N
Nobster
New member
Hello all,
I'm looking for some suggestions as to what to buy etc on a tight budget.
Quick background: I'm an oldie at music in general with limited and mostly ancient experience in commercial studios from being in bands many years ago. I've dabbled a bit in a friends home studio quite recently and done a little recording at home with various bits of cheap kit, some of which I still have.
After a long pause I now need to get quickly back into basic recording. Two main reasons are:
1) I'm now playing in a 3 piece band and we need to quickly record a demo to help us get gigs. We don't need top quality, this is mostly for getting bar gigs and maybe put a few mp3's online. It's guitar bass drums vocals and I'll need to record at least the drums and bass and a click track at our rehearsal room so a fairly portable setup is important. I'd probably track guitars/vocals at home.
2) I've got a lot of songs that I've co-written that I'd like to record at home just for the sake of it really. I may put em online but I don't intend to sell them. I don't have the luxury of a "studio" room, this will be in a bedroom/office setup, i.e. recording in front of a computer and probably mixing with headphones (I know that's a bad idea but I have AKG K240DF headphones and no monitors). I may use a drum machine and/or my son on roland v-drums.
For recording guitar I think I have enough stuff, a nice tube amp, a few small amps, lots of effects pedals, a Vamp Pro I could use as preamp/cabsim. and of course guitars and basses.
I have an sm58 at home and various other mics at the rehearsal room. At home I also have a small mixer that I can carry around in a case. It's a Behringer UB 1222FX.
I also have the use of a (my sons) little digital recorder, a Tascam DP004 but this is not ideal for recording the band because it can only record 2 tracks at a time. I'd like to at least get drums n' bass down together and that's going to be impossible unless I record the drums as a mono mix.
I have a M-Audio 2496 audiophile pci card in my old broken computer but as far as I recall it's records 2 inputs max. I have an ancient version of Cakewalk.
So ideally I need a portable setup with at least 3/4 simultaneous inputs (I could take a stereo mix from the v-drums). I could use the UB1222 for mic pres, phantom and also monitoring, so line level inputs is fine. I dont need specific guitar inputs or any kind of modelling.
I have an old Toshiba Satellite A60 laptop with 1 usb2 port and I think 1 firewire?. It's a P4 3GHz with 1.2G of ram and a slow 40G internal disk.
Can you suggest an audio interface for my needs ? would I be able to use the Toshiba or is that out of the question? What would be a good choice to replace it (cheaply!).
Assuming I have to get a laptop, I don't want to spend more than about 700 euros total including the interface. Is that possible? After reading a few threads here I guess I'll try Reaper to do the tracking.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
I'm looking for some suggestions as to what to buy etc on a tight budget.
Quick background: I'm an oldie at music in general with limited and mostly ancient experience in commercial studios from being in bands many years ago. I've dabbled a bit in a friends home studio quite recently and done a little recording at home with various bits of cheap kit, some of which I still have.
After a long pause I now need to get quickly back into basic recording. Two main reasons are:
1) I'm now playing in a 3 piece band and we need to quickly record a demo to help us get gigs. We don't need top quality, this is mostly for getting bar gigs and maybe put a few mp3's online. It's guitar bass drums vocals and I'll need to record at least the drums and bass and a click track at our rehearsal room so a fairly portable setup is important. I'd probably track guitars/vocals at home.
2) I've got a lot of songs that I've co-written that I'd like to record at home just for the sake of it really. I may put em online but I don't intend to sell them. I don't have the luxury of a "studio" room, this will be in a bedroom/office setup, i.e. recording in front of a computer and probably mixing with headphones (I know that's a bad idea but I have AKG K240DF headphones and no monitors). I may use a drum machine and/or my son on roland v-drums.
For recording guitar I think I have enough stuff, a nice tube amp, a few small amps, lots of effects pedals, a Vamp Pro I could use as preamp/cabsim. and of course guitars and basses.
I have an sm58 at home and various other mics at the rehearsal room. At home I also have a small mixer that I can carry around in a case. It's a Behringer UB 1222FX.
I also have the use of a (my sons) little digital recorder, a Tascam DP004 but this is not ideal for recording the band because it can only record 2 tracks at a time. I'd like to at least get drums n' bass down together and that's going to be impossible unless I record the drums as a mono mix.
I have a M-Audio 2496 audiophile pci card in my old broken computer but as far as I recall it's records 2 inputs max. I have an ancient version of Cakewalk.
So ideally I need a portable setup with at least 3/4 simultaneous inputs (I could take a stereo mix from the v-drums). I could use the UB1222 for mic pres, phantom and also monitoring, so line level inputs is fine. I dont need specific guitar inputs or any kind of modelling.
I have an old Toshiba Satellite A60 laptop with 1 usb2 port and I think 1 firewire?. It's a P4 3GHz with 1.2G of ram and a slow 40G internal disk.
Can you suggest an audio interface for my needs ? would I be able to use the Toshiba or is that out of the question? What would be a good choice to replace it (cheaply!).
Assuming I have to get a laptop, I don't want to spend more than about 700 euros total including the interface. Is that possible? After reading a few threads here I guess I'll try Reaper to do the tracking.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
I suppose I'd like to record at least 4 simultaneous tracks. I'd need a relatively quick and easy way to get individual wav files to a computer and back again in case I need to any editing that the machine doesn't handle on it's own, but built-in mastering would also be nice.
