DAW questions, help!

[Ghazi]

I must admit first off that I'm a newb, and I need help creating a small home studio. I'm trying to setup a small home studio for making hip-hop instrumentals mainly through MIDI. I need them to be very professional and sound very clean. I'm buying a MIDI-controller (was possibly thinking about an Evolution, hearing they are better over the Radium), I have an MPC2000XL, a Technics 1200 turntable, and a P4 computer that I want to operate as the DAW. I want to bring all this equipment together to work together through a program such as Sonar. I'm not going to be recording vocals. The soundcard I got with my computer was an Audigy, so I'm looking to buy a low-latency professional soundcard that will be best for the DAW. I'll need advice in that area as well. Eventually I want to be able to hookup several sound modules (like a Mo Phatt for example) to my setup and be able to use them as well.

This is quite confusing for me. I see things like the MOTU 828 firewire audio interface, what exactly is it? Do I need anything like that for my setup? What type of mixer would be good for bringing all my equipment together? Would something like a Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro be good for what I need? Is there anything else that I will need for my setup? Will I need preamps, what exactly do they do? I realize my question is very in-depth, but I'm a newb. ;-p

 

[Ed Dixon]

It boils down to a couple of things you can do.

1. Do all recording that is PC based using PC gear and software

2. Do recording using a separate multi-track recorder and then use PC to mix result

It's not clear to me what different sources you want to record and how many you want to record at one time. What do you want to do with the recorded result?

For many, option 2 is a good one to consider. Latency is gone, recording is mobile, and costs are fairly low.

Ed