MULTITRACKING

For this activity, I produced a minute-long song cover of Cup of Joe's Patutunguhan as either part of my final project or a practice for it. I prepared first the guitar, made sure it's in the right tune, as advised by Prof Al, before assembling the recording equipment. Unfortunately, I haven't outsourced an electric keyboard because it's being used by my cousin for their music club at school, hence, I decided to employ a virtual keyboard through BandLab to also check if it'd complement the acoustic guitar. The short cover consists of following tracks: keyboard, guitar, vocals.

I followed Prof Al's advice regarding mic positioning for the guitar instrument. I placed it closer to the guitar and aimed the mic at the lower part of the instrument. I had better audio, however, it took me many trials before having the final recording due to a barre chord. It was challenging since I hadn't used a guitar for a long time.

I decided to record vocals this time to practice and see which aspect should I improve for the final project. I used my condenser microphone (Delta Force) as my recording equipment. I find it plain that's why I also included a bass line for a little bit of harmony. It wasn't that good but I think it's enough to complement my voice.

I used BandLab as my DAW to edit these tracks. I used its denoise feature to slightly clean the guitar and vocal tracks. For some improvement, I used presets that are free and available to use. I applied the "Acoustic Guitar" preset to the guitar recordings while for the vocals, I employed the "Minimalistic Reverb" preset. To complement the tracks with each other, I adjusted their volume manually through the Gain setting.

After listening for few times, I noticed that the guitar sound lacking in bass that's why I used the virtual keyboard again to add some bass lines in the background music. I think they blend well and don't affect or overshadow the vocals, though I'm still open to suggestions from Prof Al and my classmates for this one.

I believe the quality of my output for this activity falls between good to decent categories. I admit it's not as good as the others, perhaps, due to limitations on recording equipment and acoustics of my room, but I consider it satisfying since the quality of my recording has improved lately compared to the ones I had prior to this course.

For the following days/weeks, I think I have to improve my recording techniques to produce cleaner audio outputs so that software-based effects won't be needed that much. I also need to learn the incorporation of ambient sounds and sound effects for my final project. Overall, I find this activity insightful especially in mixing multiple tracks and making them complementary to each other. Looking forward to finishing this song cover with high-quality audio.