Test instrumental

[Anorton]

I recorded this right after I was able to put together an acoustic drum kit on Beatmaker. The cymbals are too loud, but Beatmaker does allow you mix, pan, and add effects. It's very easy to delete the drums in MT, go back to Beatmaker and adjust your mix and paste back into MT. Admittedly, I don't know how to use all the features of Beatmaker, but it's great for what I need it to do right now. This is the "song" where I discovered the crosstalk issue with the iRig. I deleted my first drum track to get rid all the silly crash cymbals. I was surprised to still hear them after pasting the new track. I just left the drums alone after that. My fix for this is to make sure of my drum arrangements before I do anything with the iRig. The bass was played through the iRig and straight into MT. The rhythm and lead guitars were plugged into an old compressor/sustainer pedal and a Rat distortion box, the iRig, and then MultiTrack. I really like the guitar sounds on this. I copied and pasted the lead guitar to another track slightly out of line with the original to create the delay and panned each lead guitar track to a side. It's an interesting effect. Anyway, it's a bit sloppy, but I think the sounds and tones are excellent. I'm thinking that it's going to get even better as I learn more.

http://soundcloud.com/anorton/gretsch-wav

[dstole]

Could you create your drum track first in BeatMaker, and then export them as two or 3 tracks? Maybe a kick track, snare track, and cymbals? You could mute the cymbals when you record other parts, and would give you more control over individual levels when you mix? It might also reduce the cross talk in the higher frequencies? After you record your other tracks you could adjust the volume to taste?

Just thinking out loud

Speaking of out loud, nice track by the way. How long did it take you from start to finish?

[Anorton]

Funny you should mention that (about importing multiple drum tracks). I've been meaning to try it but haven't had the time since school started (I'm a teacher). I do think that it's possible, but might get a bit tedious. Eventually, I'll see how it goes.

Getting the tracks down took maybe an hour or so. I spent about another hour the next day trying to figure out a bass part I could live with (when in doubt follow the kick drum). The guitars were each done in one take and I went back and punched in on the lead guitar track to add the second rhythm part towards the end. Of course, there was some knob turning on the pedals to get a decent sound and some moving around to try and keep my Strat quiet! I would say the whole thing, including programming the drum patterns and saving, exporting, and copying them (Beatmaker isn't very intuitive during the copying process), took about four or five hours. However, I was and still am on the wrong end of the learning curve.

On a side note, I was playing guitar in Ampkit tonight and tried using the clean "amp" with some reverb. I then plugged in a couple of real effect pedals and it sounds very good. I don't know if you're interested in using an app for guitar, but it's kind of fun being a bit of a traiblazer with all this stuff. I haven't been this excited about music in years.