Make a Christmas (or other) recording for free or cheap

     More from my artist uncles:  My uncles made a Christmas tape of a story called “The Girl in the Yellow Dress”. We still years later play this tape at holiday time. If you have a tape recorder, you can make a recording of a story you make up, or just read one from a book. Get a couple of jingle bells for the sleigh sound effects. This is a fun project for some older kids to make for their younger siblings.

     If you want to make your recording on a computer, Audacity is a free multi-tracking software. With a cheap computer type condenser mic plugged into your computer, you can add your vocals or whatever parts, and just keep adding parts until you get the effect you want. You can also get a CD of 1,000 sound effects for about $5.00 in most any office supply store, or I’m sure there are free sound effects you can get online.

     If you want to get fancy about your recording, you can get a small box for about $40 that converts RCA ins to a USB out, and then you can hook up anything with RCA outs (i.e. a stereo, a VCR or DVD player, a mixing board, etc). The only thing I’ve found about this setup is when you are laying one track after another sometimes there is a small (like 1/10 of a second) delay between the tracks you already have and are listening to and the track you are recording, and then you have to delete a small amount of silence from the beginning of your new track to make it line up with the others on playback. I think this is called “latency”. If you are recording your own music it really helps to put a click track down first, or the drums if you are using loops.