Interlude 4: Recording with Audacity

I want to show you how you can record yourself using Audacity. I have a laptop here, a PC, and on it I have Audacity and I’ve also got the F blues playalong track. All I want to try and say to you is that the actual process of recording is straightforward. You load up the playalong track into Audacity and when you’re ready you just press record. That’s it. Then I’ll show you what the output is in the final interlude.

The technicalities of this could be quite complicated. I don’t know whether you’re using a PC, or you’re using an iPad, an iPhone and I don’t know what facilities you have. In my case this has an internal mike and I’m just going to use the internal mike - nothing sophisticated - and it has an earphone output which normally I would perhaps use a pair of earphones - perhaps I wouldn’t - I don’t know. But this is actually going through to the booth because I am recording this so that the sound is better a bit later on for you to watch.

I’m going to be using cans in order to play with this because of problems about the complexity of the setup in my studio, which I won’t bore you with. I really want to get through to you

that the procedure is straightforward: you load the track into Audacity and you hit record. Now the details of how you yourself are set up - you’ll have to experiment with and find out what works for you. You may use internal mikes, you may use external mikes, you may use internal speakers, you may use external speakers, you may use cans, you may not use cans. I can’t dictate on that, but I do say it is really worth the effort - honestly. Not only will you have fun playing with your Audacity tracks and you will learn a lot.

It will be good to record yourself so that you can hear how you are getting on and maybe share your recordings with other people. Here we go. I need to put on some cans. Here they are.

I need to then just hit the record button. That’s it.

Record: and here we go …

Ok. Then I’ll show you how this turns out.