I've just written a couple of songs, and I really want to be able to record them, but I don't have the equipment....

I want to buy myself a voice recorder which will record in good quality, and can record for a few hours at least, and one that can connect up and transfer the recordings to a computer....

Does anyone have any reccomendations? The cheaper the better really, as most of my money at the moment is going into buying a new piano!

Thanks in advance, it's much appreciated,

Laura
XxX

Dear Laura,

Using a mic you can sing directly onto your computer if it has a soundcard. There are two ways, firstly you can create a wave file by using your computer's inbuilt sound recorder, or you can buy a computer studio program from from Magix which costs around £40. It is easy to use and you can add effects as well. Wave files are quite large, so make sure the computer has enough memory. Let me know if you need more info.

Regards
Jane Vanessa

You do not need to buy anything, at least initially.

Download free "Audacity" from the sourceforge (or from any other place).

Audacity will allow you to record up to 47 hours of reasonable quality voice or anything you can input to your computer through the Line input or microphone input (for voice).

You can edit, clean if needed and finally export to WAV or to mp3 (for mp3 files you need an additional DLL you can download from free from many places).

If you want to try your compositions, for free, ( no need to getinstrument performers), you can download free Finale Notepad and write your compositions there. You can listen to them and also make recordings using Audacity at the same time.

For serious (and long) composing you will have to buy one notation SW like Finale (very complete but a little bit complicated) or Sibelius (sp?). They are rather expensive, in the few hundreds dollar range.

Good luck!