Help needed!?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Niall Maxwell
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Niall Maxwell

New member
Hi folks,Im new here.

I really hope you can help,ive been interested in recording for quite some time now.
I have a good idea of how it works,well sorta haha.

I have a powerbook apple mac that i bought 2 years ago for uni and i feel disapointed with what i bought i spend 1100 pounds and i feel i didnt get very much for my money.

But my mate talked me into getting a windows based desktop just last week which im really pleased with.Its got a 700gn harddisk and 4gb of ram and its a quad core processor.For what i know of computers i no it to be a good system.

Music wise i play pianos and keyboards,I have an acoustic yamaha baby grand and roland keyboard.

I know i need an interface i was thinking about the edirol firewire fa66 that has midi for electronic keyboards and 2 mic channels for recording my grand piano.Do you think this is a good interface??Do you recommend anyothers??

Do I need a mixing desk?? I was thinking about the Samson MDR6

As i will be recording on my windows computer i will need good software what do u recomend????

Budget wise i am flexable i will pay good money for a quality product i know will last me a while.

I hope some of you can answer my questions?

Thanks so much

Niall,Ireland

:)
 
THere are several ways to record and mix. You have the computer. I would start out mixing "in the box" which means mixing audio tracks in software. I wouldn't spend too much money on them if your just diving into this for the first time. Converters are like anything else. You can pay a few hundred or a few thousand (us dollars that is). The ediorol sound fine. But remember if you want to track a drum kit you need at least 3 or 4 simutanious channels of
conversion. Remember that there are stand alone converts and mic preamp/converters. If you were going to use the mic pres on a mixing desk or outboard mic pre's, logic would tell you to get stand alone converters (like RME multiface or maudio 1010).

As far as DAW software. I have only used Cubase. It was not easy learning it on my own. I'm sure there are cubase forums here and elsewhere as there are for other software. Just got to jump in head first.

I would use the search function. You can find out a lot by just reading other post.
 
Cheers

Thanks man,Yeah I think i only really need two mic channels for recording acoustic piano and the edirol has midi too for my keyboard.The edirol looks like a very solid piece of hard ware.

How would i set up a small analog mixing desk for computer recording with that interface?
 
Niall Maxwell said:
Thanks man,Yeah I think i only really need two mic channels for recording acoustic piano and the edirol has midi too for my keyboard.The edirol looks like a very solid piece of hard ware.

How would i set up a small analog mixing desk for computer recording with that interface?
Click to expand...

You don't need the mixing desk if you just need the preamps to run into the Edirol. Depending on your budget, you can do pretty well for yourself.

So, first things first, do you have any microphones? Acoustic piano is probably up there with the more difficult instruments to accurately reproduce, so decent mics are a must.

Next will be the preamp, so a general idea about budget would help :)
 
I spend 220 pounds which is about 300 dollors on two akg c1000's

Im not sure what a preamp is?? is that different to the edirol fa66 firewire interface?

Budget wise i am flexible i want things i can rely on but i dont want things and features i dont need.

cheers
 
Niall Maxwell said:
I spend 220 pounds which is about 300 dollors on two akg c1000's

Im not sure what a preamp is?? is that different to the edirol fa66 firewire interface?

Budget wise i am flexible i want things i can rely on but i dont want things and features i dont need.

cheers
Click to expand...

The Edirol your looking at has the mic pre's built in with the ad conversion.

A mic preamp is a gain stage to bring the audio from the mic to line level which is high enough to capture the audio to record.

This looks like a good start for you.

THere is software mixing and there is analog mixing which is with an actual mixing desk.

To mix with an actual mixing desk from a pc based daw, would require bussing audio channels out of the software thru d/a converstion. So, if you had 10 software audio tracks to mix you would need at least 10 channels of D/A converstion (which the edoriol doesn't have) that would then feed and analog mixing console.

Or you could sub mix in the software combining channels (for ex. a stereo drum mix) and use only 2 channels of D/A converstion to feed a mixing desk.

The simple thing to do for you I would reccomend is to do all of your mixing within the software and export (or mixdown) from the application software to a wav file.
 
pre amp

Yeah the ediriol has a pre amp but i read in a number of reviews that its not great but everything else in the interface is good.

I'd looked a pre-amps online and came accross the M-AUDIO DMP 3 pre-amp,the price looks good do you think it would be worth while getting one to go along with the ediriol,if so how do i hook up the preamp to the interface and computer etc?
 
Niall Maxwell said:
Yeah the ediriol has a pre amp but i read in a number of reviews that its not great but everything else in the interface is good.

I'd looked a pre-amps online and came accross the M-AUDIO DMP 3 pre-amp,the price looks good do you think it would be worth while getting one to go along with the ediriol,if so how do i hook up the preamp to the interface and computer etc?
Click to expand...


absolutely not, it would be a waste of money. You would need to buy something pretty nice to hear a big difference. Put it this way you would need to spend 3-4 hundred dollars a channel to hear much better results.
 
Excellent

Ok so computer with cubase

Fire wire interface

From that run midi in/out to the roland keyboard

and my two akg's from the xlr inputs to my piano

and that should be me running?

Is that all i need?
 
Excellent,Thanks so much guys :)

I'll keep you all posted on how im getting on
 
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