i wanna learn how to do this better and am sort of lost on what to do so my natural reaction is to ask saltw about it

damn i found my old keyboard but unfortunetly none of the buttons worked
i'll probably look around some thrift stores tomorrow and stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGvowG9lIp4

I like my toy keyboard, if you change the instrument while holding a note it makes glitchy sounds. So one rad trick is this: buy some toy instruments and mess around with them, if you're a electronics genius maybe do some circuit bending, record everything with a crappy microphone. I don't know how to do circuit bending but toy instruments recorded with a crappy microphone sounds like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shyGIwfPN5Q

Remove the erase head from a portable tape recorder

Make the hit singles of tomorrow

Just experiment a lot. I got a Tascam Portastudio 424 about 5-6 years ago and it helped me learn the basics of recording and overdubbing. You can do a lot with only four tracks.

One trick is to try dubbing your digital recordings to a cheap portable cassette recorder (via line-in), then dubbing the result back to digital.

Does anyone have experience with recording a guitar amp? I've got a 70s tube that makes some pretty wicked sound and produces a lot of incidental noise that I'd like to record. Do I just put a mic in front of it?

My technique for recording guitars thus far has been this: one mic on the speaker (the actual speaker inside the amplifier) and one mic at the other end of the room, sometimes suspended up near the ceiling.

This way, you get your guitar sound, but you can mix that with the natural reverb of the room you're recording in.

As for mic placement on the amp itself, you can pivot it 45° to the left or right, but I usually just point it directly at the speaker. Be sure to adjust your gain here so you're not clipping.