Muselog #2 - Gear

I wanna recreate the song Wherever I May Roam by Metallica at home from scratch. Well, maybe not from scratch, I do have a few things:

Guitar

I have a used Epiphone SG G-400 that I got for a good price. The previous owner put a Seymour Duncan bridge pickup, so that’s good. The bad is that some strings make a choked buzz kinda sound on some frets. I suspect that the truss rod needs some adjustment. I have no experience with that whatsoever and I don’t feel like paying to get it fixed right now, so I’ll use it as it is and blame the crappy solos I play on those frets.

Audio interface

An audio interface, or a sound card as it is sometimes called, is a device that lets you connect microphones or electric instruments to your computer. You can then record audio and add effects. Doing it that way instead of plugging your mic or instrument directly into the computer helps with the quality, I will talk about this later in a dedicated post.

After checking countless videos, articles, reviews and online forums, I decided to buy a Behringer U-Phoria UMC202HD. This one is relatively cheap. There are cheaper ones online, but I decided that this one has the minimum acceptable specs for recording and if I grow with this experiment, that interface will probably keep fitting my needs.

MIDI controller

This is a keyboard that does not produce sound, instead it sends information to the computer, like which note did you play and how hard did you press that key for example. The computer then takes this information and dresses it with a sound of your choosing. For my project I will use it to produce the sound of drums and bass guitar, mostly.

I got an Arturia MiniLab Mk II. It’s not expensive, but not exactly cheap by my standards. I hope it’s worth the investment. I’ll talk more about it as I explore it in action.

Potato

A glorious HP EliteBook 8440p that rocks a whopping 6 (yes, six, not four, not eight, six) gigabytes of RAM and a Core i5 2.40 GHz CPU with 2 physical cores and 2 threads per core. I can do basically anything with this machine, from watching YouTube videos to playing Solitaire.

OK, maybe I was too harsh. It’s not that bad, but it’s definitely not great. I saw on YouTube that “if it has a Core i5 processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM, you can make music on it.” We’ll see about that.

That computer probably wouldn’t do so well if it was running Windows. In general, nothing does well on Windows. Thankfully, I have Linux installed on it as on my other potato, and they’re doing kinda alright actually. I have Manjaro on this one because I use Arch , by the way, on my other laptop and I like how package management goes there.

Being on Linux means that I have the privilege of using totally superior free and open source software only. I’m kinda forced to. Well, there are some available proprietary software for Linux (the UMC202HD comes with Tracktion DAW), but why would you ever wanna do that?! I will keep it FOSS.