Recording your practice sessions

Phil Halton · Post by **Phil Halton** » 21 Sep 2007 9:20 am

While noodling around in my music room, I got the notion to record my guitar through the NV112 line out XLR jack into Sonar on my laptop. I found that the line out runs quite hot and is pre gain controlled only (post gain has no effect). I was surprised at just how darn good it sounds--quite a faithful reproduction of what you hear through the NV speaker.

After listening to the playback of a few minutes of my playing, I realized what a great practice tool this could make. It occurs to me that recording yourself playing along with a rhythm track, and listening to the result (painful as it might be), you can get a completely objective perspective on what you're doing wrong as well as what you're doing right--hopefully shaving off alot of bad playing habits by zeroing in on and correcting the clinkers.

Its not always easy to tell if you're on pitch when playing along with a track, but on playback you can readily know if you're playing on pitch, when you go off the rails, when and how you're mangling a lick or phrase etc.

Anyone out there doing this as a regular part of practice? Any thoughts or suggestions on recording your practice sessions?

Tony Prior · Post by **Tony Prior** » 21 Sep 2007 10:04 am

Phil you are so right. I have been practicing thru my 16 track Workstation for a few years now and do record many of the practice sessions.

Lately I have been using the Boss Micro BR as my practice "studio" and record my noodling very often. Listening back tells the truth

Bill Terry · Post by **Bill Terry** » 21 Sep 2007 1:34 pm

I've been recording live gigs, that's even more humbling....

Dick Wood · Post by **Dick Wood** » 25 Sep 2007 6:22 am

Hey Bill,isn't it amazing how you never hear mistakes when you record at home versus at the gig?

Michael Winslow · Post by **Michael Winslow** » 2 Oct 2007 5:09 pm

A really easy thing to do is import an entire midi song file from BIAB and drop it into one midi track in Sonar. Loop that track so it keeps repeating. Then set up to record an audio track......plug in, and away we go.......!!!! You can solo forever over that one track and record it all.

To save disk space I delete my solos and just record again. Anything really interesting I would save to a cd.