First Step

[The Pianoman]

Hi all,

Having not done any PC recording I find myself a bit lost here but at least I have lots of pro music gear and am blessed with playing ability and a good voice.

My first stumbling block is this.

If I want my songs to sound as professional as possible ie ........sellable to punters,
.......... listenable to by a record company,
............. good enough to sell the song,

Should I use the sounds built into a top line sound card (drums, bass, pianos, strings etc etc OR create a good arrangment in my Roland RA 800 arranger (Module version of a Roland G-800) then record that into the PC?...... Leaving the acoustic instruments and vocals added later.

Will my admittedly crap Sound Fusion card "contaminate" even that signal as it comes in through line in?

The RA- 800 is cabable of full arrangements, has EQ, effects etcand I kinda know it backwards after years of working live with it.
http://www.harmony-central.com/Newp/...nd/RA-800.html

The point here is that I am somewhat out of step with modern PC based recording and am clutching to the tried and trusted methods that have served me well.

Maybe the sound samples in a top line sound card would blow my RA -800 away?

So maybe I should get this point cleared up before I do anything else.

Lastly, in general terms, is there a preffered OS used by everyone...... I run win 2000 pro and its a stable OS that does everything I need up to now BUT the PC will now become a music production tool also, and might not function so well in that role.

Thanks again

Regards Alan Davidson

[TexRoadkill]

You will need a better sound card for any acoustic recording you want to do. Stand alone keyboards still beat any onboard soundcard synths or soft synths that I have heard.

[The Pianoman]

Thanks for the reply..... So I need to change the SC if I wish to add live vocals, electric & acoustic guitars.

Thanks for that.

Regards Alan

[tmix]

I agree with Tex.
The sounds on most consumer cards are identifiably cheap sounding. Plus you have the added benifit of familiarity of your own unit. If you are going to be recording acoustic instruments and voice, please take my advice and stay away from the Soundblaster type cards, for about $200 you can get a good (maybe less than stellar) prosumer card that can record on for quite some time.
Your use of win 2000 is fine, many people use it with great success. Just stay away from win ME. I still use win 98se and it is rock solid, never a glitch. A lot of your decision on what platform will have to do with the actual software program you wish to use.

[PeteHalo]

The win2000 is a great os for music production. It's stable and it's easy to setup another hardware profile for recording and disable all unneccessary devices and background processes (aka services) in this profile to make it run even smoother. There's a lot of unneccessary processes loaded in memory during the startup up of Windows that takes away available memory from more important programs. There's free utilities you can use for optimizing the performance on the web.