I'm with you now Bill.
Man, I'm sure we're
all looking forward to hearing your stuff - it sounds like before your illness you were very much into your music and you mention live stuff and records.... sounds so cool!!
Making CD's and producing MP3's for uploading to Soundclick is the goal for most of us hobbyists - with GT3 and your Marshall you will have the tools to produce these with very little extra outlay.
The Line 6 TonePort/Gearbox stuff should be seen very much as a product which will give you many more options to your recording and mixing but at this stage, the biggest benefit would be the fact that you'd be getting a good quality soundcard. In the short term though Bill, I'd even suggest that you get to grips with GT3 before exploring these extra Line 6 options, should you decide to follow that route.
Here's a few thoughts that may or may not make a lot of sense to you!
Recording GT3, in conjunction with your Marshall will get you some great guitar recordings - this I will guarantee!
What you may also need to think about are the other parts of your project, such as drums, bass and maybe even vocals, if that's your thing.
Drums: GT3 ships with some very usable ACIDised drum loops, there are many more available to buy and to download free. ACID loops usually consist of 1 bar recordings of a particular pattern that can be imported into your project. The generic term ACID refers to the fact that these loops will be adjusted to your project's tempo when imported without changing their pitch as would be the case normally.
Cakewalk's equivalent to ACID loops are 'Groove Clips' - these also adjust to your project's tempo and actually allow you to change the pitch as well, not so much use with drum loops but very useful for bass or guitar loops - just one recorded loop can be adjusted to play in any of the twelve possible basic 'keys'.
There are many other ways of creating a drum track in GT3 [you may even know a good 'real' drummer] but one important thing to mention is that GT3 doesn't support MIDI, so drum applications that use MIDI cannot be used in GT.
Bass: Again, MIDI bass is unavailable in GT - pitch shifting VST's [you can use these in GT3!] will be able to drop a dry guitar signal by an octave but there is
no substitute for using a real bass guitar if that's the sound you want.
If you already have a bass that's great - if you don't, even the cheapest model
will sound better than a processed guitar signal.
Making CD's and/or MP3's Once you've created a song you're happy with in GT3, it's best to export the mixed down tune to a wav file. In GT3, this process is very simple - you end up with a wave file in a location of your choice on your hard drive.
Burning your song/s to CD: As long as you export your songs as 16bit/44.1kbps wave files [this is an option
direct from GT3] you will be able to create CD's capable of being played in msot commercial CD players.
You will need some CD burning software - most PC's have this software built in, even Windows Media Player will allow you to do this.
Creating MP3 files: Should you wish to make mp3 files of your projects to share by e-mail attachment or to upload to sites like Soundclick there are many excellent free wav→mp3 encoders available to download online, an excellent one being
C-Dex, which Doc put me onto a while back.
Hope that gives you something to think about Bill
Steve
post edited by SteveStrummerUK - 2008/09/24 13:04:39