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Getting back into (hobby) music recording

So playing around with the Roland, I think it should work. Initially I had to use headphones and the only ones I have are earphones that have been chewed up by a dog. Eventually I found a 1/8 cable and was able to run it into my bass amp. I still hate the way the cymbals sound and I’ll have to work a bit with the kick to get it to preform how I was, but I figure I’ll probably end up running it was a MIDI controller and using something like Steven Slate Drums. Anyone familiar with that?

Anyway, I wish I had more of my recordings from early 2000s preserved. Influences then (and now) things like The Cure, Type O Negative, others. This recording was a little long and a little repetitive (didn’t have vocals recorded — I don’t sing). I hated the way the drums sounded because I had to play them off a keyboard and they sounded flat and the cymbals bleed through everything. Anyway, I recorded this on the 8 track and without YouTube back then to really learn things, I was clueless. I simply ran the audio out on the 8 track straight into the mic jack on the computer and hit record, so quality lost. I used a Yamaha for the drums and the voice sound at the end. Used a Korg MS2000 for the intro effects and chorus lead. Would be a lot more creative with the drums now, especially being able to actually play them, and would mix things up a bit different with the guitar parts. Guitars have too much distortion. But hey, this was high school me 20 years ago.

 
So I actually really like the drum set. It sounds worlds different on proper headphones and not on the bass amp. I got the MS2000R a couple days ago but haven't had time to play with it much other than going through the presets. It will take quite a while to learn about synthesis. Finally got the audio interface up and (sort of) running. It's amazing how back in the 90s I used to be on the cutting edge of technology, and now I feel like an old man who's resistant to change and gets confused with all the garbage. I think the biggest things that perhaps maybe I thought I'd use more than I would was that midi guitar. May just use an actual controller instead of that most of the time. But the good news is that I discovered that with proper power adapter, that I can still run the BR-8, so I can pull my original recordings off that.
 
Just listened to the first few minutes. Felt like that one Steve Miller song at first...then I felt like Sonny Crockett driving along in a sweaty night in Miami. Then, idk. It lost me.
 
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Here’s some past life stuff. Not what I’m recording now, but shows you what my voice is like as well as my songwriting (for the original songs - there are some covers in there as well).



A few notes:
The Pop Jockeys stuff was when we were doing a cover band... those were just fun covers we recorded for the heckuvit, and to send to club owners to show that we could actually play.
The Mean Phoenix song was a country song that I wrote that I wanted to record and did for fun as part of a trio that I’ve played with for a long time (was called Mean Phoenix for a while, and most recently we were playing as Dirty Old Men before I started to focus on DJing my 80’s & 90’s parties).
The Humbled Man track by me (now you know my real name) I wrote and recorded waaaaaay back in 1990.
 
So a bit of an update here over the past four years:

I was able to find a proper power cord for my BR8 (my old 8 track) and found out it wasn't fried so I was able to get all my old stuff off of it. Anyway, I don't really have a proper computer set up with a DAW and haven't spent any time learning that, but it's on my agenda and am almost there. In the meantime, I've written the basis for about 10-ish songs and I've got numerous other ideas and bits and pieces here and there. I'm going to use the basis of two old songs I had. I'd say by the end of the year, but who knows, my plan is to put out a full release (12-16 songs) on Spotify. My largest challenge will be solving for the vocal issue as I'm not a singer, but I'm going to have to figure that out in some fashion or another. The 10 songs I have I feel are really good. I've recorded other stuff (just real rough cuts of essentially me just "jamming" with myself doing all the instruments) but my goal is to not have anything that I feel is just filler, and making sure that each song could stand on its own and not just be space to fill out the rest of the tracks, so I feel pretty comfortable with where I'm at with those, which brings me to the point of needing to buy a new computer to run a DAW on it and learn the ins and outs of all that stuff. A few different things I'm running into that I'd like feedback/opinions on:

- With regard to recording guitars, I was going to invest in a mid-grade multieffects pedal for different tones. However, I'm wondering if it makes more sense to just run the guitar as a line-in and then running different amps and effects through software in the DAW. Does this give enough quality? If so, perhaps I'll bypass doing hardware because I'm just using this for recording (for playing too, but what I mean is that I'm not performing at all).

- The same thing with bass. Before, I always had a difficult time with getting the bass to sound right when recording. I've been running through an old Digitech effects board for guitar and it's been decent enough. Part of the reason I was looking at a multieffects board was that one of them contained a few bass amps in it and I was going to consolidate with that being the way to make the guitars and bass sound a little better, but perhaps the same thing where I just use plug-ins for amps and such?

- I have the Roland electric kit for drums. I'm going to just use it as a midi controller and will use a program plug-in that has different kits. I'm okay with this but there's something that really irks me about the over-reliance on sampled drums in almost all music nowadays. When I listen to the kits individually, so many of them seem so stereotypical. In any case, just within the past month or so I had seen that you can get a kit of (reasonably decent) drum mics (6 of them) for just over $100, which now has me considering actually micing my own kit. It will really depend on how it sounds in the mix and the vibe of the song. I think I'll still use this in the minority of situations, though. The biggest catch with this is that I'd need to get an audio interface with 6 inputs, which makes it a bit more pricey than what I've already got, because I want each mic on an individual track and don't want the kit mixed before going into the computer.
 
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