PA gear = good home recording studio?

jiggs

New member
I'm a singer songwriter looking to create a home recording studio and currently have my PA gear and not much else. I'm just after a spare room set up for my own personal use - not one to hire out to others!

I have a Dynacord Powermate 1000, 2 decent new EV speakers, a minidisc player, a Shure SM58 radio mike, an Audio Technica lead mike, a new PC and Cubase. Oh and a bass guitar and a willing guitarist with a fender.

Luckily my guitarist mate knows a bit about recording but I wanted a second opinion.

What would I need to complete a basic studio set up? I understand that I would need a decent soundcard but which one and what else?

Can anyone give me any advice? If u need any more info let me know.

Thanks in advance
 
You will have to look into a decent a/d converter for gettng the analoge signal into the computer and out.

How many channels are you looking to record at once?

It all starts at how much you want to spend. You could record 24 channels at a time w/ cheap mic pre's for 1-2k or could have a single channel HIGH quality Mic pre, A/D converter, and mic for 5 thousand.

I don't think PA speakers are really that good for monitoring in the recording world. Better look into Monitor Speakers sometime.

As far as the mic's. Most don't use dynamic mic's on vocals like you have for recording. Look into a conderser sometime too.
 
I have to disagree with Blue Bear to some extent. Good PA speakers, especially smaller ones, can make pretty good guitar cabs. I often prefer the sound of one of the 8 ohm caps on a Fender Passport to an open backed Marshall cab with a Celestion vintage 30, especially for clean guitar. A Shure SM58 is PA gear, and it has plenty of uses in the studio. In fact, come to think about it, every piece of my PA gear has found some use in the studio, from mic stands to cables, even to the head itself, for some applications.-Richie
 
My very first recoding set up was based around a PA console and mics (57's) and I made some decent recordings on it (FAR from great but OK). Just as long as you understand its limitations. I've never heard of your mixer. Does it have inserts on the channel strips?
 
If you're just getting your toes wet, something is better than nothing. For solo / multitrack, there are a lot of decent cards with a couple of inputs / outputs in the $200 - 300 range. I'd avoid any soundblaster or gamer card, such as the Audigy, and start one step higher. Don't waste any time at all on the computer's soundchip on its motherboard.

If you're going to try to track three or four signals at a time, that's a bit more complicated. Even so, a small USB unit like a Tascam can be slick for this.

I've been fooling around with this stuff for a couple of years and am just now moving away from the SBLive card stage. I'm learning my way around the M-Audio Delta 66 interface. It has a breakout box where you can give it four line level signals at once; it requires a mixer or some other preamp to work, which is what I use anyway.

A really nice starter setup - and one that has stood the test of time - is the Aardvark Pro2496. That has a standard PCI card and a rugged breakout box with four preamps; you can plug in an XLR cable right from a mic and you're golden. It also comes with its own software. Worth the money at $500.

Don't forget N-track (look at the forum here) which is powerful and cheap.

Your PA speakers won't give you reliable information; a set of garden variety headphones will be better. Folks here will tell you never to mix on headphones and if you already have a set of monitors, they're right.

Decent powered monitors start at about $300 / pr. I have a set of Event TR5s and they're OK. Actually, I like them quite a lot. But if I had a better budget, I would go one more step and get 8" woofers; that's really the size where the sound starts being reliable.
 
A mic stand is a mic stand, as are the clips, cables, etc.... of course those are usable in both "worlds".....

My comments came more from the typical questions around using PA gear such as powered mixers for a recording console (not great since PA boards are very noisy) and PA speakers as monitors (again, completely different sonic design compared to nearfields....)
 
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