Roger McGuinn (The Byrds) has a DVD out about home recording on the computer. He's using Cool Edit Pro as his main software program. He's made a couple of cd's on his laptop and has a nice small home studio set up. The whole lecture was made a year or two ago and is a bit dated, but still has some great recording tips for using CE or AA....Watching this dvd, I picked up a few tricks myself. He runs thru the motions of doing a multi-track recording of a song, doing some punching in, overdubbing vocals, cleaning up tracks by adding silence, doing the fade out at the end of the song, and saving to disc. It may seem a bit elementary to us old pro's, but I did learn a few things, and it was great to hear his take on it all......and the finished song.
With regards to the age old debate on digital vrs analog...he says if you start out with a warm signal, you'll get a warm signal....and recommends using a quality tube mic. He compares computer recording to having a $500,000-1,000,000 dollar studio at your fingertips. No more worry about $1,000 a day studio time costs......No special acoustic treatments needed, just edit out any unwanted sound.....he does use two video monitors at home, one for the main editing screen, and one for the mixer screen...lots of good ideas from Roger !!!!!
You can read more about the dvd here at....
http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/mcguinn/video.html
I ordered this dvd on Wendsday and recieved it on Friday !!!