Looking for some direction on recording

[lieu910]

I need to make the leap into home recording, and am admittedly lost.

I would like a platform that would allow me to import songs into it, allow me to strip the guitar part(s) out so I can record guitar/vocals over them, as well as the ability to add effects.

Above all, I want something easy to use, and not overly complicated.

I have 5150 iii EL34 with a 1 x 12 going into a pedal board and a UA Ox Box.

Suggestions?

[Dave's Dreidel]

Sounds like you want to do cover songs, right?

Others who know more than me on this (which is probably everybody) chime in, you won't hurt my feelings.

But from my understanding, stripping out vocals AND guitar from a downloaded .mp3 is pretty damn hard to do and get anything of quality. If you are looking to do cover songs, I would simply by an custom accompaniment track of the song (if available) and use that.

Here is one site that I've used for doing bass/vocal covers, and I know Brett uses it for guitar covers.

www.karaoke-version.com

They are pretty reasonably priced.

[Dave's Dreidel]

You can also find some multi-tracks on YouTube and other channels for songs that have been in the Guitar Hero and similar games.

But they usually get taken down pretty quickly.

[Dave's Dreidel]

There is also this site:

https://www.guitarbackingtrack.com/

[Jedi McFly]

DD's 100% correct - no software is going to be able to just extract or remove an instrument/vocal from an mp3. And exactly as he recommended, findings stems, isolated tracks, or decent backing tracks from YouTube or the sites he recommended are your best best.

In terms of DAW - are you on Mac or PC? If you're on Mac I know Garage Band is an easy entry into the DAW. It'll fit your criteria of easy to use and not complicated. I also really enjoy Garage Band's bigger brother, Logic. That's what I use for all my recording.

[nobozos]

Vox made a product called the JamVox. It was a little desktop speaker that you plugged your guitar into, and had a computer interface that would allow you to manipulate the downloaded songs to "virtually" strip vocals and guitar out of them using some kind of eq algorithm that you could manipulate. It worked better on some songs than others, and sometimes when you strip the guitar part out, it would impact some vocals occupying the same tonal range. It never really completely stripped out the guitar track, but it did enough to play over it. You could hear it faintly in the background.

[Brett]

I’ve purchased so many songs from karaoke–version.com that I probably should own a share of the company by now. After you buy a certain amount of them they give you one free. I can’t tell you how many I’ve gotten free that’s how many I have downloaded from there. But they are the best in terms of being able to pay a couple dollars and download tracks and only use the things you need like drums, bass and vocals or whatever. And the song recordings are usually very good, even the vocals. I mean you can’t beat that for $2.99. The selection is very good and there are a ton of really good Van Halen songs on there. I’ve done a ton of VH and AC/DC stuff from there. I’ve also done a lot of Iron Maiden and Zep as well. You can also switch the pitch, so if you want to record songs down 1/2 step that are normally standard pitch, or vice versa, you can easily do that.

Another site is jamkazam.com where they also sell similar download ability to strip out each instrument, but I don’t quite think their versions are as good. But again it’s only $3 a song.

The only thing I wish they would offer is .wav versions and not 320 bit MP3 versions of the tracks. I mean they’re fine, but I would like to have the ability to have a full uncompressed file to work with. That’s the only downside to me. And that’s really just a minor complaint.

All I do is download each track into my Logic Pro DAW and then I record all my guitar parts on different tracks. I mix them all down as an MP3 and add it to my iTunes and I’m done. If I know I probably one day want to do a video for the song, I will record myself doing one take as clean as I can and keep that aside to use for the video. I usually play one track of rhythm and then do one track for the solo for a video, even though I have probably recorded more guitar tracks than that. I don’t always show every one on the video.

And that’s pretty much my routine. I’d say in the last five years I have recorded almost 150 covers using various backing tracks from the sites I mentioned. I’ve got a pretty giant library of stuff I have done. Recently I’ve been going back to some of my older covers and redoing them because I play them better now, and I have a better idea how to mix sound better. You do learn a lot about mixing and production doing this over the years.

[MF5150]

Shure SM57 > Steinberg USB Interface > GarageBand.

That’s what I used and I found the results to be more than adequate. Very easy, plug-and-play functionality. And it just worked.

Download guitar-less backing tracks. There’s actually quite a few actual Van Halen studio recorded tracks that people have removed/lowered the guitar, just enough, to where if you recorded over it you wouldn’t hear Ed out there.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Dave's Dreidel]

Hey Brett, there are some programs that will convert a .mp3 to a .wav, but I am not sure how much of a quality upgrade that is (if any) due to the source material being a .mp3.

[Brett]

Hey Brett, there are some programs that will convert a .mp3 to a .wav, but I am not sure how much of a quality upgrade that is (if any) due to the source material being a .mp3.

Yeah that’s really pretty pointless because you’re converting something that’s already been compressed into an uncompressed format.