Beginner Questions

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Brian_Buresh

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I have been trying to educate myself in digital recording for a few weeks and plan to purchase a computer and digital recording card. I'm not quite sure of the process, though. Can I record with only my PC and an Echo Darla sound card? Also, it is my understanding that I can plug my 1/4in. guitar signal directly into the Echo equipment. Is that right, or do I have to go through a mixer or preamp or something? One more thing. . .I'm looking at a computer with a pentium 3. How much RAM should I have to record digital music? Any thoughts on the Darla for a beginner?
 
I'm not sure about the guitar, you may need a DI box. I'll let someone else comment on that. You would need a preamp (or mixer with preamps) for any microphones.

I would suggest at least 256Mb RAM for recording. You probably wouldn't need any more than that.

I've never used the Darla card. I currently use a Delta 1010 and am quite satisfied with it. HIghly recommend staying away from any "consumer" cards such as Soundblaster, unless you want to do MIDI. Most "audio" cards do not have MIDI synths. Also, when considering the card you need to consider how many "simultaneous" tracks you want to record. You need at least one input for each simultaneous track. However, if you record just one track at a time, you only need one input.

Of course, you will also need some type of recording software (Sonar, Cubase, Cakewalk, N-Tracks, etc.)
 
There's an article on www.prorec.com called "Roll Your Own" 2000 that describes what kind of computer is best for digital recording. I am not sure on what kind of sound card is best (I use a crappy sblive for now). As for plugging straight into your soundcard....you can do this but you don't get a great tone and any effects you want on guitar (ie. distortion) have to be added once you have recorded the track. At least that is what I have found with Cakewalk. Personally I like running my guitar into one of those guitar amp simulator units (eg. POD) and then into the soundcard. Getting a mixer though is a good idea cause then you can run everything (guitar, mics etc) through the mixer preamp and into the card. Hope this helps.

Chris
 
A few more questions:

I forgot to ask an improtant question in this post: How much space does this type of audio take up? Like one minute of audio, for example? And what type of trouble would I run into with lower-than-optimum RAM? Like, say 128 meg?
 
ok im going to assume you dont know too much about computers and with that in mind ill tell you what i think you want to know. if you do know about computers skip down a bit.

id suggest an athlon k7 or anything amd, but thats just me personally. your pentium 3 will more than likely handle just about any kind of sound card, but double check just to make sure. ram and hard drive space are another matter. RAM or memory (that 128MB or 256MB thing) is not what you store informationon, and how much you have will not determine how large a wav file you can store on your computer. 256MB of ram will definatley provide you with more recording stability when say youve got 5 or 6 tracks open and the computer is trying to keep everything running smoothly while tweaking the sounds with a software mixer. i do it with 128 but it is a pain in the ass sometimes.

your hard drive is your info storage and right now most hard drives are typically anywhere from 10 to 50 gigabytes. a gigabyte is a 1000 megabytes and belive me 50 gigabytes is plenty of hard drive space. however i have a 10 gig and im not hurting or anything when i record. your average wav file, suggesting that a typical song is about 3 to 4 minutes, is about 30 to 60 megabytes. granted that is when i record in 16 bit depth. i have yet to do it in 24 which is where you should be. i dont think it whould be dramatically different though. so 3 to 4 minute guitar track at 40MB, a bass track at 40MB, a drum track at 40MB, vocals...and whatever. your looking at maybe 150 MB. worth of eaten up space a song. then you mix down all your wav files to make one wav file and that becomes about 40- 60mb. most recording software will let you convert wav files to mp3s and the file compression is much greater. a 60 MB file becomes like a 5 MB file. the only sad thing is you cant delete all the other crap because that is truely your mixing tapes so to speak. if you ever want to go back and adjust the sound levels they are all there. after about 10 to 15 songs on my computer space can get a little cramped with all my other games in the way and its time for all the wavs to be burned on a cd as a backup. INVEST IN A CD BURNER...either way. hope that answers your question.
 
guitar straigth into the box= bad... use a di box they're cheap... better yet use a sansamp redbox... excellent sound i heard...

guhlenn
 
make sure you have a fast hard drive 7200rpm or more if you really wanted.
 
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