I've started to record some music direct to my PC. I usually start out with a drum beat from Hydrogen, then record guitars and vocals over the top. I find playing to a metronome more difficult that playing to a beat.
On my PC, I use Jack to route sound from the sound card, to Guitarix and use the output from Guitarix direct into Ardour. I struggled previously to get my head around all of the routings in Ardour as it's not fussy how things get routed. I'd often end up with the wrong inputs and outputs routed. However, I've not dialled in my setup. I am aware that one can use Guitarix as a plug-in in Ardour, however, I've preferred to record direct out of Guitarix.
I think one of the things that I struggled with intially was that I had the buffer set to high. A higher buffer number increases latency. So some of my early recordings, I was playing out of time, not hearing directly what I was playing. Then in Ardour aligning the recorded track to the beat. Which felt way too wrong. Setting a much lower buffer resolved this.
Here are some recordings using this setup: - 10 Little Monsters
These are children's books, I've turned into songs. I've not yet recorded the lyrics to 10 Little Dinosaurs. Both use Hydrogen drum kits.
I'm really impressed with the quality of the software I'm using here. I've been a Linux user for a long time and accept that a lot of work goes into it, but I get the impression that, because a lot of tech companies rely on it, it's well supported. DAWs and a software guitar amp seem like they would be much more a love of labour, so it impresses me how good they are.
Hardware/Software: - DAW: Ardour - Audio Management: QjackCtl - Sound Card: Behringer U-Phoria UM2 - PC: AMD Ryzen 7, 16gb RAM running Debian - Software Guitar Amp: Guitarix - Drum Machine: Hydrogen - Mic: Tascam DR-05XP