Like All The Others, I Need Lots Of Help

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koston360flip

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ok... so i would like to start a DIGITAL home recording studio in my basement. when i say DIGITAL i mean that i want to put it through my computer. I've read all the FAQ's and i'm still confused... this is what i've grasped so far:

I would like to record a full rock and roll band into computer software, that can later be burned onto a cd.

I Need:
A Mixer
A Vocal Mic (preferably condenser)
a Kick Mic
2 Overhead drum Mics
Snare Mic
A Good Computer

now i have lots of questions...

1) Can i plug guitars and bass right into the mixer as i would an amp, and still get distortion effects and stuff? I've heard of things like Pods... i'm a drum player and this confuses me.
2) Can i play tracks seperately, and replay them in headphones and stuff like the pros (lol)?
3) The Usual Question: What Equipment would i need, with good quality and moderate prices, to get started?

Thank You To Anyone who can answer this question. THANK YOU SO MUCH.
 
to plug the guitars and bass directly into the mixer you need a DI box... mixers only take in unbalanced signals so the DI box changes the balanced signal (guitar cable) into an unbalanced signal (XRL Mic Cable)


i suck at describing things ....but all i can tell you is you need a DI box ... do a google search and type in DI box
 
1) Can i plug guitars and bass right into the mixer as i would an amp, and still get distortion effects and stuff? I've heard of things like Pods... i'm a drum player and this confuses me.

You can plug them in directly, but they won't sound as good. A better idea is to mic your amps. There are threads all over this board that cover techniques for that.

2) Can i play tracks seperately, and replay them in headphones and stuff like the pros (lol)?

Yes you can. If you are going to use your pc, you can monitor them that way. If you are going to use a digital multitracker, they have headphone jacks. And mixers have jacks for monitoring.


3) The Usual Question: What Equipment would i need, with good quality and moderate prices, to get started?

That is a loaded question. You already listed pretty much what you will need. Just check out places like Muscian's Friend or other online music sales and compare prices. A couple names to look for are Behringer and Yamaha in mixers. And MAudio for soundcard interfaces.
 
I'd stay away from behringer mixers if you can. They just tend to have a reputation as being pretty cheap, and you can really get something better for pretty cheap price too.

The yamaha's seem to be pretty good, or you could go a little bit more for something like a soundcraft.

Another option that would work in place of a mixer is dedicated preamps, such as the audiobuddy or dmp3 from m-audio. The mixer will have preamps built in, but you can get higher quality with dedicated preamps, as basically with a mixer, you're paying for preamps AND all sorts of extra circuitry - which you may or may not want. And if you dont want it, dedicated preamps may be the way to go. They still may cost more to get the same amount of channels, because there aren't many dedicated preamps built as cheaply as the ones in cheap mixers.

Unless you spend a lot more however, a dedicated outboard pre might not be very significant of a step up from the ones in a mixer such as the yamaha mg series, and if you think you might want some of the functionality of a mixer (mixing things down to subgroups, using it for another headphone out for monitoring what's going in), that would be the way to go.

At this point I'd say get at least a solid mixer or a few channels of solid dedicated pre if you can (if you need 2 channels, go with a dmp3, if you need 10 you're gonna pay a lot more than you would with a mixer, and at this point money would probably be better spent on quality mics)

And yeah, you can plug in a guitar or bass either using a direct box (to get it to mic level and balance it, so you'd plug it into a mic input like you would a mic), or an instrument level input if you have something that has it. You probably COULD even plug it in to a 1/4" line input and get enough gain from somewhere to get a signal, but it wouldn't be a very good sounding idea.

Sound cards, I think the suggestion of M-Audio would be a good area to start looking at for your needs. They make some pretty solid entry level type systems that a lot of people seem to really like.

One thing that's really important that often gets overlooked in a recording chain is good monitors... personally I'd just mix with whatever you can at first, because whether you can really hear w hat's going on well is going to be the least of your worries for a while, and if it were me I'd reccomend waiting until you can afford some good quality monitors rather than buying cheap ones right away (Buy cheap, buy twice, is a common saying around here).


Other than that, seems that you have a pretty good idea of where you want to start. The selection of mics you listed will get you by just fine for quite a while (you could even get a pair of condensers for overheads that would also be useful on vocals.) That will cover a drumset just fine for most things, and everything else is even less demanding on mics than a drumset. A few quality mics will beat an arsenal of crappy ones any day. Heck, one quality mic would beat an arsenal of crap mics, hehe.

Hope that helps you get a better idea of what you might want to do. Good luck, and be warned: recording is a very fun - and very expensive - hobby.... there's never an end to the cool new things you'll want to buy.... but I like it anyway.




You can use plugins in your recording software (there's even some good free amp sim plugins) to play around with that.

But, as was said, you can get a much better sound by mic'ing your amp (assuming you have at least a decent sounding amp), and you'll learn a lot about mic placement that way too, which will be crucial any time you're using a mic.
 
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