Specing a Home studio

[zebedy]

Hey guys it's been a while since I last logged on here. 2006 to be honest.
That is crazy,

Well im looking to get a decent home studio going, Now being with my band recorded and EP and LIVE DEMOS as such blahh blahh, I'm wanting to get the hands on of making teh band sound good and recording as such.

I'm currently training to be an audio engineer in college, But I know this is the best place to get the know how. As I'm only in college 3 days a week, it's long enough for me to forget.

I NEED TO SPEC

a computer

sound card

software

midi controller

needs to have midi and audio capabilities .

I want to do this all through a laptop, So as I can do location recordings aswell.

If anyone could give me some links and advice, I'm really keen to get this all going asap aswell, As my friends band are now recording themselfs and getting shit hot sound, I want to be able to do the same for my band

I've finally passed my driving test, so we dont have to taxi around anymore. So final stone is to be able to record us and we will all be happy Chappys

PLEASE HELP SOMEONE

( Quite fancie having a wee mixing desk as I've seen them in college but haven't learned what i could use them for.... I'm a drummer btw aswell so I guess i Will need enough inputs for micing my boom booms. That band are thinking of getting a MOTU PRE 8. As our friends have one and they get a shit hot sound with it, I know its a 8mic pre amp but i dont know much more can someone dumb all this down for me? )

 

[wheelema]

Hey guys it's been a while since I last logged on here. 2006 to be honest.
That is crazy,

Well im looking to get a decent home studio going, Now being with my band recorded and EP and LIVE DEMOS as such blahh blahh, I'm wanting to get the hands on of making teh band sound good and recording as such.

I'm currently training to be an audio engineer in college, But I know this is the best place to get the know how. As I'm only in college 3 days a week, it's long enough for me to forget.

I NEED TO SPEC

a computer

sound card

software

midi controller

needs to have midi and audio capabilities .

I want to do this all through a laptop, So as I can do location recordings aswell.

If anyone could give me some links and advice, I'm really keen to get this all going asap aswell, As my friends band are now recording themselfs and getting shit hot sound, I want to be able to do the same for my band

I've finally passed my driving test, so we dont have to taxi around anymore. So final stone is to be able to record us and we will all be happy Chappys

PLEASE HELP SOMEONE

( Quite fancie having a wee mixing desk as I've seen them in college but haven't learned what i could use them for.... I'm a drummer btw aswell so I guess i Will need enough inputs for micing my boom booms. That band are thinking of getting a MOTU PRE 8. As our friends have one and they get a shit hot sound with it, I know its a 8mic pre amp but i dont know much more can someone dumb all this down for me? )

Well, you know your business better than anyone but as any Gamer will tell you, you are not going to get the best box for the best price in a laptop form factor. Gamers drag full blown rigs all over the place all of the time. You can put together a verrryyyy nice DAW that is totally portable... more power, less money... than a decent laptop.

Something to keep in mind. Laptops are for libraries and airplanes.

 

[oretez]

Except sometimes. Generally speaking you will end up paying more for a Laptop based recording rig then you would for equivalent featured desktop.

But by and large issues are same for either hardware platform and can with time & money be resolved effectively for either.

If you are attempting to track everyone simultaneously the cost is non trivial in any case and the cost differences between laptop and desktop begin to level out.

That said I can't think of a single laptop I'd recommend off the rack at this point. Audio work was always a tiny niche market for consumer computer manfc and offerings have, over all, not improved over that past five to six years Some elements might have improved but main selling point for using a laptop for audio work is remote/field/live recording, which requires a robustness that is simply missing in the build to price end of the market . . . Purely for tracking you would probably find it more cost effective, over the long haul, to look at a dedicated hard disk recorder, something like Alesis HD24 (purely as example).

That said my field rig is still centered around a pair of IBM A31 thinkpads (8 & nearly 9 years old) This, as far as I know, was the last three spindle machine built and with docking station added a fourth spindle and let me use PCI audio cards. But again this is not a rig I'd currently recommend any attempting to duplicate

Butting in here primarily because, in my experience, what ever plan you implement you need to map step wise refinement from the very beginning, otherwise you will constantly be in a position of having to throw money at a problem that seemed to arise out of nowhere. For example it is very easy to dedicate nine tracks to drum kit alone (so all of a sudden the MOTU 8pre can appear to be not so cost effective). If you don't have an effective live PA you might want to start there. Since recording is one of the goals select one with more channels and better mic pre's then you think you need, think Allen & Heath rather then Behringer. If you want to use one get the laptop & any of the entry level 4-8 channel A/D's and work of refining your live mix as a stereo snapshot of the show. Gang your Drum mics to a sub, work on positioning performers (and their mics) to reduce bleed.

The most expensive component of any functional studio is, and should be, the room itself. One of the most time consuming tasks (when drum kit is used) for any recording session is setting up the drum kit (and necessary mics). The outline here is to refine recording skills with combination of live shows and focusing on your strength, drumming, as you gradually refine the fixed studio. Learn to use the room as part of the recording process. After the room itself the most important element of the recording process is mic placement. Initially focus the learning curve on the drums, drum room interaction, mic placement-drum-room-interaction. Then throw bass into the mix. Particularly if you are not attempting to 'work for hire' to record others, the gear you use to get started can almost be anything. You don't need to break the bank initially with a cabinet full of $4k mics, $2k 2 channel mic pre's . . . I would suggest you opt for as much quality as the budget can tolerate, but part of the measure of quality is based on how you work, the content of the music. If your genre is death shred metal you probably would never benefit from a vintage $8k tube mic. On vocals. The guitars are going to be generating nothing functional above 8K so subtly in mics and pres for them is purely a waste of money (initially).

There are a lot of people who for all kinds of reasons will tell you that you need, specifically 'X' or 'Y' (i.e. You can't use a laptop to record audio) . . . Mostly they/we are all wrong. We all have preferences, prejudices. Some of the opinions are anchored in physics, more are determined by 'how' we work and some are purely magical thinking.

Which is why I emphasize need to build step wise refinement into the plan from the beginning. You might know your magical thinking but from the way to talk about what you seem to be suggesting you want to do you don't yet know how the physics effects your preferred 'way' to work. After spending $5k you might find that you don't use a fraction of the expensive feature set of that desk, in the studio. You can spend a couple of grand on audio monitors (another general rule of thumb is that you can track pretty much anywhere but mixing requires a specific ambient environment . . . If your budget forces you to choose you need to drop more money on the mixing environment then tracking environment) only to find that the room and placement makes improvement in the mix negligible

You can easily & honestly, even cost effectively spend more on the 'room' then your budget permits. As I don't know your budgetary restraints the suggestion was to focus learning curve initially on the live capture, adding overdub refinements, basic single instrument at a time capability as you build the room.

General rule of thumb for hierarchy is: room (more important then), mics, monitors . . . . . . Big jump into pool where almost anything will work . . . Mic pres, convertors . . . . . Huge leap into pool of everything else. Which unfortunately doesn't mean you buy the room first. Unless your experience tells you exactly what you need. It means that among all that stuff clustered at the bottom of the hierarchy buy the stuff you can afford that you don't hate, today, using. As you use it, hopefully, you'll figure out what is required for the way you work with the bits that are slightly more important.

On the other hand you can send me six million dollars and I can drop a very respectable recording facility in pretty much any four thousand square foot warehouse space.