Hi all,
I'm trying to set up a pretty basic home recording studio (just recording vocals and classical guitar). I have a regular PC laptop, a Rode NT1A condenser mic and a Xenyx 1202 mixer. Anyone willing to forgive my ignorance and let me know what else I need? I have a general idea, but it would be really nice to make sure before I go out and make bad-purchasing-decisions.
Thanks so much!
My 2 cents:
Take the mixer out of you input chain and put it in the output chain. Maybe use it to monitor you mix while tracking for headphones and adding some reverb to sweeten things while tracking. Also never tell anyone again that
you own any of that brand equipment.
You gonna need 1 or 2 small condensers your rode is not going to get you the sound you want for a classical guitar not by itself. There are some inexpensive MHS mics you will mentioned everywhere on this forum get yourself one of those.
Your going to need a firewire audio interface like a Motu, RME, those are
pretty good middle of the road units.
Also you'll need some software such as Cake Walk Sonar? or Pro Tools
I think some the M-Audio interfaces have Pro Tools LE included that would
save you some cash if you can live with the M-Audio hardware.
You'll also need a pair of monitors, and bunch of good cables depending
on what your hardware requires. Better had some power conditioning
for everthing to plug into.
Do you know what time of chip your fire port uses in your laptop if is not
a Texas Instrment chip you may need a PCMCI card that has this chip in
it because the fire audio interfaces can be real finicky about what they
are plugged into. You'll also want to make sure you have atleast 1GB in
your lap top and a nice fast cpu.
Other than that you just need a good place with good acoustics to record in.
That will get you on your way then you can start looking into the fun stuff.
Expensive mics, pres, compressors, plugins