Week 1: Improve your Recording Skills

martin  I will do Martin. However, my question is:

Based on your knowledge or experience; is it better to record a nylon string guitar from a microphone or from a preinstalled Fishman preamp.  

martin  Thanks Master Martin  I will do the exercises with both the phone and the preamp. We should be able to hear the difference 

martin  and fellow members, I desperately need some guidance I have very weak, fuzzy signals on Reaper, installed on my windows 11 laptop. A similar set-up seems to work fine on my desktop.

Don't know what's wrong. I followed what I understood to be the correct process.

1. Connected the mic through the interface to Reaper.

2. Turned on phantom power

3. Setup the gain on the interface about 50 percent.

4. Set up preference on Reaper as shown in the attached picture. Vu meter at 0 dB and master meter at at the same mark.

I just get a straight line of I record anything instead of the waveform that I should be seeing ( even my finger clicks don't register)

Any guesses what I might be doing wrong? Is it something to do with the audio settings of my laptop? Is asio driver compatible/necessary for my interface and Reaper to work?

I'm completely lost and utterly frustrated. 

Nijwm Bwiswmuthiary Hi. Usual suspects are setting up the correct audio interface for recording (seems ok in your case), arming the correct channel (mic is in channel 2, did you arm channel 2), setting the channel preferences etc. Usually, in most hardware interfaces there are some LEDs that indicate signal and peak. 

Nijwm Bwiswmuthiary I expect someone smarter than me will give you a more comprehensive answer, but in the meantime, you might experiment with your "audio system" settings. Waveout is the default Windows driver and from what I understand it won't work with a lot of interfaces and ASIO like you mentioned is what many of them are looking for.

Steve Price Really grateful for your valuable suggestions. I'll try them. I bought my equipment and then adopted the hit and trial method, thinking I'll make it in the end. Watched many livestreams, YouTube videos, and still got stuck on something as basic as not getting enough signal. I suspect the problem is as simple as the set up and an expert walkthrough would solve it.

Anyways, I'll try to solve it tomorrow and see what happens.

Nicholas hi, thank you so much for helping me. Channel 2 is input 2? I have two inputs- one has hi-z underneath it, which I think is for directly plugging in instruments like keyboard or electric guitar. I plug my mic into input 2, turn up the gain to 50 percent. I tried turning up the gain on the interface all the way up and the peak lights up to orange on the interface but barely registers on Reaper. I've reached a dead end at this point but I'll give it another try tomorrow.

Apologies to fellow members for clogging up the forum with my issues and envious of their beautiful recordings Hopefully, I'll be able to contribute my own recordings.

Nijwm Bwiswmuthiary This may sound simple but is your gain knob on the audio interface at ''0'' - zero?

Andre Bernier It's at 50 percent. I've checked the input/output settings on my laptop. They seem fine. The interface peak light turns on if i turn up the gain. Strangely, it even picks up voices from a distance like my daughter speaking loudly in the background but won't pick up nearby signals, especially the guitar. I think there must be a simple solution and I've been scouring the internet for solutions to no avail. I might have to give up on it and try another way like buying a plug and play usb mic.

Nijwm Bwiswmuthiary 

If your set-up works fine with your desktop you should not have to buy a new microphone. 

 1- Just to make sure you can check this again on your desktop.

2- I noticed that at the bottom of your audio interface; it is written '' 24-bit/192kz USB Audio interface" and the picture of the Reaper setting is saying you selected a 16 bit sample format.  You could try the 24 bit format.

3- You are connected using a USB connection. Do you have another USB connection available on your laptop. If so, you could try it.

Anyway, good luck. I know well how it could be frustrating when we have that kind of stupid problems.. 

Andre Bernier Andre, can't thank you enough for trying to help me. I finally found a solution! 

It's a bit of a personal triumph over my issues with recording. I scoured the internet- lots of forums and YouTube videos on recording. But the solution was in plain sight.

The culprit was the NOISE CANCELLATION FEATURE on my laptop. As I was testing my setup, I could hear my the sound of my 5 year old daughter speaking to her toys and the DAW registered it. I tried clearing my throat, coughed and they registered too.

Then, I tried recording on the inbuilt mic of my laptop ( played guitar, played music from YouTube). Nothing. Same with my wife's laptop, which was the same model. However, the mic registered voice signals.

My son's laptop registered the voice as well as the guitar. Then I googled something on noise cancellation and something of an Eureka moment struck my head. 

Turns out, the main culprit was the NOISE CANCELLATION FEATURE in my laptop. I disabled it, turned on my setup again, VOILA, it worked.

Nijwm Bwiswmuthiary  Bravo Nijwm, You must feel so good after that discovery.

Andre Bernier  I don't know what this is but some of my video and pictures ended up attached to this post ......