Recording of Instruments and Vocal

The Goal

In this project, I am covering a song named "Guxiang", originally wrote by a Chinese artiest Xu Wei. I am going to use that melody and lyrics to create my own cover version. I invited my friend Zhao Jing to play the bass and electrical guitar for me. I did the acoustic guitar and vocal.

Recording
Before start recording, a tempo must be set so that all the instrument follows the same time reference. For this song, I set the tempo to be 145 beat per second. Open a metronome when recording.

The sequence of recording follows this:

1. Acoustic Guitar Intro
2. Acoustic Guitar Rhythm
3. Bass
4. Electrical Guitar distortion
5. Electrical Guitar Solo
6. Vocal

Using Audacity in my Desktop PC, each instrument in recorded and stored in Audacity as a track. This took about two days. It took so long to just record the instrument is because that we are not professionals. We make mistakes all the time!
I did more than 30 takes to play my acoustic guitar intro without a mistake. Ha Ha!

The sequence of recording:
set

All the tracks are stored as wave files in the system since wave format is lossless. An Audacity project file (in the format of *.aup) is also created to make the relative time and volume information of each track.

I roughly adjusted the volume of each track so that no instrument is too loud that covers other ones. I mixed them into an .ogg file, which you can listen by clicking the following link.

Draft Version
Click!!!!! Guxiang draft version (without drumbeats, effects or processing)