SecondHeartbeat
New member
what is the general standard to what ou should have in your rack for a home studio?
SonicAlbert said:Some good posts so far.
The first most important thing is along the lines of what Track Rat already said, which you have to determine what it is you will be using your studio for. All you gear choices will flow from that.
So if you are doing vocal and a single guitar tracking, then a couple mics and two channels of preamps would be the appropriate starting point. If however, you will be recording bands, then obviously you'll need a different set of gear, and more of it.
As a basic tracking type studio where you might want a couple channels available at a time, the following would be kind of a starting point, assuming you already have a computer and sound card:
A couple mics, two channels of preamps, good AD conversion. From there, probably the most useful tracking tool would be a compressor.
For mixing you would definitely want to add a rack reverb unit, plus possibly an eq. A patchbay would also make things a lot more convenient for you.
So you list is actually pretty good, but again the important thing is to know what you will be recording and then design the gear choices around that.
Creamyapples1 said:Multiple pieces of the same gear would be to use during playback, mix down, etc. Say you are mixing through a 16 channel board, using 13 tracks and you want compression on just 6 of the tracks, the compression for track 1 may not be suitable to track 2 and so on. I mean, you can live without a crazy setup like that, but that's the idea of it anyway.
Patchbays are rack mounted and all of the ins and outs of all your gear run to the back of it. Then all of your cable routing is done with patch cables on the front of the patch bay, so you don't have to get in behind the rack and switch out cables, and under your board and behind your PC everytime you want to try something different, or using the above example, if you have 4 different compressors, you can patch them into whatever you want without leaving your chair as opposed to tracing cable and rerunning a stretch to your board multiple times, every time. It's really the lazy mans dream, esspecially if you have multiple rack units, boards, etc.
Big Kenny said:what'syour budget?