Best Addition for Less Than or Equal to $400

  • Thread starter Thread starter anonymous.bosh
  • Start date Start date
A

anonymous.bosh

New member
'wan't quite sure where to post this, but I thought I'd give here a go.

Currently:

M-Audio Fasttrack
M-Audio Axiom 61
Rode NTK
Shure SM-57

So... yeah, not very much. 'kind'a building up from nothing.

But, yeah, suggestions?
 
Well... what type of music do you make? Do you play any instruments?
 
I play piano/keyboards using primarily Cubase 5, Battery 3, Colossus and other softsynths for composition. Also do vocals.
 
Do you have any monitors? What do you have for a computer?
 
I use a Bose waveradio-thing as a monitor. It's pretty shitty, but I more or less use headphones for everything anyway (Sennheiser HD280). My computer is a custom built laptop: 2.6ghz, 4gigs RAM.
 
Yeah, then I'd say your next investment should be a nice pair of monitors. You should get used to mixing on loudspeakers rather than headphones. $300 can get you a pretty good pair, so it's right in your price range. I'd start researching and searching for monitor threads in this forum :)
 
i'm reading conflicting opinions as to whether monitors would legitimately increase my ability to mix
 
Okay, well if you don't decide to buy monitors some other things you might want to get if you don't have already are:

  • Large (1TB or more) hard drive for backups and some good backup software
  • Another MIDI controller (maybe an MPD style one)
  • Plugins
  • New DAW (just to mess around with or to possibly switch over to if you don't already have a quality DAW)
  • High quality cables
  • Computer upgrade (RAM or other aspects)
 
this is undoubtedly a foolish question, but why should i get another midi controller (beyond the fact that my Axiom-61 just died last night)?
 
It's always good to have options. It's personal preference, I guess, but it was just a suggestion if there is a different style controller you want. I'm not saying it's 100% necessary.
 
I'd say a backup drive or monitors would be the best investment at this point. Just my opinion.
 
I just found a pair of KRK Rokit 8s (generation 1) on Craigslist for $300 and picked 'em up. I was thinking the other day, that I probably should have invested in them much earlier in my days of recording. But then again, it would have meant not having a decent condenser for vocals, or not having other mics, cables, stands, etc.

I'm pretty much just rehashing what's already been said, but I do agree with the suggestions already stated.

Depending on your computer's specs/situation, you may want to spend some of it on upgrading the processor or RAM.

It's also always a good thing to have a place to back up data, as you never know when something could go wrong and you lose lots of recordings that may be of great value to you down the road. I used to always have backups and was an idiot and for a short period of time, I had my old, OLD recordings only in one place -- my external drive. I dropped it... and lost it all. It's not sad because the recordings were super great, it's sad because they were the first recordings I had ever made.. and that would have been nice to have down the road for nostalgic purposes.

Anyway, in short (after a long post..), it depends on what you think is important for your situation. Just think about the suggestions posted and go from there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top