What’s all this about?

I live in a one bedroom apartment in New York City, shared with a significant other. After eight years living by myself in a whole house, everything about this meant downsizing, including recording music.

This means:

  • No sprawling multi-room home recording setup that I had before
  • Limited recording time, namely when I have the apartment to myself
  • Recording is limited to my Chromebook, because they’re cheap and wonderful, but not powerful enough to run Reaper; this means in-browser DAWs, and in particular, restricting the number of tracks

What is light audio recording?

I’ve dubbed the process these restrictions have created as “light audio recording.”

It’s cheap, quick, and compact. There are plenty of posts online about such matters, but nothing in depth or conclusive, so through this blog, I’ll document my journey so anybody else looking for a similar approach feels a little less lost, with more to go on than maybes spouted on forums.

Things it’ll likely include are:

  • The process, with outlines of DAWs, gear, setting up etc
  • Reviews of gear
  • Finished products with final thoughts and perspectives for next time

Who even are you though?

I’m an amateur musician with plenty of years under me. I did plenty of solo and band stuff over the ten years I lived in Birmingham in the UK, and did a lot of dabbling in music production.

I always messed with home recording to get ideas for songs off the ground. When the cost of the recording studio we used got expensive, I opted to delve into it more. I lived in a house by myself, and had plenty of room for a command center loaded with the wonderful Reaper.

We made plenty of recordings that were perfectly satisfactory for what we were about.

Light audio recording command center

I think that’s it. Let’s see how we get on?


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