Issue recording guitars

[treewolf7]

Hey, I just downloaded Tracktion7 for free, and I'm having issues with recording. I am trying to record some guitars for a black metal style project. This kind of music has very loud, very distorted guitars, which may be causing the issue. When I try to record, I put my recorder (which is a C910 logitech HD Pro Webcam) near the amp and hit record and play the track. When I listen back to what recorded, however, I find that for the first couple of seconds the recording sounds normal, but then it becomes very muffled.

I speculate that the problem might be that the music I am recording is so distorted and continuous that it is being treated like background noise which it then tries to mute. How do I stop this from happening? Thanks in advance!

Edit: I tested it with other cleaner sounding instruments/sounds and it still happens. It doesn't seem like the distortion is an issue.

[Peter Widdicombe]

A webcam, even a non-dirt-cheap one, is not going to give you good results. However, as a start...

1. Try placing the webcam at least 10 feet from the speaker cabinet facing the cabinet. Put it on a rubber pad, or the vibration of the webcam will induce its own noise.
2. Set Tracktion for "live input monitoring"
3. Play to your expected volumes. Make sure the input level in Tracktion peaks at about -10 db. If you pass 0, it distorts badly.
4. Try recording. Do some takes with the webcam further away to see if you like it better.

Other...
5. Get a better mike - a USB one makes it easier, but better get a "normal" mike and a small USB mixer (even 4 channel) that takes "standard" mike inputs. A small basic 4 channel mixer and budget XLR mike should set you back $120 US or less...
6. If your amp happens to have a "line out", try feeding that into either a little mixer, or possibly into your sound card. You can "play" dirty and distorted, but have the guitar recorded less so; then use virtual pedals and amp cabinet simulator in Tracktion. Experiment with amp types, EQ, compression, echo after the fact.

Update: Also, the webcam may have built-in echo/noise cancelling. MAYBE there is a setup option to disable that. Still not a good option for recording, but might be less counter-productive...

[treewolf7]

I tried moving the webcam further away and it still didn't work. The input levels never exceeded -10db as well. Also, I have my audio device type as DirectSound because nothing else worked, and I changed the input to the Primary Sound Driver and it still had the muffling effect.

[Peter Widdicombe]

did a quick test with an admittedly cheap "rocket fish" webcam - looks like it takes a nosedive above about 1.8 Khz. This is somewhat OK for a webcam, but horrid for music.

[skipscada]

Spend 30-40 € on a cheap USB mic or better still, try to save up for a quality mic. When I started out I had very little money to spend and used my headphones as a mic. Even a 20 € mic was a huge step up, both in terms of sound quality and ergonomy / practical use.

BTW, is you insist on a "use what you have"-approach. Try the headphone trick (mics and headphones are sort of the inverse of each other)

[Peter Widdicombe]

Yeah, not spelled out above. Headphones are basically a small speaker, and IF your sound card happens to have separate jacks for microphone and speakers, you CAN actually plug your headphones into the microphone jack, which might be better quality than the webcam.

(Or you might be lucky and your headphones are actually a proper headset with a built-in microphone that's usable ! )