Help With Studio Please

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Christoffer

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Hello, i am very new to this world. i graduated high school last year and tried out college but that just not seem right at this current time. i have wanted to to open/build my own studio for a long time now. i have been working two jobs for the last 8 months to save up for this project. i was wondering if anyone could give me some advise and/or opinion on some equipment. if anyone please has the time to send me an email about certain things i should buy for this studio please feel free to shoot me a line chris.hofmeister@yahoo.com

i would appreciate some hep.

Thanks again
 
First off, there are a lot of things to consider. These include, will you be using an existing building or new construction? What kind of location is it in, are there neighbors nearby, etc. Are you considering building basically from scratch or starting off in a basement or something like that. The studio is much more than the sum of its gear. The rooms are more important than just about any gear, so you need to make sure the rooms are up to snuff first. Then comes the question of what do you have already, what kind of capacity do you want to end up with, what is your budget, etc. Building a good studio, especially from scratch, can be EXTREMELY expensive, but you can also do a decent project studio for a reasonable amount of money. So before we flood you with suggestions, why don't you fill us in a little more on your vision of this place and what things you know already.
 
yeah ok, sorry. i did take all those into thought. my main concern was equipment. i am moving into a five bedroom house on the outskirts of where i live, neighbors are pretty distant. i have a whole basement to myself which contains two rooms. they are all dry-walled and i really wanted to buy the installation to put on the wall to sound proof the room more. the room is fairly large with a walk in closet big enough for a drum set, which i was also going to sound proof.

My budget as of right now is 6,000. i know that not THAT much, but really i just want the basics of a studio to start and grow and replace equipment as i go.

and as for programs, i have had a years experience using pro tools but a few people i talked to yesterday referenced me to a different program, cant remember what it was called though.
 
There are a lot of options here. First I want to talk about soundproofing. Insulation helps with absorption, not soundproofing. Soundproofing requires mass (like extra sheets of drywall, deadsheets, etc.). If the others in your house don't mind hearing drums, then the real issue is how much nosie will get in to your studio from the other parts of the house. Is there a lot of footfall noise (can you hear people walking on the floor above you)? If so, this can make your situation tricky. Assuming that your isolation is adequate, for equipment you need something to record to. Do you want to record to a computer? Then you need a nice computer, at least a dual core machine to run the majority of programs and effects. You also need a program. If you intend to work in the professional community, pro tools has become kind of the de facto standard. If you are going to be doing your own thing, there are a ton of other programs around. Cubase, Sonar, Logic (if you use a mac), DP (also for macs), and the list goes on. It depends on how much you want to spend on a computer program, because good ones can range from like 50 bucks for reaper to hundreds (thousands for a pro tools tdm system). If you go with pro tools, you have to buy their interface and plugins can be more expensive for it than for other programs. If you go with some other program, you can choose your own interface. Motu makes great firewire interfaces that you can daisy chain to record up to 32 tracks simultaneously (I think it's 32, not sure). There are a ton of interfaces out there besides Motu that would work also. Trying to create an equipment list from scratch is like trying to paint a painting from scratch with someone saying "paint something pretty", most everyone will come up with a different end result. What kind of music will you be recording? How many simultaneous tracks? Will you be working with midi much? How much post processing do you want to do (plugins, etc.)? There are a lot of things to take into account here.
 
Well, you cant hear the people walking above you to terrible bad. lets see, i really like to use macintosh, i have a not book but i am going to buy another mac but a bigger one with a bigger monitor. Im not to sure on the plug-ins and what not. i would like to do 12 or 16 tracks simultaneously. i can already tell though my six grand is not going to get me too far haha.


lets see, as far as the types of music...i wanna do a little bit of everything, a lot of rockabilly, country and d-beat.

thank you by the way, i really wanted to know all this before hand, i have no mentor or anyone to help me out with any of this.
 
there is a big difference between not hearing people terrible bad and not hearing people. All it takes is one good thump in the middle of an otherwise perfect drum track to drive both you and the drummer nuts. But since eliminating footfall noise is so hard, you might be able to get by. I would probably recommend getting what is called resilient channel (it goes on the joists of the ceiling) and mount drywall to that. That should help. If you want to use a mac, you could easily blow about a third to half of your budget just on the computer. But that choice is yours. If you want to do 16 tracks simultaneously, I think motu makes an interface called the 8pre that can be daisy chained, i.e. two of them hooked together for 16 channels simultaneously. I think the first thing you need to do is to determine what computer, interface and software you want to use (but try to get the most for your money, because you will have to still buy mics and at least one or two good preamps). How much experience do you have recording and how serious do you plan on being with the recording (i.e. home studio, project studio or pro studio)?
 
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