Throwing myself to the wolves...

[sky_lennard]

OK -- I have not previously sought much help with purchase/equipment/etc decisions for recording, but here's what I have and am using...

I am interested in / currently working on midi/audio mix projects for orchestral hard rock (ie. the Evanescence through Dream Theater type sound). I don't have the space or budget for "professional" studio equip, but I do set up in my living room when i'm working on my music stuff.

I have an HP pavilion notebook, 2.53GHz, 512MB RAM, 4200 RPM HDD, etc.

When using MIDI, I was having terrible latency with my midi controller, so i bought an Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card, and the ASIO drivers run pretty darn quick.

I am borrowing an AKG d65s mic from a buddy, he says that it's about as good as a Shure sm58 but 1/2 the price...

I plan to hook this mic up to a ART Tube V3 preamp that i'm waiting to be shipped to me, into the audio in on the Audigy2 card, going into Sonar 4 Producer Edition. I'm also using software like Spectrasonics Trilogy (http://www.spectrasonics.net/instruments/trilogy.html) for bass, and BFD (http://www.fxpansion.com/product-bfd-main.php) for drums tracks.

For orchestra-related pieces, I'm using the Vienna samplers on Gigastudio3.

My question -- where have I done well/bad for this setup? It's just me and I'm not interested in multitracking into my comp yet, the tracks on Sonar are enough for me right now.

Thanks for your input!

 

[Halion]

If it works for you, stick with it. Personally, there's some definative no-no's if it was my gear. Take the following purely as my own choice (although not entirely unargumenten).

The Audigy was *probably* not neccisarry. There is a driver called Asio4All, which will work with any soundcard (even the crappy internal notebook ones) and will provide you with latency similar to what you can get with the Audigy. So why is it better? It's free.

The 4200rpm HD is gonna be a problem sooner or later. Find out how much you can do without getting terrible jitter. That will be a hard limit to how much your notebook can handle. I don't like hard limits, them beeing hard and all. My system is not all too huge itself (desktop Athlon XP 2000 with 1gig of ram and 7200 HD) but it does the trick, and is upgradable quite a bit (ram, cpu, HD etc.).

The mic. I'll take your friend's word for it that it's just as good as an SM58. However, you didn't tell us what you are planning on doing with it. Decent electrical guitar tracks? If your lucky and you REALLY know your gear (and that of the guitarplayer), perhaps. Good-to-go nearly every time? Well, I don't know your standards ofcourse, but not for me.

The preamp. Why this particular one? Let me guess: 1) it has a tube 2) it has all these cool/handy presets. Truth: the tube does nothing. The presets do something, but nothing that will make you say "wow, that's really better!". Just different bad. I'm not trying to sound like a total dickhead and burst all of your bubbles but really, if these were the reasons, return the unit asap. It'll have more noise and (softly put) a less than desirable impact on your sound than you might think at first.

The software sound good. Kinda stands out cost-wise compared to the hardware you mentioned but that's a whole different ballgame isn't it? I won't touch that right now.

You are mentioning some pretty big libraries. I highly, highly doubt the HD in your notebook will be able to handle those, so disk streaming is probably out of the question. That leaves you with gig after gig after gig of samples, all to be loaded into the 512 megabytes of ram at the same time. That's not gonna work. When I load up a normal kit in Drumkit From Hell 2 (similar to BFD but alot smaller), my ram is full for at least 80%. The samples of that kit will be about 1gig (that's also how much ram I have, but some stuff is streamed directly from the 7200rpm HD).

I hate to say it but you'll most likely have to spend some bucks to get anything done at all. Stuff like Vienna Symphonic is so large most new computers sold these days have a hard time running it.

 

[sky_lennard]

Thanks for your response, I guess some clarification is in order about what i'm doing with some of this stuff

Thankfully, all the money i've spent on this stuff was from pretty savvy bargain/ebay shopping, and everything other than the software that I've bought was at or under ebay-market price -- so I'm fairly confident I can unload whatever I need to, if the money could be spent in better ways -- that's basically why I was posting.

The MP preamp seemed like a good idea, yes because it has a tube in it and 2nd because it gives me some kind of hardware connection (XLR->I/O) to the input on my computer that I can also plug my electric guitar directly into (1/4in->I/O). I was weighing the options versus buying an m-audio fasttrack or something, but unfortunately I don't have firewire so it has to be USB if not into the soundcard. Too bad I didn't know about that ASIO driver before I got the Audigy 2 ZS-N, I'll look into it and hopefully it works ok on my soundmax integrated I/O (hooray for 90 day returns!).

I plan on running my vocals and acoustic guitar through the mic, and no I don't have a sound room, so i'm using my closet, and no I'm not particularly concerned with getting that "holy crap that sounds friggin sweet" sound out of it. I just need it to be clear enough and sound nice enough that it doesn't make me cringe with horror when I listen to recordings.

I don't find any notebook HD's that run at 7200rpm, but truthfully I've not had much of a problem with the streaming, since most of the stuff I do that's streaming is single note stuff that I can just freeze the track after I'm doing composing it.

Anyway, your response was pretty mild, I was expecting something much nastier Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

-nate