Digital Newbie

[mrtheatr]

Hello All!!
First of all I would like to say that this site is wonderful. For a first time digital recorder it is great!! I have a little experience in a recording studio, having worked for a Recording studio at a theme park. We used an 18 channel mixing board, a cassette recorder, and a tascam 200 ( i think). I have been using my computer for midi sequencing for quite some time now, so i am really familiar with Cakewalk. I just purchased a Technics Digital Piano a few months ago and would like to do a little recording, with vocals. Now, I am not going to play and sing at the same time, for its like rubbing my tummy and patting my head, not going to happen I am using a PII 350 with a SB Live and lots of HD Space. I have read most of the posts on the BBS and have gone through the website, to no avail. The more i read, the more confused i get. My question is: Will it be possible with what i have to do some low end recording? If so, will i use my Digital/IO card to do that, coupled with my SB Live and a MIC, or do I need other external parts? Sorry this is so long. Thanks for the help
Jeff

[Emeric]

Hi Jeff,

The setup you have now should work fine for recording. It's not high end, and it's not the lowest either.

The biggest problem you will have is getting vocals and any other acoustic sound souce into your soundcard. The digital I/O is the addon card on the SB Live right? I guess you could use this to output or input from another digital device. But this won't really factor into your initial recording. The I/O you could send to a DAT for mixdown or into another computer with a digital I/O. Not familiar with the SB Live digital I/O setup.

So, you do need a bit of extra equipment.

Ideally a decent clean/quiet mixer, a microphone and a bit of cabling. All depending on your budget, this could cost anywhere between a couple hundred dollars and ... upwards.

The alternate method (not recommended) is to adapt your microphone to a 1/8" stereo jack so that it can plug into your soundcard. (you will need a similiar cable for the mixer setup as well). Your depending on the preamp in your soundcard at this point, and you will not get a whole lot of gain.

How much do you want to spend?

Emeric



[This message has been edited by Emeric (edited 06-24-1999).]