Goats in Toyland: Recording Your Own Album with Your Mac

I've been playing the guitar for a while now, but up until now I really did nothing with the skill. I just played it as a hobby; something to do when I was bored. But then I decided that I should make up an album.

The first question was whether to write my own songs or do covers of other people's songs. If I decided to write my own songs, I'd probably end up spending more time on the lyrics and music than getting down the process for making my own album, so I decided for the first one I'd do covers of other people's music, and I'd write my own for a future album. I thought it would be fun to do acoustic covers of punk rock music, so I set about finding some songs to cover. I chose nine songs by artists ranging from The Clash to The Unseen.

But what's this all have to do with the Mac?

Ten years ago, if you wanted to record your own music, you either used a cassette recorder to record it or had expensive multitrack equipment in order to put it onto a CD or LP. While I do like cassettes, I thought it would be too complicated a process to redo a song if made a mistake, and it's a lengthy process to make copies of the tape.

Luckily, with today's software and hardware anyone can make a CD of their own music without having to have any ultra-expensive equipment.

The first thing I did was made sure I had the necessary equipment. I found the microphone that came with my beige G3 and connected it. While I probably should be using a better quality microphone, I figured this one would be fine for my purposes - and I wouldn't have to spend any extra cash for new equipment. The CD burner in either my PowerBook or my Pentium III tower would suffice. For recording, there's a whole bunch of expensive software you can choose from, but there's also some simple and free (or low cost) software you can check out.

I used Sound Recorder 1.0, which only works in Mac OS 9 and earlier (version 1.1 works with OS X, ed.), but Audiocorder would also complete the task, and it's Mac OS X compatible. These applications don't have the extensive features of the others, but they get the job done for little or nothing, and I wanted to spend as little as possible on this project. If you're going to record a band, I recommend looking into better equipment and software, as my method only really works well for a solo project.

So after gluing yet another crack in my acoustic guitar, I set about to start the album with "Barry Prudom" by Combat 84. Once I was done, I copied all of the AIFF files that had been saved to the desktop into an iTunes playlist window, where I established the order of the songs. I then copied them over to my PowerBook via our home network and burned a test CD.

I listened to it carefully and determined the songs I had to redo - and that's where I am now, where I will redo several of the songs using Sound Recorder and copy them over to my PowerBook to create the final version of the album, which a friend has helped me name, quite randomly, "Goats in Toyland" (You can visit my page < http://home.earthlink.net/~adamg587/music2.html> about it for more information)

Making an album is something I have always wanted to do, and using my Mac to do the recording part of it made things ridiculously simple. I ended up worrying more about the various problems my guitar kept having (and, in fact, I switched guitars halfway through the album - and I think next time I will end up using my Telecaster with the distortion switched off) than lost or corrupt files and problems with the application.

My experience just proves that anyone can record an album themselves - all you need are some skills on an instrument, a Mac, a microphone, SoundRecorder, and a CD burner.