Newbie Needs Help w/ Midi cable & Accessories

[grrcheetah86]

I am trying to equip my bf w/ all the accessories he needs to make his own music. He has an acustic & an electric quitar and recently purchased Cakewalk's Music Creator 2003. He wants to put his guitar beats on the computer and add other instruments to his stuff.
I have tried to call Cakewalk to get information on what I have to get for him to be able to do this (have nothing-not even midi cable) and those people are horrible. They told me to buy him a microphone - I spoke to someone today that referred me to this website
The person I spoke to today told me I would need: an adaptor, a sound card, a keyboard, midi cable, and a mixer(with amp). If I do need all of this are there variations and what are some suggestions on what I should get.
I am also curious to know about how much this will all cost me - this is hopefully bf's Christmas present - but when looking at costs of adaptors and sound cards I became a little worried. Are the cheap products going to put limits to his recordings?
If anyone could help me I would GREATLY appreciate it!!!

 

[AlChuck]

Well, it depends a lot on what he wants to record. If he just wants to record his own guitar playing and singing, and build his music up by overdubbing and adding drums and such through the use of loops or MIDI instruments, it's easier to achieve something with minimal equipment than if he wanted to have the capability of a real multitrack studio with many channels of simultaneous input.

His computer probably has a sound card already. The bare minimum is a cheap mic made for plugging into a soundcard. But that will definitely limit the quality of the recordings

Next step up is to buy a reasonable mic and preamp, which will cost on the order of $100-200. This will give you the ability to record vocals, acousctic guitar, and the sound coming out a guitar amp. At this level you can achieve very good results with even a cheap generic soundcard if you know what you're doing, which of course is a limiting factor even with the best equipment.

Beyond that, there's the issue of MIDI. You can make backing tracks and beats just using audio loops, but if your BF wants to record and play MIDI sequences in order to emulate drums, keyboards, strings, etc., he needs some kind of controller (usually a MIDI keyboard) to play that will send MIDI messages into the computer so they can be captured in Music Creator. Of course, then you need a MIDI interface into the computer, which for the typical generic SoundBlaster-type soundcard, requires a game port adapter (about $15/20). Alternatively, some MIDI keyboard controllers have USB interfaces as well as MIDI ports.

A keyboard that has some decent sounds on board will set you back at least $500 or so. A controller only keyboard can be had for less but then you need something to make the sounds in response to the MIDI messages. The easist thing is to use a software synth on the computer; I believe Music Creator has t least a basic one. Better ones can be had for $50 on up.

Finally, if he wants the capability to record a group of people playing together to separate tracks, to be mixed down later to stereo, he'll need significantly better hardware -- a multichannel soundcard with four or eight inputs or more, a mixing board, enough mics, and better software -- I believe Music Creator is only capable of handling two inputs (the L and R side of a stereo signal into the soundcard) at once.

Hope that helps get you started...