Mountain High (Valley Below) is an uptempo song, countryrock and bluesrock influenced, by the Solid Rock Blues Band project. Inspired by a short holiday trip to the Harz region in Germany.
While on holiday this song was written by Rudy and it took a few months before the melody and music were composed. After that was ready, recording and mixing the song was done in one day. Recorded, mixed and released on May 2, 2021 at The Loft Studio.
Audacity is a free DAW, a program for audio recording and mixing, and it’s popular for some very good reasons besides being free. It’s easy to use, stable and is the perfect little DAW for anyone who wants to get his feet wet in home recording. It is also perfect for recording things like voice overs or a demo for a (small) band. Record, for example, the basic tracks an mix them later on in a more professional DAW or let someone else mix them. Some even record full albums with it. So, it is popular for many reasons.
Audacity the Free DAW for Windows, Linux and MacOS
Some time ago, in 2018, I made a video about mixing and recording with Audacity and the Behringer UMC404HD. The UMC404HD allows for four inputs to be recorded at the same time (4 tracks) so you can record 4 musicians, or instruments/vocals, at the same time. The Behringer UMC404HD is amazing and it’s availble for only a fraction of the costs of several competitors. For example (at this moment) at Thomann. It is out of stock a lot, it seems to be very popular and rightfully so. I am still considering to buy a second one, as a spare, in case mine will stop working or will have mechanical problems one day.
Recording with the Behringer audio interface works perfect with Ardour or Mixbus. Especially since they don’t need any additional drivers. On Windows it also worked perfect on, for example, Mixcraft. I showed this in various videos as well as other people. Many of the viewers however seemed to be having issues with Audacity and the Behringer UMC404HD.
DRIVERS
One of the biggest issues most have is the drivers for the UMC404HD. Behringer has been changing their websites a few times recently and people were complaining they can’t find the drivers. They’re not included on a CD with the interface. Now, there is a good reason for this: production costs. Including a driver CD costs money and Behringer tries to cut the costs so you will have a product that is as cheap as possible. Besides that: most computers and laptops these days don’t even have a CD(r) station. Even if they would include a driver CD it would, in most cases, be useless. Including a CD would only lead to more trash (environmental issue!). You can download it. No environmental damage and cheaper. I’d say that’s a win-win.
However, as noted: the drivers have been hard to find. And, for some reason some complain the new drivers don’t work well. So here’s an older version that does work. Download and use on your own risk, I am not responsible for it.
DO NOT USE ASIO4ALL
Asio4All has been a pretty popular hardware driver for Windows. Do NOT use it. Remove it completely from your system (uninstall) if you wan tot use the Behringer UMC series. They have their own drivers (official site). You won’t get Audacity or any other DAW running on Windows working with the UMC404HD when using Asio4All.
AUDACITY LACKS SUPPORT?
Some noted that the version of Audacity they have doesn’t record 4 tracks. It only shows 2 tracks. There might be two reasons for this, I’m not certain what the reason is in certain situations:
it is showing you 2 stereo tracks (meaning 4 mono tracks!).
You don’t use the correct settings for recording 4 tracks. Set the ‘preferences’ to Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI) as I do in the Video!
Some claim it isn’t available on their Audacity version. On the Audacity website, however, it is still mentioned and what’s more: it’s been a standard in Windows ever since Windows Vista. In fact it is one of the “unique selling points” in Audacity! So I do have a hard time believing it isn’t available and my best guess is you’re not using the corect settings.
Prefereces Audacity
I am having the Dutch version but you should be able to see where this setting can be found (under preferences). In case you cannot get it working with the current version of Audacity – and I really do advice to use that one since it has hundreds of fixed bugs! – there are still older versions available. Like over here. Please note, this versions dates back to 2015 and this link (from Google Drive, it’s my “old” Windows version, works on Windows8.1) is to be used solely at your own risk.
