Yeah! New music blog!
In 2011, after 35 years of playing mostly acoustic guitar, I have finally arrived in the digital age. I've always been a geek, and I've always been a musician, but somehow the two never intersected. My geekdom has been towards enterprise data not very much towards media. My musicianship has tended to be acoustic - guitars, banjo, hand drums, recorders, etcerta. I just never had the drive to plug in - but all that is changing. New toys are letting me make some noise and capture it digitally...
Let's face it, I'm a hippy at heart! I've always owned an electric guitar, but they have all been pretty junky, so i have mostly played my Ovation and rarely made use of the onboard electronics. Not too long ago I picked up a fairly cheap Epiphone Les Paul copy, which of course I had to plug in. I plugged it into my old 30th aniversary Marshall (my electric guitars may have been junky, but the amp never was!) hoping that it didn't need new tubes, and it roared! I wanted to rock. I had the need to make noise.
Another aspect to my digital revelation is recording. So long as I have been playing music I have never had a decent recording solution. My singing/guitar playing has gotten decent, so I really wanted to hear what I sounded like to the rest of the world. I did some research and wound up with a few MXL mics and nice Tascam US-1800 USB digital interface. I'll do a whole blog post on these, but suffice it to say, I am very happy with the results - particularly working in Cubase.
So why another f'ing blog? I freely admit that I am a total newb when it comes to digital music production, and frankly I'm not a great musician. I definitely don't profess to be giving good advice. The reason I'm choosing to blog is preserve my own experience. I want to share it with people, and hope it's of some use to someone somewhere. I hope people will leave comments and point out what an idiot I am, but of course encouragement is always welcome. Maybe in a few years I will learn some new things and this will be a useful resource.
If you've read this far, welcome to Digital Cheddar and thanks for stopping by. There will be more content soon...