How Can I Record Myself? The first thing you need is a microphone or some kind of input device. Most multimedia computers come with a microphone, but you can also pick one up from any computer or music store. The microphone can be plugged in directly to the sound card in your computer. Most sound cards use a 1/8" Walkman-type headphone jack, so make sure your microphone is compatible with this. The second thing you need is recording and editing software. Windows comes with a built-in sound recorder that you can use to record microphone input. You can find it at: Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Multimedia -> Sound Recorder Unfortunately, it does not allow you to edit what you've recorded, so what you record is what you get. To record and edit audio input, some common applications are: Cool Edit 2000 for Windows 95/98/NT GoldWave for Windows 95/98/NT Studio Vision Pro for Macintosh Unity DS-1 for Macintosh What are the steps of recording? Here's a quick step-by-step guide to recording yourself on the guitar: Plug your microphone into the mic input in your sound card Open up your audio recorder/editor and put it into record mode Check the input levels to make sure the signal is loud enough, but not too loud. Hit "record" and start playing When you're finished, hit "stop" Save it as .wav or .aiff file If your audio application supports editing, you can remove any unwanted sections If your audio application supports "normalization", then normalize the sound sample. Normalization boosts the volume of your recording to the maximum level possible without clipping ("clipping" causes distortion which, while great for a guitar part, is not great for a digital recording). Once you're finished, you can use an MP3 encoder to convert your sound file to MP3 format. WAV and AIFF files run about 10MB per 1 minute of CD-quality audio, and converting to MP3 can reduce this by a factor of 12. For some background about MP3, check out our MP3 tutorial. What are the steps of converting my sound file to MP3 format? Here's the remaining steps to convert your audio file to MP3 format: Open your MP3 encoding application Choose the "Convert" function Choose the WAV of AIFF file you want to convert to MP3 Choose the sampling rate and bit depth of the MP3. This is usually 44.1 kHZ and 128 bits, and will result in compression by a factor of 12. When you're finished converting, add a title and other background info to the MP3 track using the track editor. If you have questions, a good source for answers is to post them to the FretBuzz discussion forums at WholeNote.

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