Music Scrapbook

Recording

Early Days

Early on, around the Piano Drafts 2004 era, I tried recording music on a Sharp Zaurus PDA that had an inexpensive microphone attached to it. It worked for getting song ideas down, but there was a lot of strange ambient noise added to the recordings with that setup.

Later in time, I ended up going to a store called Guitar Center to get some new equipment. I picked up a microphone (I think a popular Shure dynamic mic model), a PreSonus Firebox recording interface, and some other audio equipment. I also had the opportunity to get a digital piano at some point as well.

Something nice about that recording interface was that I could play the digital piano and have the results end up on my computer via something called MIDI. On the computer, I was using some version of Logic in order to capture the music from the digital piano. Something nice about MIDI is that you can edit musical notes after you've "recorded" them, so mistakes can be relatively easy to fix!

Meeting a Sound Engineer

In late 2007, maybe in the fall, I had the opportunity to work with a new friend of mine named Andrew Nagatori. Andrew worked as a sound engineer who took a lot of his own time and effort to teach me about recording and sound engineering. I think he introduced me to a program that was used a lot at the time (and at the time of this writing is still used) called Pro Tools which is helpful for recording audio. Andrew pointed me in a better direction as far as audio engineering equipment went, as well, and I had the opportunity to upgrade to an MBox2 Pro recording interface, some M-Audio BX5a monitor speakers, and an Allen & Heath Zed 14 mixer.