When you're about to record into your DAW, there's a number of things you want to get in place before you start recording. And I would like to give you a short checklist of things to remember before you start recording onto an audio track. The first thing you'll do is create the necessary track. And you want to be careful if you create a mono or stereo track. And remember the mono or stereo designation is really talking about the input of the track. The output of the track is pretty much always going to be stereo. In that you have a pen knob that can put it in the left or right channel. But the input makes a really big difference. If I'm recording with a single microphone or a single pick-up, we want to make sure we create a mono track. If you were to record into a stereo track, the signal would go into the left speaker. And it's very hard. To get it centered again. So, make a mono-track most of the time. If you're making a stereo track that would be for maybe a synthesizer as a stereo out-put. but most of the time when you're recording audio is going to be a mono-track you make your track, and then name it. Every time you record, the file that's created is named by the name of that track. And if you don't name your tracks, you'll end up with this huge folder full of names like audio one dash one, audio one dash two, which really isn't that helpful. If things are named properly, you'll much better be able to say, organize your files, and possibly recover from a crash. So you want to name things very carefully. The next thing you want to do is set your levels. And we've talked about the level setting procedure in a, in a previous week. Just review that and make sure you, you do all that in the proper order. Remember turn down your gain, plug in the instrument. Turn on phantom power, check your settings. Those are the usual level setting procedure. Then, you want to record enable the track, but be careful. When you hit that record enable button, it's going to turn on input monitoring. Which means the input of the track will be set directly to the output, right when you hit that button. And there's a chance that you really can get feedback if you have a microphone in the room. And you have speakers active. When you hit that record button, you may get feedback. So be very careful. In fact, I would suggest for this whole procedure, you know, if you're recording someone else, tell them to take off their headphones. And for yourself, bring down the level of your speakers. You really want to avoid those kind of loud feedback moments. Your performer will never do a good performance if they get that loud feedback once, because they'll always be worried every time you reach for the mouse. So, be very careful with their ears and your own. And I would suggest, after you have everything set, that's when you bring up the level of the speakers. After you've record enabled the track, you're going to want to turn on the click and count off. It's really important to have a click in the speaker so that the player can be in time. And you want to have that count off ahead of time. So something to figure out in your DAW. just exactly how to turn those on. Once you have those configured, you have the track record enabled, you've checked your levels, it's time to record. In this example, I'll be recording an electric bass performance along with a MIDI drum group. And I'll be using this as a way to demonstrate all the things that must be configured before you record and how to make the recording go smoothly. The first thing I want to do is set up the project with the appropriate settings. Now I'm plugging my bass directly into my interface, so I want to make sure my buffer size is low so I can reduce latency and play it in time as best as possible. Let's start with the audio preferences. I've chosen my input and output device and I have a low enough buffer size for kind of in time recording. I have my bit depth set to 24 bit recording. And I'm also going to check and make sure in the project settings, my sample write is 48k, or 48,000 hertz. Everything looks set up properly there. I'll need a new track to record onto. And I will be creating a mono audio track since this is a single channel device. It's a single cable plugged in the bass into my interface. I'm only recording one channel so I'll set the format to mono. I've plugged this into the second input of my device. So I'll choose input two and I'll create it right now. Now before I hit record, I want to be very aware that as soon as I hit record the audio from my bass will be going to my speakers. Not a big deal now, but if it was a microphone something I really want to be aware of. I'll record and enable this and earlier when I plugged in my bass I turned the gain the input microphone pre-amp gain, all the way down. I'll play a note on by bass and turn up that microphone pre-amp gain. [NOISE] And we're starting to see some good levels. There. Oh, sounds like a little distortion. I'll back it off a bit. Always trust your ears instead of the meters. The meters inside of an, of a DAW can be a little off. Sometimes you can hear distortion before you see it there. I'm trusting the meters on the outside of my interface to set the appropriate levels. I'm just going to play a little bit and make sure the levels are where I want them to be. [MUSIC] And I'm hitting about three quarter of the way up on my external meters I'm kind of in the yellow which is perfect. It seems like I'm ready to record, I'll make sure my click is on. And my tracks record enabled, oh, remember we always have to name our track first. Double click I'll call this E-bass and I'm ready to go. That way the audio files that are created when I record will be named well, let's try it out. [MUSIC]. [SOUND]. Alright. I'm happy with that performance. Let's hear it back. I'll turn off the click, and try it from the top. [MUSIC]. That's pretty good, but there are some slight things in there I don't love. So, what I'll do is duplicate the track. Let's create another copy of it. Call this E-bass2. Turn record enable off on that one. On this one, I'll mute this track so we don't hear it, and I'll make, I'll take another try at this. [MUSIC] . [MUSIC]. [SOUND]. This way, I can edit between them, and choose the best one I want down the road. Now that I've done some recording, I'd like you to see what was created in the hard drive. This is the project folder. We have the Coursera recording example a session file, that's the logic file, I have an undo folder that includes some data from before the video, I had tried some things and undone that, so we have some undo data there. And I have an audio files folder that includes all the recordings as separate audio files. You see I have E-bass track and I have an E-bass1 and 2 recording. And I have an E-bass2 track, and I have E-bass2 recording number one. If I was to record again, right now. Let's just try it, from this point on. [SOUND] We get another E-bass2, number two, and we get a recording, called E-bass2, number two wave file, in our hard drive. No matter what you're recording, or which DAW you're using, the steps are going to be the same. First you'll check your settings, then you'll create a track, remembering to choose mono or stereo depending on your input. You'll have to name the track, record enable the track, set your levels using the microphone pre-amp, enable your click and count off, and then hit record. If you don't know how to do those steps in your DAW, I'd like you to take a moment to go to your program and figure it out now. If you're having trouble figuring this out on your own, please go to the forums and ask there. I'm sure there's someone here that has experience enough to help you through setting up recording in your DAW.
