Live songs online

I've put up a couple of live tracks onto my Reverbnation player.

Let Me Love You Tonight - is a new song that debuted at the gig that I'm quite proud of and sounded pretty good.
My Baby - is different as a solo acoustic piece so I thought I'd lob that on there as well.

Enjoy!

For the technically minded / interested read on...

I took along my Boss BR-600 to the gig on Sunday, it's a digital multitrack recorder and is what I use to make my "studio" recordings. It's a really simple (apart from the drum tracks that still loses me) little 8 track device. Anyway you can power it off 6 AA batteries and it has a couple of little built in mics. I've used it like this just to capture early demos of songs as work in progress at times. I thought to myself "I can record the set" - mostly so I could listen back and learn from it for future performance. Which I have! Anyway Fourdinners asked for some tracks to play on his scooter forums radio show this Saturday so I needed to take the recording and make it into MP3 tracks. Having done that I picked out a couple to load up.

Here's how it all worked; I loaded up a new clean 1GB memory card, created a song in the middle level of quality to be sure I'd be able to get it on the card with enough room to subsequently export to WAV format - which happens on the card so you need that room free. I then showed my daughter how to start and stop a recording and just plonked it on the table in front of her. Listen for yourself but the results were much better than I'd expected, very creditable indeed.

So I got home and exported the recording to the WAV file and loaded that onto the computer. I now had this massive WAV file, which I converted to MP3 through an MP3 converter that I have giving me now a 30+MB MP3 file. So still too big for emailing about and also a single "track" of the whole performance.

Col who is a font of all knowledge on this stuff was sought out for his expertise and he confirmed that Audacity was the tool to use for this chop suey exercise on the big file. As soon as I got home last night I downloaded that... beware go to the proper site the first one I went to my virus scanner instantly quarantined the download as it had a Trojan in it!! But with the latest beta from the right place installed it only took a couple of mins for me to figure out the best way to cut it up... basically listen to it and at appropriate point hit the [ key to start the section and the ] to stop it. Then just cut and paste into a new Audacity project, tidy up the beginning and end of the track, I found I had to switch off the default "snap to" setting on the selection tool as it only wanted to cut only a section on precise second timing boundaries. Once done and happy with it I just export as WAV file ... or MP3 but I used my bulk MP3 converter program I already mentioned for that myself once I had them all exported at WAVs.

Great stuff all round.

  • The BR-600 was excellent given how portable etc. it is

  • Audacity was pretty easy to use to chop up and clean up each track

  • All in all only a few hours work all round to get any live set into MP3. If you were someone with a big enough fan base the making of live recordings for subsequent sale is really easy

Comments

  1. I was with at 'Here's how it all worked' but didn't really pick it up again until 'Great stuff all around'....;-)

    I'm technologically backwards I'm afraid...

    Got the toons old bean.

    You'll be opening the show, popping up throughout and closing.

    So there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I haven't used Audacity - Abletons the kiddie for me it beat mixes and everything...

    Check this mini-mix I made about 3 years ago. Took 40 minutes to mix together using Abelton. And I'm still super-pleased with the Ian Dury section. Comes in off the back of Prince and blends out and into Once In A Lifetime. All mixed in a single take..

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, m'dear, Too bad you will be in Scotland, but if they ever decide to do one in the U.K., I am gonna try like crazy to go there, too. Since I have crazy for family, it should work well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Signature Guitar

Let's talk plectrums...

12 String Guitar - Bridge Doctor Installation