Audacity Tutorial How to Multi Track Record Guitar and Voice at Same Time

Audacity tutorial on how to record 2 tracks or multi track at the same time. This tutorial shows how to record voice and guitar at the same time in Audacity.

Recording multi-track in Audacity is very simple. There are a number of ways to multitrack, but in this tutorial I will show one of the simplest ways. You need to have some way to get your microphones/instruments into your computer. To do this you will need a mixer.

We will be using the 2 channels of stereo for our multitracking. The guitar will be on the right channel and the voice will be on the left channel. Make adjustments to your mixer to place the guitar on the right and the voice on the left.

In Audacity you will need to open preferences and select devices. Choose the input you need for your mixer and make sure "Channels" is set to stereo.

As you record now Audacity will create a stereo track with guitar in right and voice in left. Once you have finished recording open the pull down menu on the right of the new track and select "Split Stereo Track."

Now you will have have 2 separate mono tracks, one with voice and one with guitar.

That is it. Good luck.
Andrew

Audacity Tutorial Multi Track Recording How to Keep Tracks in Sync

In this multitrack recording Audacity tutorial I show a simple way to keep your tracks in sync using the editing software Audacity.

As you record multiple tracks in Audacity your computer may not keep them perfectly in sync. If you do not have a clear way to keep them in sync it would be nearly impossible to fix. This trick really helps out.

As you are preparing to play the first track of a recording count in 1 2 3 4 1 2 and 2 beats of silence. Be sure to make your count very percussive so it will be easy to line up later. This will end up on the recording, but you can remove it later.

As you record the second track in Audacity count along with the count-in from the first track.

After you have finished recording use the Time Shift Tool to move track to back and forth to line up with the count-in of the first track. If you said your counts very percussive then you should be able to see the peaks of the audio in Audacity and line up that way. Always check with your ears though.

If you are recording through a DI, like an electric guitar, then make sounds on the instrument in place of a vocal count in.

Once you are all done you can erase the count ins and your all good.

Rock on,
Andrew

Tips for Recording Audio and Video

Boy, what a busy time of year. A music teacher's work is never done around now :)

Like many music teachers, I am involved in many concerts around this time of year. From time to time I like to record some of our shows. Here are a couple of things that I do to help get our shows recorded nicely.

I use a small digital audio recorder called the Edirol R-09. It gives great sound quality and is small enough to fit in my pocket. Before we begin playing I will lay the recorder on a chair or a music stand close to the stage, turn it on and let it do its thing.

It seems like every parent these days brings along a video camera to their children's shows. I never have a problem getting some video footage.

When I get the video footage and my audio recording I combine the two in iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. By combining the audio and video this way I get a great audio signal rather than the one captured by the parent's camera.

To edit the audio I sometimes use Audacity. This is a great free audio editor. Oftentimes I get my students to do the editing of our concert recordings. This is a great little project and they have WAY more patience than I do for these sorts of things.

Andrew