29 bucks from pgmusic.com.
grand total = 280 bucks.
all the foregoing assumes a windows pc and not a mac environment,
and also assumes a newish pc not a real oldie.
the reason for the condenser mic is to pick up all the nuances of acoustic guitar and mandolin. because they are sensitive instruments to record a certain quality level of products is needed to record them properly.

 

[manning1]

by the way the reason for the powertracks software is it will let your hubby do neat things like record multiple different acoustic guitar and mandolin tracks and vocals and mix them together and even produce a cd of his songs. in fact he will be capable of laying down 48 different tracks ,
depending on how powerfull the pc is.
all the best. you can download a free demo of powertracks if you wish before you buy, just go to the pg web site. also check out the forum. lots of help there for you to get recording tricks from.

 

[Jason64]

Thanks so much for your help as you can probably tell I am muscially illiterate, the computer we have is only about 6 months old I found all of this info on the computer saying that we have VIA AC'97 Audio Controller (wave) for voice recording problem is I dont even know if this means anything. We are running Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version: 5.1.2600 I have been told it is a good system that we have but unfortunately I really only know how to use the computer not anything about what we run on it. It is fathers day tomorrow so I am going to go out and have a look around today and see if I can find any of the things you mentioned thanks again for your help..