For my parents' 30th wedding anniversary, my siblings and I decided to record ourselves performing Neil Young's "Harvest Moon," Ma & Pa O'Malley's first dance. The only problem: one sister lives on Long Island, one in Philly, and I live in Chicago. Being that I would be traveling for the holidays anyway, I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to test out Propellerhead Record as the cornerstone of a mobile recording studio. Record has been fascinating me, more so than it probably should. I mean, on one hand, Propellerhead is pushing it as recording software for "musicians" instead of engineers, but on the other hand, there's Record's not-too-streamlined interface, deeply tweakable rack function, and very engineer-friendly mixer interface (based on the intimidating SSL 9000 K). Perhaps part of my fascination with this software is my desire to figure out how the hell PH should be selling it, because I'm not sold on their DAW-for-dummies approach. I figured this project would be a great excuse to get to know Record a little better, see how steep the learning curve is, whether I would really miss 3rd-party plugin support. I also wanted the opportunity to use Record for tracking real, acoustic instruments as opposed to composing with a bunch of virtual instruments; is Record simply Reason-plus-audio, or is it something new?

I loaded Record onto my Intel Macbook, a 2 1/2-year-old laptop with a 2gHz Core Duo processor and 1 GB of RAM (more RAM would be optimal for Record, but. . . I'll get to how well it performed later). For an interface, I used a first generation MBox, and my portable, decidedly "budget" mic collection included the following:

• Samson CO2 Small-Diaphragm Condensers (pair, at right)
• M-Audio Luna II Large-Diaphragm FET Condenser
• AKG C 3000 B Large-Diaphragm Condenser
• Audio-Technica AT8031 Small-Diaphragm Condenser
• Blue Encore 100 Cardioid Dynamic

I brought along a single mic stand, a stereo bar, a pop filter, a pair of headphones with passive splitter, and a Radial JDI. I also brought a crappy Maxtor external USB hard-drive, and here's where I learned two very important things: 1)my crappy Maxtor hard-drive doesn't have the sufficient RPM to stream digital audio, and 2)using a USB hard drive and USB audio interface on a two-USB port computer means there's no room for Record's USB dongle. Unfortunately, the first recording location I found myself at didn't have internet access, so I couldn't run Record in internet verification mode. I ditched the external drive, and ran the Record session off my start-up disk. . . a no-no, I know, but time, travel and financial constraints dictated otherwise.

My first stop was Philadelphia to record my sister and her harp. She had been keeping her instrument at a friend's house, which was a good thing, as her own apartment is a little too close to an interstate with windows that don't close all the way. In contrast, her friend's house had (I'm approximating) 18' ceilings and a separate room in which to track. It also had creaky wood floors, but hey: beggars, chooser, etc.

My sister's is a balanced-sounding Salvi Daphne student pedal-harp. I had never recorded harp before, so I trolled some recording forums and found a near infinitude of suggestions. I knew I wanted a stereo recording, and also that the track would include acoustic guitar, three vocals, and an upright bass. I decided to go with the CO2s in an X/Y using the stereo bar, positioned about 16" from the left side and in front of the harp, at about two feet off the ground. Even at this low and bass-favoring position, the higher strings of the harp were extremely present and percussive, with the bass fundamental almost downplayed. I could have fattened up the harp by switching out one of the CO2s for one of the LDCs I had brought, but knowing that there was going to be an upright bass in the mix, I assumed that the CO2 arrangement would make for less frequency competition later on.

I'll say this about Record: going from opening a new session to tracking really is as quick and easy as Propellerhead claims. I created six audio tracks (to which I added later), and put down a scratch track with vocals and guitar in about ten minutes. I could have created a stereo track for the harp, but decided to track it on two mono tracks instead, not knowing how much flexibility I would have in Record's mixer interface (in hindsight, a single stereo track would have sped up the mixdown process with no loss of flexibility, but no matter).

After three takes of the harp, my sister and I recorded a few vocal takes (on the Luna II). The comping feature in Record is extremely intuitive, and cobbling together some final "takes" was a matter of a few click's 'n drags. Ah, computers. There were a few digital hiccups present in some of the recorded audio, probably a combination of my computer's single GB of RAM and the session being located on the start-up disk. I comped them away. Still, a nice firewire drive should be the next addition to my little mobile setup.

Next stop: Long Island and tracking some acoustic upright bass.