D
drum420
New member
Hello forum readers,
Before I go on, I am a drummer who has been playing for 20 years and spent every one of those just bashing the skins, never paying attention to anything technical at all.. lets let the sound guys take care of it! For the last 4 years I have not able to play seriously, because I like to eat, and my wife informed me that she wanted our first born child to eat as well, so I put my artistic side on the back burner in favor of providing for my family. Recently, musicians from the past have hit me up to work on some music and since we live about 3 hours apart, we've all talked about recording separate tracks and sending them to each other adding our own pieces of the pie. Herein lies my complete lack of knowledge and the basis of my cry for help!
I have done some research and I think that I have gathered a few basics, but here is my situation. I have nice professional quality drums, a very beefy laptop for portability, a mixer, a rack mounted headphone amp, mediocre mics for my drums, and a room that is probably not very good acoustically since one wall is all glass with just hanging curtains in front of them.
GEAR
Drums: DW Custom 5 piece kit with 3 cymbals (crash, splash, hats) on the left along with percussion blocks and cowbells, and 3 cymbals on the right of the kit (crash, ride, china)
Laptop: Asus G73JH – Quad Core I7-720QM processor, 8 gigs of ram, duel 500GB hd's, and a killer graphics card. This was purchased as a gaming laptop, but I was hoping to be able to use it to record as well. The only drawback with this machine is that the only ports available are USB 2.0.
Mixer: Yamaha MG12/4
Mics: An old set of Audio-Technica Kitpak.. I know these mics are not very good, but hoping they will be good enough for what I need to do. The bass drum on my kit also came with a very nice Shure mic (not sure of the model, would have to remove a head to check)and plug built into the shell.
Headphone Amp: Samson S-phone rack mounted 4 channel Headphone mixer/amp
Also I have a Sony hi-def hard drive based digital video camera and Adobe Premiere Elements 8 for making some drum videos down the line.
Basically what I would like is help setting up a home studio with a limited budget, also using the gear that I currently have. I would like to be able to download audio tracks sent to me from the other members of the band and lay down a drum track to it, as well as record drums/video. We will be getting together to practice as a band every other week, and it would be nice to be also be able to record our practices playing thru the headphone amp as well.
After doing some research, I think that I need to purchase a few things... please correct me if I am wrong:
1)audio interface to plug into my laptop that must be USB 2.0 based... something like the E-MU 0404 USB? http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/proaudio/emu-0404-usb.html
2)2 overhead condenser mics... is the M-Audio Nova a decent choice? They look to be around my price range for a pair.
3)Was thinking about a Shure sm57 to mic my snare because I hate shitty sounding snares, and it would probably be a significant improvement over the old Audio-Technica mics that I have... but this is optional
4)Drum mic mounts and stands for the condenser mics... was looking at the Shure A56D mounts.. not sure on the condenser stands.
5)Software for my laptop.... I saw some free software such as Audacity or even the bundled software with the audio interface that I need to buy... would those work ok?
I'm sorry for the wall of text, but I am the kind of guy who needs to research to make the best purchase for the money... I've done some research, and quite frankly, I feel like my head is going to explode after reading all the technical stuff available to us on the web. Any advice would be greatly appreciated and thanks for your time!
Before I go on, I am a drummer who has been playing for 20 years and spent every one of those just bashing the skins, never paying attention to anything technical at all.. lets let the sound guys take care of it! For the last 4 years I have not able to play seriously, because I like to eat, and my wife informed me that she wanted our first born child to eat as well, so I put my artistic side on the back burner in favor of providing for my family. Recently, musicians from the past have hit me up to work on some music and since we live about 3 hours apart, we've all talked about recording separate tracks and sending them to each other adding our own pieces of the pie. Herein lies my complete lack of knowledge and the basis of my cry for help!
I have done some research and I think that I have gathered a few basics, but here is my situation. I have nice professional quality drums, a very beefy laptop for portability, a mixer, a rack mounted headphone amp, mediocre mics for my drums, and a room that is probably not very good acoustically since one wall is all glass with just hanging curtains in front of them.
GEAR
Drums: DW Custom 5 piece kit with 3 cymbals (crash, splash, hats) on the left along with percussion blocks and cowbells, and 3 cymbals on the right of the kit (crash, ride, china)
Laptop: Asus G73JH – Quad Core I7-720QM processor, 8 gigs of ram, duel 500GB hd's, and a killer graphics card. This was purchased as a gaming laptop, but I was hoping to be able to use it to record as well. The only drawback with this machine is that the only ports available are USB 2.0.
Mixer: Yamaha MG12/4
Mics: An old set of Audio-Technica Kitpak.. I know these mics are not very good, but hoping they will be good enough for what I need to do. The bass drum on my kit also came with a very nice Shure mic (not sure of the model, would have to remove a head to check)and plug built into the shell.
Headphone Amp: Samson S-phone rack mounted 4 channel Headphone mixer/amp
Also I have a Sony hi-def hard drive based digital video camera and Adobe Premiere Elements 8 for making some drum videos down the line.
Basically what I would like is help setting up a home studio with a limited budget, also using the gear that I currently have. I would like to be able to download audio tracks sent to me from the other members of the band and lay down a drum track to it, as well as record drums/video. We will be getting together to practice as a band every other week, and it would be nice to be also be able to record our practices playing thru the headphone amp as well.
After doing some research, I think that I need to purchase a few things... please correct me if I am wrong:
1)audio interface to plug into my laptop that must be USB 2.0 based... something like the E-MU 0404 USB? http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/proaudio/emu-0404-usb.html
2)2 overhead condenser mics... is the M-Audio Nova a decent choice? They look to be around my price range for a pair.
3)Was thinking about a Shure sm57 to mic my snare because I hate shitty sounding snares, and it would probably be a significant improvement over the old Audio-Technica mics that I have... but this is optional
4)Drum mic mounts and stands for the condenser mics... was looking at the Shure A56D mounts.. not sure on the condenser stands.
5)Software for my laptop.... I saw some free software such as Audacity or even the bundled software with the audio interface that I need to buy... would those work ok?
I'm sorry for the wall of text, but I am the kind of guy who needs to research to make the best purchase for the money... I've done some research, and quite frankly, I feel like my head is going to explode after reading all the technical stuff available to us on the web. Any advice would be greatly appreciated and thanks for your time!
Thats pretty much what i was saying is that i couldnt find any real user experiences with the unit, just manufacturer descriptions etc... what i was really looking for was a good comparison between the 1641 and the 2000... something like "hey if you like the 1641, the 2000 is all that in a neater package, but maybe not worth the 200 dollar price difference"... also maybe driver issues etc... the 1641 you can find pages and pages of forum posts... i think there were 2 posts about the 2000....
