Confused, and need direction

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sibleypeck

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I fancy myself a composer, and do almost entirely MIDI. I do not play keys and do not have a synth. What MIDI I do is written in musical notation.
The only audio I do is voice and guitar.
I am just getting my feet wet with DAW and need advice regarding equipment purchases. All I have, so far, is a good mic - no pre-amp, no signal processing, no mixer; just Pro Audio, SB Live, and a decent mic (Electrovoice RE20).
I want pro quality sounds, including drums, so I can make pro-sounding demos. I don't expect to need more than two audio inputs - for now.
What I THINK I should do is invest in a great sound module, a great A/D converter, and a pro-quality limiter (Can one use a limiter on voice with no mic pre?)
Where possible, I'd like to use expandable units, so I can begin small, with pro-quality, reliable stuff, and double the capacity of my set-up if and when it is warranted.
Can anyone give guidance?
 
Sounds like you have most of what you need to get started. An SB Live with some good Sound Fonts makes a very decent MIDI synth.

I would suggest getting a decent mic preamp, or a decent mixer, first. With this, the SB Live, and your stated needs (specifically only two inputs at a time)

No sense in getting a limiter without a mic preamp; they work on line-level signals. There are many mic preamps that have a limiter circuit built in...

All the other stuff you mentioned, while a great way to spend money, will not help you compose any better. If you want to produce a truly professional recording, better equipment helps -- but even more important will be your skills at mixing. You can develop your recording skills with the Live for the moment; then if you want to go the next step once you've become resonably skilled at getting good signals to disk and applying effects and mixing, then look into improving the setup.

But you can do very far with a good mic, a decent mixer/preamp, and an SB Live...
 
AlChuck,
I'm so glad you replied to my post. I didn't think anyone was going to. I have questions, though.
You mentioned "good Sound Fonts". I don't know what that is. The SB Live card has instrument sounds, but few of them are good. The drums, in particular, roundly suck. What exactly do you mean by Sound Fonts?
In Pro Audio there is no EQ for MIDI (unless it is there and I don't know about it). So I can't really improve the sound of the drums by mixing. Do I need to convert the MIDI drums to audio, and EQ that? Is that what people do?
I feel like my composing and arranging skills exceed my mixing skills, but that my mixing ability is hampered by cheap instrument sounds.
About mic pres: I am going straight into the sound card now (XLR>impedence-matching transformer>1/4" plug>1/8"mini-plug) and getting a hot enough level. If mic pres and limiters both work on line-level signals, as you say, why not skip the pre? The answer may be incredibly obvious, but I just don't know it. Please help me out, if you can.
 
Sound Fonts are a file format for samples, developed by Creative Labs for their Sound Blaster cards. Instead of just having WAV samples for their wavetable synths burned into ROM, they made it so that the sound sets could be stored in RAM (first on the soundcard, then, with the Live card, in system RAM). The upshot is that you can create very good sound sets from almost any source material and use them in the card in addition to the standard sound set.

Check here for more info and some example MP3 files of some very good commercially-available Sound Fonts:

http://www.sonicimplants.com/Products/allaboutsoundfonts.htm

Check out these drums:

http://www.sonicimplants.com/Products/drumimplants.htm

(the Blue Jay drum sets)...

There are also some pretty good free ones available on the web. Perhaps the best resource is Hammersound:

http://www.hammersound.net/

Yeah, you can't EQ the MIDI instruments in Cakewalk. You can either render them to audio, or make the adjustments on the MIDI instrument itself if it offers such capability. With an SB Live, you could find samples you basically like, EQ them (as audio) until you are really happy with them, and then create a Sound Font out of them.

Mic pres work with line level signals if you keep the gain down. The whole point is that microphones do not put out line level signals (nor do instrument pickups like guitar and bass pickups). It's a preamp's job to apply enough gain to the signal to get them to line level.
 
AlChuck,
I tried converting the MIDI (mix) to audio and applying EQ and it worked! It sounds about 100% better. Now I just have about 1000% to go.
I've decided to separate the drums (MIDI) onto individual tracks and give each its own EQ. I've worked on the bass and snare, and come up with something I'm happy with. Bass: Parametric: Filter 1: -2db@50Hz; F2: -8db@260Hz; F3: +3db@5KHz (Q of 1.0 for all). Snare: Parametric: F1 +5db@300Hz; -5db@1KHz; +7db@7kHz.
Can you tell me how to create a Sound Font out of them?

sib
 
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