You wrote a song. Maybe a few of them. You learned guitar the way most of us did: by ear, by accident, and by watching a lot of YouTube at 11 o’clock at night.
Maybe you have a band. Could be just a couple of people you jam with in somebody’s basement. Maybe you’ll play a gig someday, or maybe the songs never leave the house. Either way, you want to hear them back. You want them to exist somewhere other than your head.
So you join a recording group on Facebook, and within five minutes somebody is arguing about preamps, phase alignment, and whether your room has a “low end buildup problem.” You close the app. You figure recording is for people with more money, more time, and more knowledge than you have.
I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me: you are a lot closer than you think.
I’ve been at this a long time. In college in the late 90s, I learned to edit audio on tape. At the student radio station, I cut promos on an early digital system instead, because one slip with a razor blade could wreck a whole project. In the early 2000s, my band recorded in a real studio outside Pittsburgh on Pro Tools. Today I make records in Logic on a Mac, which is what I’ve always used.
I recorded an entire album, 11 Days, in a small room at home. I did it with a day job that has me on the road, a family I want to be home for, and no studio budget. If I can do it, you can absolutely get your first song recorded. This is Step 1. Let’s start.
Forget the masterpiece (for now)
The goal of Step 1 is not a finished song. The goal is a recording you can play back, so you can hear what you actually have.
That sounds small, but it’s the step most people never take. They wait until they have the right gear, the right room, and a free Saturday. That Saturday never comes. Meanwhile the song sits in a notebook and slowly gets forgotten.
Your masterpiece is built in layers, one small session at a time. Somebody with a toddler and a full calendar doesn’t get eight hours in a studio. You get 30 minutes after bedtime. Good news: 30 minutes is enough, as long as you know what to do with it.
You already own most of a studio
Look at what’s probably sitting in your room right now:
- An acoustic guitar
- An electric guitar
- An overdrive pedal and a tuner
- An amp you like the sound of
- A couple of cables
- A laptop
- A phone
That’s not nothing. That’s the sound. The guitar, the amp, and your hands are the part nobody can buy for you, and you already have them.
About that laptop: if it’s a Windows PC that’s a couple of years old, you’re fine. You don’t need a Mac and you don’t need a new computer. Recording a few tracks of guitar and vocals is not hard work for a modern laptop. Plug it into the wall while you record, close your web browser, and it will do the job.
The three things you’re missing
Before you spend a dime: your phone already records. A voice memo of you playing the song is a real recording, and it’s where Step 1 starts (more on that below). When you’re ready to go past the phone, here’s the short list.
1. An audio interface (about $120 to $140). This is a small box that plugs into your laptop with a USB cable. You plug your guitar or a microphone into the front, and it sends clean sound into the computer. A Focusrite Scarlett Solo is a solid first one; it lists around $140 and often goes on sale near $120. If you want to record two things at once, like guitar and vocals together or two of you jamming, get one with two inputs instead, like the Scarlett 2i2. Bonus: your electric guitar can plug straight into it, no mic needed.
2. One microphone (about $100). Get a Shure SM57. It’s built like a hammer, it sounds great in front of a guitar amp, it works on an acoustic, and it will do vocals in a pinch. It’s been on more records than you could count. Grab an XLR cable with it so it connects to the interface.
3. Recording software. This is the program you record into. You’ll hear people call it a DAW (digital audio workstation). On a Windows laptop, two good places to start:
- Reaper. Full program, free to try for 60 days, then $60 for a personal license. I record in Logic on a Mac, which doesn’t run on Windows, so this is the one I point PC folks to. It’s cheap, it runs well on older laptops, and a lot of home recorders use it.
- Cakewalk Sonar. Has a free version for Windows.
Your interface will also come with some free software. Pick one program and stick with it. The forums will argue about this forever. Ignore them; every one of these can record a great song.
What about headphones? Use whatever you have for now. Earbuds are fine for Day 0. Good closed headphones can come later.
All in, that’s roughly $300 for gear you’ll use for years. Prices bounce around, so shop the sales.
What not to buy yet
This is where most of us waste money, me included. Skip all of this until you’ve recorded a few songs:
- Studio monitor speakers
- Expensive condenser mics
- Plugin bundles that promise a “pro sound”
- Acoustic foam for the walls
- A new laptop
None of it will make your song better on Step 1. Gear is fun, trust me, I know. But the thing that makes a recording good is a good song played well. Everything else is polish, and polish comes last.
Your Step 1 homework (30 minutes, $0)
You can do all of this tonight with your phone and a guitar.
- Pick one song. Not your best one. Pick the simplest one you can play all the way through without stopping. Save the epic for later.
- Record it on your phone. Open the voice memo app, set the phone a few feet away, and play the song top to bottom. Sing it if it has words. One take. Don’t fix anything.
- Listen back once. Then write three things down: roughly how fast it is, the order of the parts (verse, chorus, verse, bridge), and the chords for each part.
- Name the file. Give it the song title and today’s date. This is your demo, and it becomes your map for everything we do next.
Grab the Song Map. I made a free one-page worksheet for this homework (okay, two pages). It has spots for your tempo, the order of the parts, and the chords for each one, plus a checklist for every part you’ll record later. Print it, fill it in after you listen back, and keep it next to your guitar. We’ll use it again when we lay down the song’s skeleton.
That’s it. You’ll probably hate how it sounds. Everybody does. That’s not the point. The point is you now have a recording of your song, and this morning you didn’t.
What’s next
Next time is Step 2: getting the interface and the software talking to your laptop, and hearing your guitar come through the computer for the first time. It’s easier than the forums make it sound, and I’ll walk through it in order, one step at a time.
Until then, do the homework. And tell me: what’s the song you picked? Leave a comment or hit reply on the email. I read every one.