can anyone help me?

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Heatherlee

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Im a struggling upcoming artist. I got halfway through my album with a producer and went broke. I have not been playing out because it is near impossible to keep a good band together here with all the pills and crap theyre caught up on. My fans have been requesting an album for years so I got a good deal on a pv8 usb mixer and behringer c1 microphone, the problem is i am technologically challenged lol. I know how to write and play but i cant figure out all these knobs and buttons.

does anyone have any suggested settings for my PV8 mixer to make it sound good. also why do my vocal recordings have so much noise almost like white noise.... I am starting to make a vocal booth in my dining room , any ideas are welcome. if you would like to see some of what I do I have alot of rough videos on my music page. myspace.com/heatherleemusic

please any advice you have would be amazing! have a nice day
 
Heatherlee said:
please any advice you have would be amazing!
Click to expand...
Chicken or the egg... You need to learn to listen and learn your tools. There are no "settings that work" - You use the settings you need. You know those settings by knowing what you're listening for and how the tools apply.
 
Heather, you should hire a local tutor to help you set up your gear and teach you how to record and mix tracks. It's not difficult if you're determined to learn, and it's even less difficult if you have someone there to show you the basics in person.

--Ethan
 
Tim O'Brien's 'usual' post:

My obligatory standard reply-for-newbies that I keep in Wordpad so this is just a paste (I don't want to re-type this all the time):

First off, immediately get a good beginner recording book (spend $20 before spending hundred$/thousand$) that shows you what you need to get started and how to hook everything up in your studio:
Home Recording for Musicians by Jeff Strong - $16
http://www.amazon.com/Home-Recording...3169612&sr=1-1
PC Recording Studios for Dummies - $16
http://www.amazon.com/Recording-Stud...3169612&sr=1-2
(Wish I'd had those when I started; would have saved me lots of money and time and grief)
You can also pick up this book in most any Borders or Barnes&Noble in the Music Books section!

Another good one is: Recording Guitar and Bass by Huw Price
http://www.amazon.com/Recording-Guit...5734124&sr=1-1
(I got my copy at a place called Half-Price Books for $6!!)

Home Recording for Beginners by Geoffrey Francis
http://www.amazon.com/Home-Recording.../dp/1598638815

When you get a bit into it, I highly recomend The Art of Mixing by David Gibson
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Mixing-Rec.../dp/1931140456

And you can get a FREE subscription to TapeOp magazine at www.tapeop.com

Barnes&Noble or Borders are great places to start --- they have recording books and you can go get a snack or coffee and read them for FREE! Don't pass by a good recording book --- this is a VERY technical hobby and you REALLY want to start a reference library!!!

Good Newbie guides that also explains all the basics and have good tips:
http://www.tweakheadz.com/guide.htm
http://www.computermusic.co.uk/page/..._beginner_pdfs
http://www.harmony-central.com/articles/
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/tips-...echniques.html

21 Ways To Assemble a Recording Rig: http://www.tweakheadz.com/rigs.htm

Other recording books: http://musicbooksplus.com/home-recording-c-31.html

Still using a built-in soundcard?? Unfortunately, those are made with less than $1 worth of chips for beeps, boops and light gaming (not to mention cheapness for the manufacturer) and NOT quality music production.
#1 Rule of Recording: You MUST replace the built-in soundcard.
Here's a good guide and tested suggestions that WORK: http://www.tweakheadz.com/soundcards...ome_studio.htm
(you'll want to bookmark and read through all of Tweak's Guide while you're there...)

A great sequencer option is REAPER at http://www.cockos.com/reaper/ (It's $60 but runs for free until you get guilty enough to pay for it...) I use Reaper and highly reccomend it...

Music Notation and MIDI recording: Melody Assistant ($25) and Harmony Assistant ($80) have the power of $600 notation packages...
http://myriad-online.com
Demo you can try on the website.

And you can go out to any Barnes&Noble or Borders and pick up "Computer Music" magazine - they have a full FREE studio suite in every issue's DVD, including sequencers, plugins and tons of audio samples. (November 2006 they gave away a full copy of SamplitudeV8SE worth $150, November 2007-on the racks Dec in the US- they gave away SamplitudeV9SE and July 2009 issue they put out Samplitude10SE. FREE. It pays to watch 'em for giveaways...)
 
Do you have anything we can listen to from the upcoming album from before you went broke?

The stuff on your site is very poor (audio) quality.

There's no reason you can't get a much higher quality via home recording, but learning how takes time and effort and probably money.

Do you have the time? Do you have any money to throw at the project?
 
thank you

thank you all for your useful information. I do have a couple samples of my professional recordings before I went broke lol, but i cant figure out how to upload mp3s on here. you will have to email me and I will send you a couple. myangelmeows@aol.com ...The first 5 I have are already finished and copyrighted, and i also started 2 more of the last 6 but am unable to get good vocal sounds without noise. So far I have put over $500.00 into professional recordings and have spent about the same buying my own equipment, but unfortunately work slowed down ALOT and I am only getting between 8 and 20 hours a week. If I had the funds I would definitely look into a professional tutor, but unfortunately all I have in my favor is my pv8 usb mixer, behringer c1 condenser, FL studio, acid pro, ableton, the beginning of a makeshift recording booth, and any instrument i need. I cant figure out how to even work ableton and when I use acid pro there is a 2 second lag in recording

also I was wondering what is the best, least expensive material for my booth?
 
