Home Recording Blog
~ January, 2006
~ February, 2006 
~ May, 2006
~

Other Diary Entries... 
In The Beginning... 
Beginners Start Here 
The Keyboard is King! 
~ My Keyboard Family 
I Wanna be Eight Again 
Getting the Perfect Take 
Dare To Be Different  
Dare To Be Different #2 
Read The Flaming Manual! 

Home Recording Diary
Wednesday, June 23, 2004

BEGINNERS START HERE... 
When I first decided to get into home recording, I had no idea where I was going to start. I did however, know that I didn't have $10,000 to set up the perfect home recording studio. Anything I did would have to be done on a tiny budget, and with the most basic of equipment.

Believe it or not, this is my very first keyboard...

Folks, its a two octave CASIO SK-5 sampling keyboard. It has a total of eight instrument 'voices', namely: piano, vibraphone, trumpet, pipe organ, chorus, flute, and dare I say it, dog and surf voices. 

Well, I did say basic, didn't I?

So back in September, 2003, I thought I'd see if I could actually do anything with my Baby Cass, Shure SM58 mic, Takamine guitar, and computer.

I plugged the Shure in to the Mic In jack of my sound card, launched my demo version of Cool Edit, turned on Baby Cass (which was positioned directly beneath the Shure), and hit a few keys.

Holy Moly, Batman, it worked! I could record directly onto my hard drive.

Over the next few days, using lots of trial and error, and more patience than I ever knew I had, I recorded my first demo song, Heartache To Heartache. It consisted of three tracks; the guitar and vocal (recorded - eventually - in one take), and the pipe organ and piano from the Casio. Since then I have added a bass guitar track to the demo. Have a listen to it now...

Sure, it was never going to win a Grammy Award, but did I care? Not in the slightest. I had been bitten by the home recording bug, and there was no way to go from there but up - onto bigger and better things.

Of course, after my first foray into home recording, I knew I would at least have to improve the quality of the keyboard I was using if I was going to create anything of substance. After spending some time, doing the rounds of various second hand shops, I eventually settled on another Casio, the CTK-551. But that's another story.