So, I've been recording myself playing the guitar, so I can keep tabs on which songs I've been practising and how well I am playing them. I like to be able to sound the closest possible to the original, it's a sort of challenge. I don't think I'm good enough to publish the stuff, though, so it's mostly for my own reference and perhaps to demo to close people.
The way I do this is.. I grab some master tracks when I can, or cover tracks for the drums and bass and then put the guitar layers over it. But naturally, most songs have no master tracks available and no decent covers either, so what to do? Is there a way of keeping the guitar volume down on original tracks? Or do people simply play over the song and call it a day? If I do that, I'm afraid the sound will be too tangled for me to properly discern what's my own playing and what's the original song.
The rest is basically plugging the guitar into the computer and using the computer to add the distortion. I record myself separately, then I need to sync the recorded sound with the video. Master tracks lack mixing, naturally, so I do my best to make it sound a little bit like the real thing, but I don't spend a lot of time doing that.
Unfortunately I have a Mac and the software for guitar recording on Mac is a bit limited compared to Windows. I use Garageband for the recording, with a plugin to get the distortion from ToneBridge, Audacity to extract the master tracks and iMovie for the video. (iMovie is particularly bad, in my opinion, the rest is okay.) I don't have an amp to connect to the computer. I'm very bad at setting up amps.
How do/would you guys do this?
|