Recording in a cluttered room with a Tight budget

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bluepowder

New member
A few questions about getting new equipment on a VERY tight budget....

currently i am using

Shure SM58->line6 toneport->computer to mix my amp

cool edit pro,ezdrummer and fruity loops for my recording needs.

Following from the other thread, there have been suggestions to get new equipment, other suggestions to not get any equipment until i am better at recording etc...both sound equally logical to me....but somehow getting new equipment and learning to record seems like an all-encompassing option?

Above is a pic of my room, its cluttered. To the right of the guitar and computer table, the wall has windows throughout with thick curtains...near the circular area marked guitars, is where my amp is(facing the computer table). Its on the floor so it has a wall on one side and a bed on the other.....dont know how badly that affects the sound.

I dont have an option to change the room since i rent this room. And I cant throw away any of my stuff. I am not looking for amazing studio quality recording, just enough to have a decent sound.

Equipment I was looking at getting

M-Audio Soundcard(delta 44?)
Mic Preamp(budget M-audio preamp)
A Condensor mic(cheap is the criteria)

Hopefully this will give me something to start with?
 
what are you planning to record? Just electric guitar? Vocals? That piano? other stuff? What's your amp?

I got some good tracks once with a small amp on the bed with space around it, using a SM57 and a cheap interface.

edit: sorry - I haven't yet read your other thread. I'll be back...
 
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Recording in a cluttered room may not be a bad thing - in particular when using mics to capture sound. Room reflections can cause problems when recording with mics (in particular with condensor mics). Room treatment is designed to limit reflections, etc.

You've got plenty of things to control reflections (bed, chair, curtains, etc.) and I suspect you can get a fairly dry, controlled sound in that room.

Regarding buying gear - you should only buy gear if it meets a specific need. As an example, a condensor mic may be a good choice, since the SM58 is not ideal for recording vocals and acoustic instuments (such as acoustic guitar) - although for certain voices (mainly male rock & roll screamers), an SM58 can be a good recording mic.

The M-Audio could make sense if you feel your A/D D/A conversions in and out of the computer are not good enough - although I question if the M-Audio would be significantly beetr than your Tone Port (I could be wrong - but I thought the Tone Port had some pre-amp simulations and was a decent A/D converter.

In any case - it seems like you are thinking this through with reasonable logic....so you will likely make good choices when you do decide to buy some gear.
 
I read up on the toneport thing, and I now want to join the camp that says you should work with what you have for awhile before rushing out and buying something (although, yes, a condenser might be good for vocals and the piano, and an acoustic guitar, but more on that later). Since the toneport has an integrated mic preamp and does 24bit/96khz conversion, you likely won't get a massive improvement if you run out and spend a couple hundred bucks on other hardware. The only limitation that jumps out from the specs is that there's only one mic input (and preamp), which limits you to mono recording, which will prevent you from using some nice recording techniques for the piano and acoustic guitar. But besides that, I think you'd need to spend more than a few hundred dollars on mic pre, converters, etc., to be guaranteed a big boost, and that's probably something you want to do carefully after some time passes (unless you've got bags of money you want to part with, in which case, don't let me stop you :D). The difficulty is that the toneport doesn't appear to have "line" inputs that would allow you to plug in another preamp, and so you'd have to either get a preamp/converter combo (read: interface) or run the preamp into your soundcard, which would be suboptimal (and it may have only one line in also), or get both a preamp and a converter separately. This situation kind of prevents you from doing an "incremental" upgrade to what you've got, in other words.

The best room to record in is one that has been designed and built (properly) for the purpose, I suppose, followed by one that has been devoted and (properly) treated for the purpose. Then you get into my territory :) - I also think that a cluttered room with furniture/mattress/otherstuff is probably better than a bare untreated room. But watch out for the piano, since its strings may be sympathetically vibrating with your other instruments.

One other thing -- when you're using the SM58 to record the amp, try unscrewing the grill ball and using the mic bare.
 
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