austinmackert

This is a great article. Thanks to my brother's band I was familiar with copyrighting each song (actually, I didn't know you could do a whole record for the price of one!), but I had no idea about the rest. I will be passing the word on to them, as I doubt they are familiar with this either!

Is Reaper the one that's free? I remember hearing about a free DAW that has slowly been making waves in the scene.. aha, no pun intended there, sorry. *edit: funny that the next thread I read would say this... Close enough, I guess!

Hey, thank you for the responses. I think I will do what was suggested here and go ahead and take a month's worth of lessons at this place. It seems pricey, but maybe I can do a month to see if I like it (or to see if it's worth the money). If it's not, I think I know someone else experienced that would be willing to give personal lessons at a better price (Probably around $20 an hour).

I user Propellerhead's Reason 4 + Record. I mainly do electronic stuff so it works out pretty well, and the Record add-on lets me quickly plug up a guitar for a riff or two if I need it, as well as my hardware synth. I do look forward to buying into Ableton Live sometime next year as the workflow is soooo much smoother. I use Audacity when I'm lazy and want to record a quick sample from say, a video game or a movie. My Dad actually just ordered a Macbook Pro and purchased a Pro Tools/M-BOX bundle. I look forward to toying with that on his computer just for kicks.

Hm.. I'd like to hear your opinions after spending some time with this. I use Movie Maker, but I found VideoPad two weeks ago and try to use that as much as I possibly can now. It's initially a pay program, but you can turn it into a 100% free program by attempting to uninstall the demo (It will ask you if you want to enable "free" mode, which is still a big step up from Windows MM). It's sped up the editing process for me BIG time because not only does it recognize the video format my camera shoots in (WMM does not and I have to convert the files which takes time), but it's optimized properly and doesn't lag like WMM does. My only real complaint with VideoPad though is that it takes a long time to import large video clips. I am still always looking for other alternatives though and am curious about what you think of this new one.

After reading a blog here regarding practicing and taking lessons, I decided to finally inquire about instrument lessons at a local music center (piano/keys in particular). I am curious as to what the average pricing is (or should be) for lessons, and what I should or should not pay. This music center wants roughly $130 a month (one 30 minute lesson a week). Being around $40 a lesson, that seems kind of pricey to me. I have heard that lessons should run no more than $20 an hour (re: a half an hour), but I am not sure how true that is. I do know that the instructer this place is ready to pair me up with has 25+ years experience and still plays in public--would that be worth the extra money, or should I go on Craigslist and find a knowledgeable stay-at-home-Mom that charges less? I have a few days to decide, so any feedback or ideas are welcome.

I primarily just use the noise reduction to eradicate a general humming sound that might underlay the recording. I would bet there are other uses for it, but I'm no pro at this. Best of luck with your recording setup, though! A more powerful machine will certainly help, especially if you're dealing with several tracks of large audio clips at once.

Hm, de-noising shouldn't be causing this problem (all it does is remove certain frequencies, it doesn't shorten or lengthen the length of a specified clip). I was thinking at first, "Maybe it's something with latency," but it's weird that it doesn't do it initially, but does it towards the end. Maybe your computer is lagging? What are your system specs, anyways (just out of curiosity)?

Hm, if I remember correctly, Audacity can only record from one specific source at a time. So, theoretically, if you have it set to record from whatever line or aux-in you are using, it shouldn't pick up the sound of the other track (It's coming from a different source, technically). I've done multiple tracks in Audacity and haven't had this problem, although that's not to say you shouldn't follow any of the above advice. I'm curious to hear the problem in-action. Are you using the guitar line as a reference while you sing, in headphones perhaps? It's possible that if you're blasting the volume in your phones too loud (depending on if they are cheap or high quality ones), the noise from that could be bleeding out, being picked up slightly by your vocal mic.

Along the same line (and price range), I understand the SM-58 mics are better suited for vocals?