Starting out...what do I need?

[Lucas Hale]

Greetings, everyone,
I'm a first time poster to this board, and I'm kinda lost. I would like to start recording at home (play the drums and guitar) and I would be recording guitar (both electric and acoustic), drums, and voice, probably using phantom musicians to fill in on bass and piano, etc. What do I need to get started? Here's what I've picked out so far:

PIII 500MHz computer/128Meg RAM/CD Burner (have this already)
Good recording sound card (need help here)
Shure SM58 Mic (good choice?)
Good vocal mic (need help here too)

This should be enough to get me started. I have Cakewalk 8, but are there better programs out there for recording digital audio? Also, do I need mic preamps or anything of that nature? As I said, I'm new to this. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

 

[AlChuck]

Hey, welcome...

When you say "phantom" musicians, I assume you mean MIDI parts. So you will need a MIDI Interface and a MIDI synth. A reasonable inexpensive solution is a Sound Blaster Live or Turtle Beach Montego II. These cards don't have the best audio recording specs in the world but for the price (under $100) they are pretty darn good synths and samplers, and they have a MIDI interface.

If you really want excellent audio recording capabilities you should consider a better card, but virtually none of them have built-in synths and only some have built-in MIDI interfaces. For a synth, you could get a decent keyboard for $500 and up. You might want a MIDI keyboard anyway as a controller. There are USB and parallel port MIDI interfaces avaliable if you get a sound card that has no MIDI interface.

Another consideration is, you say that you play drums. It's very hard to get a decent drum sound with fewer than four tracks -- you would probably want to isolate the kick and the snare to their own tracks at least, with maybe stereo overheads for the cymbals, toms, etc. Eight is better still. Now we're talking one of the eight-track interfaces, and enough mics, and preamps for all of these as well, probably a mixing board would be the most cost-effective way to get the mic signals to the audio interface. We're getting into big-bucks area now -- a mixer with 8 outs is gonna be about a grand, and an eight-channel audio interface close to another grand. Add mics, cables, and stands... yiiii! I'm glad I'm just a guitarist!

It seems to me that a four-track interface might be a reasonable compromise between keeping all your drums separate and keeping the costs within reason. If you want to record live drums I really doubt stereo ins are going to do it for you.

Mics -- the Shure SM-57 seems to be the workhorse for micing guitar amps. A vocal mic -- these are great times. There a number of really nice condensor mics on the market now for $200-$500.