I recently have setup a new recording process. This time it’s on Windows. I wanna do some real grown up stuff with sound. I have been grateful to use iPad Garageband all these years but I want to learn more.
My Steinberg UR12 purchase about a year back permits me to download a Cubase AI for free. The interface is somewhat similar to Garageband Mac but it’s much more complex. What I was most excited at the startup is to see the options for compose on score. I will try that out in due time but today’s post will be just about basic recording.
It wasn’t very easy to navigate Cubase at first but watching some Youtube guide briefly and also some quick reading helped me through my first phase of recording. I had to sort things out like choosing the latency driver, setting up midi instruments, connecting the microphone etc. Just really basic stuff.
Since it was raining yesterday, it was hard to tell if the sound I capture on my AT mic was filtering any rain noise. Anyway, I thought I’d just went ahead recording a slow guitar picking; thought it would make some good mood music with natural rain sounds.
The next after recording the music was getting a really good video editor. I have been having some hit and misses in this department as there are many good options for Windows out there but few are free to use. You can get easily tricked by the free versions and when you want to export your video, it tells you that it is a trial software for a certain amount of days and you get really really frustrated because you have to look for an alternative all over again.
This morning I decided to do more search and chance upon Da Vinci Resolve through Youtube video editor recommendation. I really love this part of Youtube because it is very helpful when there are people out there who love to share good stuff. So, I went ahead to register and download the software. It was a very easy process compared to the other free software I tried to download i.e. Filmora, Hitfilm.
While I was downloading and installing, I went ahead to watch some video guides to help me get a quick start on the editing process later. I tried basic editing like trimming the video, syncing the video sound clip with the audio recording, inserting titles and texts etc. The rendering process was not too bad but as usual high quality videos take a longer to render but it produces satisfactory results.
The only thing slightly lacking is my video quality as I used my phone to record. That can be sidelined for now since I’m concentrating more on audio quality.
Overall, I am very happy with the audio quality. It was raining when I recorded and it was hard to determined if my gain level was appropriate. You can only hear some rain noise towards the end of the video.
Summary of the tools and software I used:
Video Editing software – Da Vinci Resolve
DAW – Cubase LE AI Elements 9
Video recorded on Huawei Honor 7
Microphone – AT2035
Audio interface – Steinberg UR12
