First music recording attempt

This evening I completed my first attempt at producing a music recording with my PC-based equipment. In an earlier post I mentioned how the audio interface seemed to produce annoying clicks in the audio stream. I tried all sorts of things to isolate and diagnose the problem. The final conclusion is that it’s actually the USB port or the PC itself. That’s good and bad, because the interface hardware seems to be fine. But it’s much more difficult and costly to replace the PC (which I’m not going to do). I’ve been able to reduce the interference to about once a minute or so, but not completely eliminate it. That is rather annoying because I have to record multiple takes and then replace the offending audio sections with clean ones.

I’d been working on producing MIDI versions of several praise and worship songs contained in a children’s choir collection. I took a set of those, recorded the audio outputs, and then I layered some of my vocals on top.

The final result isn’t spectacular, but I think it’s passable. There are some sections where the audio levels are a bit too high and clipped a bit. It’s not too bad in the original (uncompressed 73MB in size), but in the lower-quality MP3 (1.5MB), the clipping is more noticeable. I still need to get more experience in controlling the input levels, the outgoing mix levels, being more consistent while singing into the microphone, etc. to get a better final result.

Click Here for MP3.