mastering recordings

If you are like me and constantly record audio, then you don't want to drop the money to send all of your recordings of to be mastered professionally. However you do want them to sound there best when you put them in your car stereo or your home stereo. Most people don't have a clue of how to  successfully master as it is a skill that can only come with years of practice. Luckily there is an affordable answer for guys like me and many other home recording musicias. Har-bal is the answer. Har-bal is a software program for mastering. The suffix har-bal is short for Harmonic Balancing which is the main thing that this wonderful program does. It analyzes the frequencies of any givin song and displays a graph of the peaks and dips of the frequency spectrum so you can see exactly which frequencies  need to be balanced ,either boosted or cut. One of the great features of this program is that you can load any song from a CD and it will analyze the e.q. curve of the song and you can have the program automatically match your son'gs e.q. curve to the curve of the professional song. This makes your Cd sound good on practically any stereo just like the pro's and it sounds very similar to the pro's ,however the mixing of the individual tracks will determine much of how pro it sounds and how clear and seperate the track sound from each other.
  Har-bal also has a limiter that can automatically match the volume of any pro CD ...sweet. All of this for around a hundred bucks. I would'nt record again without it if i had to.

recording equipment for the at home guitarist

The way i do it is i mic my guitar amp and run it into a Alesis Multimix8. The alesis multimix8 is an eightchannel mixer that hooks into your computer by usb 2.0 connection. This mixer allows you to record multiple tracks at the same time such as if you wanted to record an intire band at once. It has built in effects if you want to hear yourself playing with them but the recorded signal can be recorded dry so you can play around with the effects on the recorded track . I use cakewalk sonar 6 with this mixer because it allows you to use it and record multiple tracks at once with it. Sonar is a very affordable recording program that is ideal for those that want to record real audio. Of course i have a large list of plu-ins for mixing to perfection. Of course to do this i need speakers. I use behringer truth b2031 studio monitors. these are a good speaker for the money. not at all the best there is  but considering the price and the fact that they are self powered makes them a good choice. you will also need some flat response headphones as well to double check things such as your stereo imaging.