VIDEO DEMONSTRATION
So this is the video I’ve been talking about, hope it helps or is at least entertaining 🙂 As I said in the video I don’t prefer Audacity for recording. These days I use Mixbus5 (and Ardour) running on Linux Mint. I’ve never looked back at Windows recording since I started using that even though I still have Mixbus on my Windows laptop (Windows 8.1). That doesn’t mean recording using Windows is less good. I simply prefer Linux (Linux Mint).
Installing Ardour, the Digital Audio Workstation, on Linux Mint or Ubuntu isn’t too difficult if you follow the steps shown in these tutorial videos.
Before you jump right in and start installing Ardour, you will need to download and install Jack Audio Server. Search for qJack or Jacl on your installer and install it. After that, configure it as it is shown at the website. You can edit the configuration files using a text editor like NANO from the command line or a graphical text editor. Please do apply them as you are told over here:
It’s slightly outdated since they use an older version of Jack but you will find the settings in qJack when you go to Setup → Settings → Advanced.
There’s a good reason to follow these steps because it will help you to install and configure realtime audio (and you will need this!) in a correct manner. The Realtime Audio will even turn a system with an onboard sound card into a good mixing and editing machine. For recording, I use a dedicated machine with KXStudio/Ardour with a 4-channel USB interface (Behringer U-PHORIA UMC404HD). But you might even be able to use a standard soundcard for recording (I have not tested this!).
Now you can install Ardour. And that’s easy! Open your software installer, type in [ Ardour ] in the search field (no brackets) and install it!
In the video below I will show the above mentioned steps.
– Audio (voice over) recorded using Ardour 4.0
– Video recorded with “record my desktop” and edited with kdenlive.
The recordings for the Solid Rock Blues Band, The Barking Aunts, Mirjam Tamara and some other demo’s for other bands and vocalists were al made using my computer as a ‘DAW’, a Digital Audio Workstation.
For many years I’ve recorded in the livingroom. But since 2015 I’m having my own small home studio. In this video I give a short tour of the studio and a short recording demo.
When I began recording I used my computers build in soundcard and a cheap microphone. These days I have some “serious equipment”. One of the things I made a rule of thumb: “It shouldn’t cost much”. So it is a budget studio, but despite that, it is possible to record decent sounding tracks!
The more-or-less full list of equipment in my studio can be found here.
The Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD is a 4 in/4 out audio interface allowing you to record up to 4 intstruments or vocals at the same time. The 4 inputs all have 48v Phantom power and are equipped with fantastic “dead silent” Midas pre-amps. It’s a step up from the cheapest models with Xenyx pre-amps. This makes it a perfect fit for any small studio or bands wanting to do some demo recording without breaking the bank!
I got this device as a birthday present and made a video about it, trying to answer this one question I’ve read the most in comments on Youtube “can it record 4 tracks at once?”. The answer is: YES. It Can!
Multitrack recording with the Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD and Ardour (Linux), Mixcraft (Windows) and Audacity (Windows) is very easy to do (once you know how to connect it and what driver to install when using Windows).
The Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD is a 4 in/4 out USB Audio interface and can be used for multitrack recording with Windows, Apple and Linux recording software (DAW). In this video I’ll walk you trough the steps I took to record multiple tracks at once with it. I made some wrong assumptions and little mistakes at first, but I hope the little errors I made will help you prevent them.
LINUX
Although Behringer doesn’t claim it to be compatible with Linux, it does work perfectly well on Ardour (with the standard ALSA driver). You don’t need additional drivers for it. Do make sure you switch off the “midi” when starting a recording with Ardour since it doesn’t support the midi input if there’s no real midi device connected to the interface!
WINDOWS
For Windows you’ll need to download a driver from their webisite. It doesn’t work with the standard ASIO4ALL drivers that are used by most home recording enthusiast using the standard 1 or 2 channel input/output devices. Although I failed to get it recording 4 tracks at once with Audacity, I’m almost certain it should be possible. If I ever find out how, I’ll post a follow-up video on that since I believe that would be a perfect solution for the fast, leightweight, “on the road” recording.
I tested it on only two windows programs but am positive it will work on many others like Reaper, pro tools, cubase, ableton live, studio one, and so on.
