As I progress into Round 2 of B2B, y’all have convinced me to move to a DAW for recording myself. Using a Mac, I already have reasonably good one in GarageBand. But now I need an audio adapter. Searches in the forum make it clear that the preferred products for most are one of the FocusRIte Scarlett units. But, trying to save few dollars, I tested the ESI Nova Duo. Amazon’s return policy made that easy.
Well, it turns out the Neva Duo (and single channel Nova Uno) do not support current MacOS. While their control panel app for Windows is up to v 1.7 (2025), their Mac app is stalled at v 1.2 (2022) and only supports up to MacOS 15 (Sequoia).
… I just headed over to Guitar Center, where a 3d Gen Scarlett Solo, list $119, was on sale (Guitar Days, I think), and walked out with the little red box for $92, tax included.
Now that the Scarlett Solo is set up for both computer audio and bass sound to play through the Solo headphones, I wish I had had this set up months ago. No need to fire up the amp, just need MacBook, Solo, Bass, and wired headphones to practice silent for the household. Much better than messing with a headphone amp, which is more expensive than the Scarlett Solo.
Next challenge is how to record audio on Garageband with video recording for cover videos.
It’s fairly straightforward. You record video with your camera and bass with Garageband, and then piece them together in a video editor. You just need to have some kind of sound/or cue on both audio tracks so that you can sync them.
add a mic to your Solo and record it along with your bass in Garageband. This way you can just clap your hands and both audio tracks will pick it up
pull hard on a string or pop it so that your video picks it up and there will hopefully be a spike in your bass recording to sync with
Once you’re in your video editing software (FCP X, DaVinci Resolve, etc.), you can sync all of the sources to the sound, then delete the unneeded audio tracks/spike.
Depending on the song and when the bass comes in, you might want to insert a couple of empty bars at the start to give you enough time to hit record in both places and to trigger the spike.
@roddie Thanks. I was afraid it requires adding a video editor to the process. I’ve used iMovie for years, so it will be easy to remain in my Mac ecosystem with GarageBand to iMovie. This now explains why so many cover videos show the musician wearing earphones; I had wondered about that.
I want to make the GarageBand sound as an input to OBS, along with a USB camera, recording the result with OBS. However, my first test of this set up the GarageBand output would not sync properly with OBS, resulting in garbage sound (?GarBageBand?). Maybe I will work this out as a recording method; if so I will let the Forum know.
It takes a little more work but I always record the audio in Garageband. Then another take recording the video (in photobooth) and sync them manually in iMovie. Getting a good audio recording is the hard part, by the time I’m doing the video, all the pressure is off and I can worry about looking cool.
