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alasdairm

alasdairm

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Jul 22, 2002
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south lake tahoe, ca
hey everyone,

i played electric guitar in college (30 years ago!) and i recently bought a new guitar to try to relearn.

a small group of friends and i have been talking about getting together to practise and play - we're planning a backyard open mic when the weather gets better here.

what's a simple setup that would allow two of us - one electric guitar and one acoustic - to play against a prerecorded drum backing track? the drum track can play from a phone or my macbook pro.

i have a small practise amp and assume we'd need, say, some kind of simple mixer and a small pa-like amp?

as you can tell, i'm not really sure what we're looking. i did a search but my search terms are so vague i got a lot of unrelated result.

any help much appreciated.

alasdair
 
audacity is a free computer program that lets people record and mix music... you'd probably need to get an m box, a device used to hook microphones up to a computer's usb port to start recording drums to play over, when you buy one of those it will probably come with some software to to record and mix with. i usually just ended up using audacity cause i like it... you should be able to just save your drum files or whatever you can think to play along with in audacity (the newer version saves in almost any format WAV MP3 ect...) and then play them out of any speaker that you can hook up to a computer, like if you already have a decent blue tooth speaker you can probably get away with out having to purchase a whole PA...

to be honest, i don't know if M boxes and being hooked up to a USB is getting to be out dated after google searching, i remember in like 2010 they were pretty popular. not sure if anything else came out... if no one else comments, you might want to try going to a guitar center or whatever music store. a lot of times they will have people that will help you with the price range you want to deal with.
 
Check out the BeatBuddy pedal, imo by far the best solution for adding drums without a drummer.



Fast forward to 1:20ish to see it in action.

I run mine through an old handmedown PA with a built in mixer. I also feed my guitar straight to the PA these days instead of using an amp, with a Vox Clear Drive filling the usual function of an amp's preamp. Lots of other options for preamp that will work for DI to PA, ranging from real cheap (Behringer V-Tone Preamp) to real expensive. Might want to add a cabinet simulator / speaker simulator too but IMO not totally necessary. I don't use one.

The acoustic guitar can go DI to the PA too with an acoustic.preamp pedal, something like the Boss AD-2 or the acoustic version of the Behringer V-Tone. Lots of options here too.

Hit me up on Messenger if you have more questions, I don't plan on logging on BL much anymore. This place was already real difficult for me to log into having so many old friends in The Shrine, now with current staff making me a pariah I am done.
 
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