Setting up my home studio

J

JimmyP456

New member
Hey guys, just looking for some clarification on a couple things.

In a couple months I will be setting up a fairly simply home studio that will only require one input (a condenser mic). All I will be recording is vocals, each song will consist of around 10-20 tracks of vocals.

First question, do I need a mic pre? And if it is not required is it at least recommended?

Second question, I know that an audio interface is required for this type of recording, but can I use a mixer instead? I'm having some trouble trying to understand the difference between the purposes of a fairly big 10 track mixer and a small audio interface.

If so my set up will look like this

Mic > mic pre > audio interface/mixer > computer > audio interface out > monitors or headphones

Is this correct?

Sorry if I wasn't too clear and thanks in advance for any insights you can give!
 
Mic > audio interface > computer > audio interface out > monitors or headphones

Your audio interface should have a preamp... it's pretty hard (but not impossible) to buy one that doesn't. You don't need a mixer.

And do yourself a favour and buy a 2 channel interface, not a single channel box... you will find a use for that extra channel.

Look at the Focusrite series and a guy called ecc is going to chime in shortly and tell you of the wonders of his favourite interface.. all good.
 
"and a guy called ecc is going to chime in shortly and tell you of the wonders of his favourite interface.. all good. "

You called Arm'? Well, my FAVOURITE interface would probably be the new RME 802!

But leave us not be silly. Yes I am going to say that the Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 is, in mine and many other people's opinions, just about the best overall AI sub £200 and better than many in some respects than some twice the price.

Those "betters" are...

Very low latency. The KA6 will work down at 32samples if need be and that is better than my 2496 internal cards which only go to 64 samples and the M-Audio PCI cards were well known to be fast.

Very clean microphone amplifiers. Yes, you could wish for another 6-8dB of gain but even so they can cope with an SM57 on acoustic guitar, flat out and give a very acceptable noise floor. A brief test showed them to be virtually the same for gain and noise as my Focusrite 8i6.

Very, very! Solid drivers. I have never used a USB AI that was so unfussy. I have the drivers in 3 W7/64 machine and one running XP pro. I just plug in the KA6 and no bother, it just fekkin works.

Yes, the KA6 is around £60 more than the 2i2 but you do get some future proofing. MIDI , two more balanced line inputs and digital, SPDIF I/O. It also comes with Cubase "lite" and Kontakt Player and about 3.5 gig of downloadable samples.

If you have to stay at the £100 point the Steinberg UR22 is the equal of the 2i2, at least and comeS with Cubase and MIDI. Now! Peeps are after saying.."you don't need MIDI I/O on an AI anymore because everything comes with USB" .
Yes, almost true but what they DON'T tell us is that the poxy usb MIDI controller is not ITSELF an MIDI interface so if you want to use another MIDI ported device you are stuffed.

I have "chimed"!

Dave.
 
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