Jeremy
Just an FYI. All of my home-made panels are now sold. I still have the packaged mineral wool if you think you can make it up - they are also on craigslist, but no one yet has offered to buy them. All the best with the wife/kid.
Can you see the pics now?-- put them on flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51090553@N05/sets/72157624141227479/
The thing is, I'm moving around June 23rd. Any of this stuff not gone by then gets loaded on the truck and moved into a storage unit. I'll probably put them up on Craigslist in a...
Some pics: Mineral Wool Sheets (I have 2 rolls of burlap that I'll throw in for anyone who buys this stuff).
And, my homemade acoustic panels. Not pretty, but functional. Most have a wooden frame, but a couple of the 4x2' panels are just burlap over the mineral wool, designed for ceiling...
If anyone around Winston Salem, NC is interested, I have a few packages of Delta 8 (8 pcf 4" thick) mineral wool insulation (3 packages of 3 sheets each 4"x2'x4') for sale. Each package sells for around $50-60 new, but I'll let them go for $25 for each 3-sheet pack. They are still in shrinkwrap...
For something clean and cheap - Rane MS-1b.
A little higher up would be a Grace 101.
If you want something that has the option to be fairly clean, or can have some balls, I'd get the Great River MP-1NV.
A cheap and simple solution is to run the pickup output into a sansamp type device. The Behringer BDI21 (bass sansamp clone) is only $30 has enough tone shaping options that you can really dial out that quacky sound. It won't give you a "pure" acoustic tone, but that's hard to get live for the...
Alot is going to depend on the guitar itself and the room you are recording in. Adding some absorption panels to your studio will help lessen the room sound. Then you can play around with reverbs to get get the right space. It also sounds like that myspace guy is blending a microphone with a...
If you can program a midi bass line, you can play it with a VSTi, like the yohng 4Front bass, which is free.
http://www.yohng.com/bass.html
Or, just get ezwillis to play it for you.
Just because a mic is more expensive does not mean it will sound better on everything, nor will it necessarily be a better mic for your needs. They are still both relatively inexpensive mics. If it's not the one for you, return it or sell it and try something else.
I don't really know what LE4 has these days, but I suspect it is far less powerful than reaper. You may prefer the interface of one over the other, so there's no harm in trying both and using the one you prefer.
You need to unzip/install the VSTs into your Cubase VST folder, so Cubase can find them when it boots up. It should be something like: Program Files --> Steinberg --> Cubase --> VST (at least on a PC). Look there and put them where the other built-in plugins are located.
It's worth picking up a used Ludwig Acrolite snare. Definitely a workhorse and usually under $100 in good condition on e-bay.
You can get A-Customs as a pack from Zildjian for around $700. A pretty good deal, imo, but buying used will be cheaper - just make sure they are in good shape.