The Linear Canvas

Right after I broke my ankle last month, as I lay on the couch wondering how I was going to cope, I thought about my Toshiba netbook and how it should be capable of multi-track recordings. I figured that it have have just enough horsepower to do the job. I saw a similar model in my Musicians Friend’s catalog that was meant to be used as a multi-track right out of the box. It was about $200 more than I paid for mine and came with some shareware and some low cost audio software. My netbook has an Edirol USB audio interface and Cakewalk Sonar 6 LE digital audio workstation (DAW) software on it. I knew it had to work, but I have two other DAW’s and had no time to experiment with it.

Until now.

Here’s the song I recorded on it, over the last month:

Hangin’ On To Yesterday

[audio:http://www.linearcanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Hangin On To Yesterday 201003091646.mp3]

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I thought about writing a new song. I still might, but just to get up and running I decided to use a song I wrote a few years ago about a former classmate that passed away recently. I had recorded it once before, but I had done it with drums and electric instruments. I have always wanted to do this song “unplugged”, so this was my chance. I wrote some additional lyrics and changed the arrangement too.

I decided to limit myself to just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and a tambourine. I really couldn’t get to the electric stuff in the basement anyway. Because of my ankle, I can’t play drums even if I wanted to. So, this would just have to do. I set up the netbook on the table in the kitchen. I plugged in my audio interface and my Korg NanoKontroll programmable controller and plugged in my guitar, a microphone, and started to record. I did most of this recording sitting in a wheel chair but by the time I mixed it down, I was able to do it on my main DAW in the basement. I proved my point that I could record on the netbook, so I wasn’t going to punish myself mixing it all down on that small screen when I didn’t have to.

What I proved was that I have enough portability to create digital recordings whenever and wherever I want to. I thought maybe I would do some nature audio, like setting up some mikes by a remote waterfall or by a bubbling brook. A CD of something like that would be nice to fall asleep to. In addition getting others to help on my recordings would be much easier as they wouldn’t have to come here. Not that they do anyway.

I recorded this song on my Toshiba netbook using Cakewalk Sonar 6 LE DAW software. I used my Takamine G-Series jumbo acoustic guitar and two Shure SM-58 microphones and a tambourine. I mixed it down on my main desktop computer using Sonar 7 Producer Edition and Sony Sound Forge v9. The only effects used were equalizers echo, and reverbs and not a lot them either. The natural reverb in the kitchen actually made the dry recordings almost sound interesting enough.