Here's a rundown on how I did the recordings on the CD: Instruments Collings CJ:  Hard Love, Old Dancing Fool, Promises and Rain and Lights of Brigantine. Larrivee D-03R:  Everything else. Tacoma Papoose:  Eisenhower Summer, Snowing in Jerusalem, Path of Least Resistance, Hard Times, Cross the Wide Missouri and Lights of Brigantine. Hohner harps:  Snowing in Jerusalem, Path of Least Resistance, Hard Times, Cross the Wide Missouri , Radio Road, Steel and Stone and Lights of Brigantine. Equipment Dell Dimension PC ($400) Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition Software ($300) M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Soundcard ($100) FMR Audio RNP 2-Channel Preamp ($450) (2) AT831a Mini Condensers wired for stereo ($119) MXL 603s Small Diaphragm Condenser Mic ($70) StudioProjects B1 Large Diaphragm Condenser Mic ($100) K&K Pure Western Mini Pickups in guitars ($90 each) I included the prices for perspective. As you can see there wasn't a lot of money involved. I had the PC and software already and added the rest as I went. The big expense was the FMR preamp. Worth it, I think. Everything was recorded to 24 bit. The guitars were recorded to two tracks at once, one direct with the K&K's and one with the 603 or B1. I got the B1 for a vocal mic but started using it for guitar too. To me it seemed less harsh than the 603. The two tracks were panned about 70% L/R and eq'd as needed. While not true stereo the eq differences between the mic and pickup makes it sound a bit expanded. The mini AT's were used on Papoose on some tracks. All vocal's were on the B1. There's a tiny bit of reverb on the vocals and harp. The guitars are completely dry. Mixdown/Mastering This stuff  is at least as much art as science and took a while. I had a lot of help from friends who listened and made suggestions but it's still a pretty steep learning curve. If I had to pick one non-technical element I had to overcome it was boosting the level on the vocals, something I found very hard to do. As for mastering the mixes I wanted the levels even and fairly boosted but not to the "louder is better" extreme you hear today. The vocal tracks had a tiny bit of compression if I thought it helped but generally I tried to stay away from it. Instead I would go through each mixdown in Audition and manually lower any extreme peaks by a dB or two. Finally I'd run this script on each mix: Normalize to 99.5% with DC Offset correction, Hard Limit to a peak of  -.2dB and an overall input boost of 3dB. This is actually pretty conservative in today's terms but I thought dynamics started to get lost after that. In any case the track levels sounded pretty even at these settings. All mixes were converted to 16bit. Overall I think it sounds like me playing live in a room and that's pretty much what I was going for. Home