home recorder looking for lots of assistance

[lexicondevilrx]

how goes it friends.
like the titles says i am a completely inexperienced recorder any help anybody could give me would go a long way.

heres what i'm using....
macintosh powerbook... 1ghz, g4, 512k, i have a firewire drive with 160gb.
i'll be recording with either cubase sx1 or garageband 2. i'm not quite sure which one to go with, any suggestions.

i have a yamaha emx 5000-12 mixer, and 2 akg regular live microphones.
i plan on recording 1 acoustic guitar, 1 electric, 1 bucket, 1 maybe 2 vocals, maybe a didgeridoo. i am not sure how to hook the mixer to my computer.

should i record vocals and acoustic guitar at the same time?

if i record vocals how can i hear the music... i don't have any good head-phones.

i am using a fender 200wat "ultimate chorus" amp with the tweed covering and a fender celtic strat,

i have no money to buy materials, so if any of you kind, intellegent people could throw some advice at me, things to prepare for, problems, solutions, a little help goes a long way here.

anyways thats again
peace

 

[earthboundrec]

Your equipment s/b fine for what you want to do. You'll have to run your mixer directly to your computers sound card though, and you'll lose a lot of quality there. You'll have to run the stereo outs of the mixer and I imagine get it down to one TRS cable with a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter. I guess like a two male to one male TRS would work. Or if you don't need a stereo out just a simple instrument cable with a 1/4" to 1/8 adapter should do the trick. You will lose a substantial amount of quality using a stock sound card, however, if you're on a budget, you're on a budget, right? Good luck to ya!

 

[earthboundrec]

To answer some of your other questions as well,

You can record vocals and guitar at the same time.... there's no rules regarding what happens in a studio... If you want them isolated on seperate tracks however you may want to overdub the vox.

No good headphones? You should be able to set the output in any recording program that you're using to your computer speakers.

Without any $$, there's no easy solutions to problems that you'll encounter with shitty ad/da conversion, improper monitoring, etc... Those are the type of problems that a good ear and good song can only do so much to fix. If you get into recording more you will have to throw some money at those problems, but for starting out, you should be fine!

 

[dwillis45]

Something like this might help and it's only 19.95:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APP...Lh1xD2L7qvlu1xOGUtF8/3.0.11.1.0.6.25.7.11.5.3

Unfortunately, you won't get a lot of mileage out of the mac soundcard. As earthboundrec pointed out, you really need to find the budget for an external interface. You should also find a way to hook the laptop up to a set of computer speakers, a home stereo, or even a TV. Anything has to be better than the dime-sized speakers on the powerbook.

As far as software, my gut says it reallly won't matter given how you're planning to input sound. Garageband does have some advantages with it's bundled loops, provided you're not a purist and don't mind combining live tracks with loops. It may also give you less headaches and setup issues given that it's designed by Apple to work with Apple hardware. The downside to Garageband is that it has a reputation for eating CPU, especially if you are using software instruments. I also find that it takes a relatively long time to open and that it doesn't offer a lot of mixdown/export options. You pretty much export to itunes.