Jamming With Your Computer
LOW-PRESSURE REHEARSALS
After you get the hang of doing this kind of recording, you can have even more fun by inviting over other musicians for practices. If you place that microphone in a good place in the room, you should be able to get some decent recordings—at least as good as you did with your cassette recorder. Try playing with different mic placements, and even using different connectors to fit a good mic onto your computer audio in jack. Your local electronics store has lots of these, as do many music equipment stores. If you like to practice using a PA system, you may even be able to find a way to pipe your best mix into your computer, either through the microphone jack or another port (find the right setting on your program, though—you may find it has changed to aux-in or line-in to get a proper signal). Play around with the different settings before you invite pals over, though, so you don’t cut in on valuable together time. You will probably find that rehearsals and taping like this adds an entirely better dimension to your music, since many people feel far more relaxed in such a setting, and there may be much less “studio-itis.” These .wav files can always be downloaded onto CDs later for future retrieval if they are taking up too much space on your drive, and, if you buy these CD-Rs in bulk, you will find that they are probably cheaper than cassettes, and can last far longer. If you want to listen to a section over and over, too, you can try jamming along with your computer in a playback mode, after taking the section you like and creating a smaller file with just that bit in it. You may find that you also have software that allows you to make loops of certain files and you can just play these continuously until you get a part right. If you are lucky, you can probably record these trials at the same time you are playing back the other file, and create whole songs by just layering the bits without the usual degradation of quality you’d get if you did this with cassettes.
DO A WEB SEARCH
I have found more wonderful programs that are free downloads just by doing web searches on the subject. Many music sites offer free programs that will take your .wav files and turn them
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