My youngest son's daughters are used to me playing the guitar when I go visit them in Ohio. It is a nightly ritual for me to sit on the end of a bed and play while the girls fall asleep. If I am allowed to play long enough, they fall asleep before I am done. The girls love it and so they asked me to record the guitar so they can listen to me playing even though I am in Utah.
It is a lot of work to set up the recording equipment and so I put it off until my oldest granddaughter asked me two days in a row. The second day, my son forwarded a video of an impassioned plea to record the music. How could I turn her down? On Saturday evening I pulled out my wife's old Mac laptop and connected it to my audio converter. Then I plugged in my acoustic-electric guitar and got ready to record.
The Mac comes with GarageBand which is great for recording audio onto your computer. I have a high-end microphone that I use to record audio for my YouTube videos but my guitar also plugs right in. I thought I could just start playing. I clicked on the GarageBand application only to have it crash repeatedly. The simplest solution is to reinstall the application so I loaded up the App Store and downloaded the latest version. That worked and I could run it on the laptop.
My audio converter connects to the computer though a USB cable and the Mac isn't quite sure what to do with audio afterwards. It can pull input from the converter but also send output to it even though it doesn't have a speaker. I had to go in and tell the Mac to use the device for input but to route output through the computer's speakers. I actually had headphones plugged into the Mac and couldn't hear anything until I adjusted these settings. Then I clicked the "Monitor" checkbox in GarageBand so I could hear my own playing and what the computer recorded.
When I play for my granddaughters before bed, they don't care if I make a mistake. When I practice for myself, I just play through the song and don't worry if the music doesn't sound 100% correct. All that changes when you record music to play over and over. I want it to be perfect and so it took me about 20 attempts on the first song before I felt I did it justice. Knowing I wanted to record around 15 songs, I had to come up with a better way to finish the project. Or I had to stop being so picky.
The first thing I did was to change how I recorded my songs. Instead of stopping the recording after a mistake and starting over, I would keep the recording going and just stop long enough so I knew where to cut the mistake from the track. That sped things up somewhat. I also decided to play each song through once before even attempting to record it. That helped a lot and I cut the number of takes from 20 down to just 1 or 2. Being less picky also had something to do with that.
It normally takes me about 20 minutes to go through the 15 or so songs I have memorized. Recording them took over an hour with all the stops and starts. It also made for great guitar practice as I could really see my common mistakes and work to fix them. I highly recommend recording your music practice on a periodic basis to help you improve. It is something I will incorporate into my practice.
I sent the music off to my son on Saturday evening thanks to some help from Google Drive. He put it on my granddaughters' music player. When I called them yesterday, I could hear my music in the background. This morning my son sent me a video of my oldest granddaughter listening to some of my songs and being happy that she can now hear them whenever she wants. That makes me feel great as a musician but even better as a grandpa.
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