JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Recording Studio and Gear Forum best way to record Q??

I've just noticed this forum down here in the basement and I thought i'd ask you fellers that know more than i do about the way to record on pc's
I've got Sonar 8.5 athlon dual core & 2 gigs mem seems to run smooth. My thought is to create a backing track and burn it to a CD then playback the CD and record the vocal then add back the backing tracks (one for each instrument)to the vocal. I'd work out the details at that point for mixing. All this instead of recording the vocals as Sonar plays back the tracks.
Any thoughts? Thanks Wyndham

This doesn't make any sense to me. If it is running smoothly, you just record the vocals in Sonar while sonar is playing the backing tracks. Plus the logistics of recording the vocals while the music is being played on another audio system will cause all sorts of problems.

Record it all on sonar in "real-time" -- that what these software programs are designed to do.

Kevin

I suppose that would work but why would you? Like flying from Florida to New York by way of Dallas.

You could buy a dozen tape recorders and then record on one play it back while recording onto another then play that back while recording on another....etc etc etc.......or you could use Sonar for what it is supposed to do...... multi track recording, mixing, editing and mastering. I have not used it myself as I use Cubase but like Cubase it is a complete DAW. It has a steep learning curve. I suggest you look at the tutorials and manual to see what it can do and how you do it.

Why would you want to do that?

The reason I was thinking about this direction is that the backing tracks(midi) are going through several different synths and I'm not sure of the latency if any. I guess I could bounce down to wav files for each track to get passed that issue.
Wyndham

My thoughts exactly. Not quite sure what the question is any chance of being a bit more specific.

Rgds
Andy

??????? I have no idea what you mean. None of that makes sense. Latency should not be a prob unless you are using a ton of extra plugins that need lots of memory.

Sonar will handle the latency issues so don't worry about it.

James.

I agree. Just record vocal through audio track on Sonar.

Well there’s one sure-fire way to find out. Just make a test recording of you singing/playing along with the midi tracks and see how it syncs up on play back. I am using Sonar 6 with a less powerful PC than yours, half the memory (and it’s over 7 years old) and I have never had such latency problems.

Well, If you get enough tracks going then, at some point in time, you can run into cpu/disk read speed issues. In that case, just bounce down the backing tracks to one or two temporary tracks, mute the originals and off you go. When the final mix occurs, you just use the original tracks again.

Kevin

With Sonar you may require adjusting latency settings and buffer size......get it under 10msecs and you should have no probs as you describe.
Here is a link that might help

http://www.cakewalk.com/tips/TechTipJuly02_1.asp

I upgraded awhile back from sonar 7 and a single core athlon 1.7 Ghz that had some issues with different synths. I could only get 3 tracks running before dropouts and other things started to happen so I have been rather cautious about this system even though it is new and seems fine.
Nigel,I will run some test to see what i can get done without probs, most likely 4-6 tracks + vocal.
Also I'm using a Delta 44 card and a Soundcraft board that has direct outs for each channel and Samson studio monitors.
Wyndham

The simplest solution seems to be to upgrade your PC to give you more memory....that said 2gb seems enough for what you need....I would also try to switch off or disable the background stuff that uses memory. That can give you probs without you even realising it.