So encouraged by my friends, I started actively recording my video songs while playing guitar. I was an active singer while growing up and used to sing during school competitions and have won some medals etc.
I learned guitar for around 3.5 years after finishing my bachelors by attending a music class for 1 hour everyday. However, it had to be discontinued as I left for my Masters in USA. Life got very busy since then, and only now after having almost done with my PhD I get time to revisit my old hobby.
My singing passion was triggered when my mother happened to send me an old soothing song from 2007, which my friends liked a lot and encouraged me to record more.
Video recording is tough is what I realized when I started recording while playing guitar and singing hindi movie cover songs. However, soon I realized that my $100 guitar is not good enough in creating a good sound and the audio recording creates lot of noise.
As I was extremely curious about tech aligned research, I decided to invest in a home recording studio setup and a good acoustic guitar. I got my entire setup last week and now I am experimenting with different recording experiments.
The basic home recording studio setup consists of the following main components. A recording mic, an audio interface, a feedback headphone, a mic stand, a pop filter, and a digital audio workstation (DAW). The mic and other instruments analog output gets plugged into input of the audio interface, where you can adjust the gain of the sound etc. so that the output of mic is not too low. The digital audio interface is connected to your computer through a USB / Firewire port. So your recorded voice first gets converted into digital format using audio interface and then is fed as an input over USB to the DAW, where you can play with different experiments to record it in software. This is the software which allows you mix different tracks, add fancy effects etc. There are plenty of these software available in market, but the most popular ones are a few ones like Apple's Logic Pro, Abeton Live etc.
The recorded song can then be heard back from the audio interface output in terms of feedback monitoring headphones or a stereo speakers. Why do you need headphones if you can listen directly to what you are recording by normal ears? Well, what you hear is not what the DAW hears, because your guitar might be closer to mic than your singing mouth so guitar could be louder than the actual vocals. So to get the correct perception of what is getting recorded you use the headphones, and adjust your recording positions such that the best effect is observed.
The music software Cubase (DAW - Digital audio workstation), itself is pretty complicated in terms of its various effects etc, but to get a basic recording done you can be up and running pretty quickly.
So I am going to have fun doing all kind of interesting experiments with my new home recording studio setting. For more you can check www.mrunalg.com to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
