Advice for a beginner

L

Lis Valle

New member
Hi! I need some advice to build a set up. I’ve been a musician for a while, but now I’m becoming interested in electronic/techno music and production and I want to build an amateur home studio but I’m not sure which direction to take first. I’m on a low budget. The economy is going down and I’m unemployed so I don’t want to spend tons of money in something that might or might not work. Also I hope to achieve decent quality demos to promote myself as an artist and luckily make some money by composing.

For my last musical project (which ended a while ago) I used an Octapad for playing drums and a Zoom r24 to record me and the rest of the band. I also own a Casio ctk-3200 with decent effects and Volcas keys and sample.

The octapad worked great for rehearsals and live performances, but now that I’m making the whole song from a chair it doesn’t seem so practical now. I’m much more comfortable using the Volsa sample to play the drums line, so I’m considering selling the octapad to buy an mpc 1000, I believe it will work both as drum machine and sampler.
On the other hand, my only synths would be the Casio, which has limited options but works well to begin with, and the Volga keys, which is not entirely mine so it won’t be always available. My other option is Selling the Zoom and buy a decent laptop and an audio interface. This way I could use the keyboard as a midi controller and use digital synths.

This is of course what I could figure out, but I’m open to suggestions. Help please!!!
 
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I think, (imVho!) that you are almost "there", all you lack is a decent interface with MIDI ports (the Octopad has them) The Casio seem to only transmit MIDI via the USB port but could I am sure be made to work.

So, look for an AI with 4 analogue inputs and MIDI and given your impecunious state you will probably have to go for a Behringer. Maybe someone here can tell us if the latency is up to keyboard work? Or, look at second hand.

"Decent laptop"? What is the specc' of the computer you are using now? You don't need Deep Blue to set down a few tracks. Ok, if you build 25 tracks and put 3 plugins on each one, steam will run out but you can always break things down into smaller chunks.

You will need a DAW of course and Reaper is excellent but there are quite a few free DAWs around now that might suite. Studio One and Cakewalk come to mind.

Dave.
 
I used to work on a pretty powerful desktop, but it was a shared computer. Now I’ve moved from that place and didn’t take the computer with me. It was in a crowded place, so it was never truly comfortable to work with. So, with decent I mean a laptop for myself that I can fill with my stuff and has enough memory to stack a few tracks.

Also, I have a few doubts. Is the mpc 1000 a good choice? Also is the R24 really needed if I get a laptop with an AI?
 
Lis Valle said:
I used to work on a pretty powerful desktop, but it was a shared computer. Now I’ve moved from that place and didn’t take the computer with me. It was in a crowded place, so it was never truly comfortable to work with. So, with decent I mean a laptop for myself that I can fill with my stuff and has enough memory to stack a few tracks.

Also, I have a few doubts. Is the mpc 1000 a good choice? Also is the R24 really needed if I get a laptop with an AI?
Click to expand...

I mean, what are you using right now?! No, you probably would not need the r24 if you had a good AI.

Dave.
 
I’m using a borrowed laptop with Intel processor and 2mb of RAM. But I only use it to store finished work, most of the editing is done with the r24.
 
Lis Valle said:
I’m using a borrowed laptop with Intel processor and 2mb of RAM. But I only use it to store finished work, most of the editing is done with the r24.
Click to expand...

Ok, well my son did quite a lot of MIDI work and guitar recording with a 3.2G single core processor and 2G (err, surely you mean gig?)

Dave.
 
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