I wouldn't worry about a booth at this point...it's not going to add any kind of quality to what you currently have and how you are using it.
There's just a whole bunch of things that need to come first...so don't waste time/money on any booth.

Not looking to discourage you...but understand that even at the home recording level, people spend a good deal of time learning how to just get to doing pretty decent sounding stuff...not to mention a fair amount of money.
So don't get frustrated when first starting out...it takes some....
 
The OP sounds like the perfect candidate for hiring out a professional studio.

If you can't afford studio time, you probably can't afford the equipment to approximate it.

Then there's the whole learning curve and the desire for instant shortcut knowledge...
 
Heatherlee said:
If I had the funds I would definitely look into a professional tutor
Click to expand...

What I had in mind was spending $100 or maybe $200 to get an expert over to connect everything and show you what to do in person. Versus spending that much for books and also investing days / weeks / months reading and understanding. Regardless, this short article explains the basic way to connect your gear to a computer:

Using a Mixer with a DAW

Your mixer owner's manual may show other connection ideas.

--Ethan
 
Make sure your microphone is getting phantom power.
 
I think almost everyone who has responded is going in the WRONG direction.

Heather, you have "Half" a studio album in the can? If that means about 5 songs, make that into an EP, and burn 100 copies.

Strip down your expectations for band size- you plus one or two other musicians. If one of them owns/is profficient with a looper, all the better- don't worry about what a looper is, or how to use one- get a good musician who owns/uses/knows his looper and let him use it. Make sure they both know NO DRUGS is the rule- in fact, make sure they are both clear and down with YOUR vision, then practice, get tight, and play, baby, play. Sell those 100 CD's at shows, make more as needed.

Notice no technical moves on your part? Be a musician, use what you already have at your disposal, and move forward. I strongly suspect you will enjoy live much more than if you try to learn recording, at least for the next year or so.

Oh, and where is "here?"
 
Help you? I don't know, but perhaps indirectly...

The first job is to sit down and ask yourself some questions and answer them truthfully. The first being: Do you want to learn to record and mix your own stuff? I mean, can you see yourself doing that and would you enjoy the process?

Don't worry about the idea of being a bit 'technologically challenged' discourage you because IT is split into so many different groups of expertise that those of us who have come forward in sound engineering through computers may not have come as far in, say - image manipulation or web-publishing, for instance. The point is to develop expertise in your chosen field, using the computer as a tool, to help you achieve what you want.

Now I can confidently say I've reached more or less the height of what a person can do with a still image processor and become something of an expert in this field, because visual art was my first discipline... but I still know only a fraction of Microsoft Office - and yet I can still type a letter. Now, when I came to recording, (people will back me up here) I had next to no clue what I was doing. I literally didn't know which socket to plug first or what knob did what (apart from the stupidly, obviously labelled).

I thought that because I was so familiar with computers, I'd be able to learn audio in a snap - but that wasn't the case. I had to learn an entirely new discipline, from the ground up. The computer can then be likened to something like a 'patchbay' or 'exchange'; simply an environment in which you exercise your knowledge of the chosen discipline but (in this case) in the realms of a digital audio workstation which, although it can't be expected to mimic Abbey Road exactly, there will be correlative patterns in the functions; at least enough sameness to know what button you're looking for, rather than looking at buttons and glumly wondering what the hell they all do.

So in other words, the key to learning all this is not to sit there, like a rabbit in the headlights, drinking in the complexity of it all and getting sick (that's almost fatal) but to define your actual problems; define what you want to achieve first - and then use the computer as the tool for solving them... ONE AT A TIME!

And the very first question you've got to ask yourself, after looking at the world of home analogue recording - is not whether you 'think you can' learn it, but whether you WANT to learn it. This idea is completely based on the old adage:

"Where there's a will there's a way."

And if you have the will, hell - the 'way' is out there, sitting on the shelves of your local digital music hardware store, waiting to be purchased, assembled, read about and... applied to your problems.

Does that help any?

If it does, and your answer to the first question is "yes" then I can gaurantee you'll find answers to each frustrating (and they will be frustrating) questions that crop up in the first few weeks - right in this forum.

It's just a series of humps and each one you get over, gives you that little extra speed to get over the next one... and so forth.

So... Are you up for it?

Dr. V
 
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Heatherlee said:
FL studio
Click to expand...

Ah, now I could probably help you find your way around FL Studio, because it's soley what I use. Firstly, what version are you using? For starteers, I think you need a pro version of it to record.

Don't ask me about Ableton 'cos I have a lite version of that and can't figure it out either! :confused:

Dr. V
 
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