Recording Guitar Music on my Computer

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.

Chromebook vs. Laptop

Yesterday I returned from a week-long trip to visit my son in Ohio. I still have not found a full-time job and so I am looking. As I don't have a laptop from my employer that I would normally use on such a trip, I took my Chromebook and used it instead. I have to say that I would have preferred a laptop but the Chromebook did well and met all of my needs.

I really had only two use cases for a computer on my trip: reading e-mail and applying to jobs. For reading e-mail, there is no real difference between a laptop and a Chromebook. I use a browser to access my e-mail and it works the same on both devices.

I wasn't sure I would be able to apply for jobs as easily on my Chromebook. Before leaving on my trip, I uploaded a copy of my resume to my Google Drive so I could access it on the road. I probably should have also uploaded a sample cover letter but forgot. My job search on the road consisted of going through new job postings that appeared in my e-mail and applying to the ones that I am qualified to fill and find  interesting.

Those that have had to search for a new job know that it is best to tailor your resume for each posting. I could modify the resume in Google Drive using Google Docs. Then when it came time to upload the job-specific resume, I told the job application website that I would upload it from a file. In ChromeOS, there is an option to use a Google Drive file just as if it is located on the device even though it isn't. I could also do the same with each cover letter. In my case, I had to create the first one from memory but could then reuse it for each successive company making sure to modify it accordingly.

While everything worked technically, the real proof of success is in the fact that I managed to get three different screening interviews during the trip, one of which is a direct result of submitting an application while traveling. That is equal to my results using my desktop computer at home. I have to say that the Chromebook worked well.

The only problem I had with the Chromebook during the trip is when I couldn't connect to the WiFi network at the Detroit airport. After trying for a few minutes, I turned my phone into a hotspot and connected to it. Then I could respond to e-mails for phone interviews. I only needed it for a few minutes and everything worked fine.

As I mentioned at the start, I would have preferred a true laptop computer. However the Chromebook is significantly less expensive and did everything I needed it to do on this trip. I just needed to plan ahead a bit. If my regular workflow was to habitually keep all of my documents on Google Drive, I would not have needed to do anything differently.