My brother loves playing the guitar. And like many other aspiring guitarists, he posts his videos on Youtube to share with the world. Well, recently, my mom watched his latest video which he recorded using his 3-year old Dell's internal microphone and an external webcam while wearing his worn-out pajamas. While in person his newly acquired Taylor guitar sounds really good, on video, well, let's just say his recording method didn't do his playing any justice. His sloppy outfit didn't help matters either. "Why did you take a video of yourself while wearing pajamas?" my mom asked. She didn't comment on the playing, but that actually means it didn't sound very good because otherwise she'd be all gushing about how much my brother's playing has improved over the years.
Anyway, so when it came time for shoti's birthday, my mom asked me to do some research on microphones that would do a better job at picking up an acoustic guitar's sounds. We eventually bought my brother a Behringer Xenyx 1204 mixer and an Audio Technica AT2020 microphone over Amazon. I didn't know his Taylor 514-CE had a built-in pickup, so the microphone turned out to be an unnecessary purchase (but I can use it to record my singing if I want to! And Yessa can sing to her heart's content with shoti's guitar!) but we were excited to try things out and see just how big a difference we would hear.
After two trips to the Guitar Center on 14th Street to get the proper cables, and after hours of trying to figure out how to work a mixer (which for the longest time looked like a very scary-looking and intimidating object with tons of knobs that controlled things I never knew existed - hello equalizers, trims and gains) we finally successfully recorded a song onto Garageband and later on to Photobooth. Hallelujah! You can hear this new recording on his Youtube channel. Yey!
I also tried patching my Korg keyboard through the mixer and it recorded onto Garageband beautifully! Now I think my mom's dreams of a band are finally coming to life. Shoti and I can't wait to tinker around with the recording and possibly make a tune of our own! Wheeee! We love our new toy :D
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