Starting out

[AmateurRecorder]

Hi all,

I'm a true newbie to music recording. I'd like to start learning, but I don't know how. The main goal is to record a choir (some time in the future), and it is purely intended to be a hobby, I'm not building a home studio or anything...

I have an old PC (PII 300Mhz, 192Mb RAM, 6Gb HD). Probably this will not be sufficient, but I guess if I search this forum, I'll find lots of threads about that.

The main question is: what else would I need? Mics, amps, software? I found a freeware program "Audicity". Is it any good, or should I really buy one? Remember that it's just a hobby to me, so , I don't want to spend heaps of money on this...

I'm looking forward to your comments!
c u around!

 

[Bahrain_Phill]

The main question I see that need to be answered is: How big of a choir? (This will determine how many mics and/or what kind) ALso, what formation they are standing in will help to decide how many you can get away with. For example, a church I attended about a year ago used three mics to record 12 choir members. All 12 stood in a semi-circle around two mics (about 10 feet away) and the third was passed from person to person as solos required. The end result was VERY good for what little money they invested.
In my opinion, what you are talking about can be done fairly cheap. Concerning your audio card, I cant help you there, I recorded to tape for a long time and just moved to a Digital workstation. I am sure you can find tons of info on the site about which cards to use.
I would, to keep the price down, use a small mixer and a few mics. Take the line out of that and you can record onto anything. Computer, Tape, VHS (An affordable and quality option) or whatever else you can imagine. Those are my thoughts.

 

[AmateurRecorder]

Thanks for the quick response.

The choir has 20-25 members (depending on how many persons come to the rehearsal), and placement is usually:

INSTRUMENTS DIRECTOR

ALTOS SOPRANOS

TENORS BASSES

But there is a lot of room, so in fact any placement is possible. For some songs, the altos or sopranos split into two voices. And to be honest, the room doesnt sound bad at all, and is quite large.

Any recommendations on which mixer / mics to use?

 

[Kevin Deschwazi]

Welcome to the BBS.

There's tons of info on this message board, the search function is your friend.

For most modern recording software/hardware your PC might be a bit old to cope. Audacity's OK. Just see how you get on with it and if/when you get fed up with it you can upgrade. As I said you maight struggle with the spec of your PC.

You'll need an interface/soundcard for your PC that is up to the job of recording audio. Integrated soundcards and cards designed for gaming don't have great analog to digital conversion and so the quality of recordings is dodgy. A decent 2 input card will cost around $100. If you need more inputs (ie. to record more than 2 sources simultaneously) the cost starts to creep up.

You'll then need mics, probably a stereo pair of condensor mics for starters if you're wanting to record a choir, try a search in the mic forum on 'choirs' and you'll probably get some ideas from people who have actually recorded choirs(unlike me). If the search comes up with nothing or if you have further questions, start a thread.

Then you'll need preamps for each of the microphones.

Another important part of the equation is monitoring. You might want to look into that if you start to take things more seriously.

So put simply you'll need mics to capture the sources, preamps to boost the weak mic signals to line level, an interface to convert your analog signals to digital signals, software to record into, do your mixing/processing and burn CDs etc. And like I said monitors can't be overlooked really if you want a half decent end product.

Another not insignificant factor is the acoustic properties of your live recording and mixing spaces. Most people need to treat these areas. The studio building forum here is excellent for tips/advice.

If you state a budget you might get some reccommendations for the gear you need. There's a lot of crap in the budget price range but there are also some pretty decent peices.

Good luck with it anyway.

 

[mshilarious]

I started in the days of PIIs, but back then I used a DSP soundcard, meaning that the card did all the heavy lifting as far as mixing & effects. Still, for a chorus you should really be concerned with a stereo recording, which your PC can handle.

Another option is to look into a studio-in-a-box, which would give you everything you needed (except mics, stands, cables, etc.) without worrying about your PC specs, and they are nice and portable too.

 

[guitarboi89]

what is the purpose of recording the choir? to make a cd?
to me it seems that you really dont need a computer... if you have a good mixer and quality microphones you can jsut take the mixers output and attach a minidisc player or something like that (you could even ask around the chior as it would be a pretty available thing).... if the minidisc is a sony net md i think you can upload to pc from that.. and it should sound pretty good as long as you have set up the mixers properly.
maybe the use of a digital multitrack?

 

[astoebe]

hey, just a quick bit of advice. I used audacity one time and I'm pretty sure it had some latency issues. The soundcard in the computer was fine w/ latency when used with another program, so i'm pretty sure it was audacity. There are some other fairly cheap programs that I think would be more useful for very simple recording (cheaper versions of cubase, cakewalk, and even powertracks isn't too bad.....although some hate it)