What would you suggest or ideas for me to play real time with a keyboard, guitar, and bass?

I assume you want to put together a song, recorded one layer at a time.

Well to do this you need the following:

  1. Recording medium
  2. An interface to play back/record to the medium
  3. A way to convert the sounds your instruments make into a form that the interface can use

Here is a sort of flow diagram that might help make sense of some digital recording terminology:

  1. Your Voice (analog vibrations in the air)
  2. Mic (converts air vibrations to low-level electrical signal)
  3. Pre-Amp (boosts low-level signal to line-level)
  4. Analog to Digital Converter (Converts line-level analog signal into digital signal that your computer can understand)
  5. Software (Tells the computer what to do with the incoming digital signal)
  6. Hard Disk (Records digital signal)
Recording Medium:

The medium can be a hard disk recorder, computer hard drive, tape drive, or anything that can record while playing back previously recorded tracks. If you already have a pretty good computer, you might want to use that as your medium. If not, you'll probably want to look into a hard-disk recording workstation. The workstation will cover all 3 bases.

Analog to Digital Converter:

Now, if you want to use your computer, you need this interface part I keep talking about. In tha case of a computer, you need to convert analog signals produced by your instruments into digital signals that the computer can understand. I would recommend the M-Audio delta-44 or 66 for this task. You will actually be able to record up to 4 inputs at the same time with this, assuming only 2 of them need to be amplified to line-level. ( i.e. you could record 2 overhead drum mics, 1 guitar, and 1 bass all at the same time).

Your Sound Blaster Live is capable of recording 2 line-level inputs at the same time, this means you could record the guitar and the bass, but not the drum microphones. The sound quality will suffer dramatically since that card is designed for gaming, not recording. If you just want to get your ideas converted into noise that can be played back for later use, the SBLive will work. If you are trying to record music that people will listen to, you will have to go with a card that is designed specifically for recording.

Interface:

In addition to this converter box, you will need some software that understands how to handle the inputs and outputs of the sound card. I have used Cool Edit for this job in the past, and it has worked well for me. (Although you will need a powerful computer to handle a lot of tracks.)

Before you make a decision about what you buy, you should figure out exactly what you need.

What do you want to do with this? Record orchestras? Live concerts? Just you and your guitar? What kind of music do you want to make? Electronic? Just Guitar, Bass, and vocals? A mix? How many tracks do you need to record at the same time? How many of these tracks will require pre-amps?

Once you start venturing into the electronic realm, the computer becomes a dramatically better option as opposed to the music recording workstation. Also, remember your computer can burn CDs, the workstation might not have that option! If you want to record a live concert, a workstation is more realistic.

Using Custom-Recorded Samples In Reason

Ok, as you may notice from my tunes, I really don't have any live vocals, therefore I haven't perfected this method, although here is how I have integrated vocals / external synths in some of my tunes using reason as my sole sequencing program.

  1. get a copy of cool edit
  2. get your sound card working in cool edit
  3. arm the record track in cool edit for the input that your mic / synth is on
  4. adjust the levels on your preamp until you get a solid signal, but don't clip
  5. start your track you want to record into on a loop in reason so it plays into your vocalist'."'".'s headphones
  6. hit record in cool edit at the exact beginning of the reason loop (takes practice to time it right)
  7. save your track in cool edit and chop it up as desired when you are done recording
  8. save each phrase as a seperate sample, of which starts exactly on the beat
  9. import the samples into reason using redrum
  10. trigger the samples using the drum machine!

I know this is sort of a hack, but its the only way I could get recorded sounds into reason and have them easily exported to a single mixed down file.

Reason has a product called re-wire, which can supposedly sync seperate audio apps together, thus doing away with the syncing problems, although you would still need a way to combine all of the outputs from all the programs.

Also a caviat - make sure your tempo is final before doing this, as changing the tempo will mess up the timing in your recorded samples!