Tools of the Trade

This isn't going to interest everybody, but for those who are interested in just what sort of equipment it took to make a recording like the last one, this is for you.

The Guitar

The guitar on the left is the one I used for the recording; it's a Variax 500 from a company called Line 6.  It was a gift from my wife, and it's been invaluable to me.  It has the ability to mimic the sounds of more than 25 different guitars, which is incredibly handy when you have a specific sound in mind.  The two guitars to the right of it were the ones it emulated to do this recording, a Martin D-28 and a Gretsch 6120.

The Bass

Like the guitar, the Variax Bass 700 models a variety of basses.  The picture on the right is the model I selected, a Gibson Thunderbird.

The Amplification/Effects

While the acoustic guitar and bass were fed straight into the audio interface attached to my computer, the electric guitar work went through the Egnater Tweaker shown on the left.  For effects, I used the Line 6 Pod XT Live (yes, I'm a bit of a Line 6 nut) shown on the right.  Like the guitar, this board does have the ability to emulate the sounds of a variety of amps, but for this recording I decide to stick with just using it for effects.

The Mics

These two microphones - the Shure SM57 and SM58 - are two of the most common microphones around, for good reason.  They're fairly inexpensive, but the quality of them is excellent.  The SM57 is geared towards micing guitar amps, but there have also been cases where it's been used for acoustic guitar micing and vocals. The SM58 is typically used for vocal performances, but it can do a decent job in a studio setting as well.

The Audio Interface

And this is what it all went into, a Focusrite Saffire LE. I picked this up during a blowout sale at a Toronto music store (though it was very reasonably priced to begin with), and it was money well spent.

The Software

My studio computer runs Linux Mint and uses free and open software for music production. I do this not because it's free (well, somewhat) but because a) I believe in the value and power of free and open software, and b) I'm a great big geek. The main pieces of software that made this recording possible were:

1. Ardour - Often compared to Pro Tools. Everything was tracked and mixed in here.
   
2. Hydrogen - The drums were done using this software drum machine.
   
3. Jamin - This program was used to master the final tracks
   
4. JackRack - An effect plugins host. I used this several times to host compressors
   
5. Jack - The sound layer that ties all these applications together.
   

And that's pretty much it. All in all, there isn't really that much hardware involved here. Hopefully someone found this interesting.

Images:
Martin D-28: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spotzilla/2852245527/
Gretsch 6120: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gretsch_6120.jpg
Gibson Thunderbird: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17677513@N00/2707999080
All other images: Marshall Brown, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0