Seven years ago, I was enamoured with the possibility of doing home recordings on the PC using muat turun versions of Cakewalk and later on with the more realistic (and free) Audacity. It was at this time when my esteemed (and better skilled) friend, Murg, was doing his stuff together with some mates in the ‘States. I was happy to go down the route of playing the bass, whilst I don’t underestimate the role of the bass in music, I felt I’d fare better than my guitar playing as compared to my friends in this instance.

I did buy an audio interface finally but didn’t really utilise it as I had no drive (and no… err… talent really) to pursue the matter further. By this time, Murg had graduated and, well, as usual I never get to catch up. A few years had passed and The Gig @ Sheffield got to a start in ’06 and my focus was further away from getting together with friends ‘trying’ to do original material.

Fast forward to, like, yesterday, I got my act together to try out GarageBand ’11 on my iMac which is almost one year old now. In fact, I’ve been an Apple user since ’07 but never got around to play around with the GB software on my MacBook. The stumbling blocks to initially trying out the audio interface (it’s an M-Audio FireWire Solo) were: 1. it’s an old interface 2. M-Audio ain’t M-Audio any more (kind of) 3. I need a 9-pin to 6-pin FW cable. Thanks to updates for the older M-Audio devices available online, as well as getting a FW cable, I finally got the setup sorted. Can aaa.

The setup at the moment is directly linking the guitar to the FW Solo and hence to GB’11. Murg actually uses a mic on his amp, which I’d like to do, but firstly, I need to get playing the guitar a bit more often, and, of course, buy a mic. It doesn’t sound up to scratch (more likely due to my playing and me doing a rush job with the setup) and I’d like to explore the mic-ed amp set up further one day. I wanted to use the in-built GB’11 amp simulators but haven’t figured out if you can do that with the guitar going through the FW Solo (I don’t think it can, but I might be wrong here). Thanks to YouTube tips, I managed to figure out the steps needed sorting before I tried out GB’11 with my guitar and stompbox.

Have a butcher’s:

_________________________________________

For details on what to do before you record on GB’11 via a FW Solo, read this.