Typical Home Studio Setup

[falter]

What does a typical home studio look like as far as equipment and setup?

Right now Im using a Phonic Helix board hooked into my computer and Cubase for the recording. Its pretty good for just tracking out some ideas for songs. I have Native Instruments Guitar Rig for distortion/effects which works pretty well but it does have its drawbacks. Sometimes I can get a good heavy sound out of it but it takes A LOT of tweeking and usually still sounds pretty "digital".

The only things that I actually like about my setup are NI Battery, it makes drum tracking super easy and doesnt sound half bad once you get the rest of the instruments layered on top. I also like not having to mic a bunch of amps and stuff- its all silent which means I can record at all hours of the night.

I just need someone to explain to me all of the equipment I would expect to see. Some ideas as far as where to get a good consistent distorted sound would be awesome too thanks!

 

[Chili]

I've got the helix brd and cubase also and enjoy the easy set up. I can leave everything plugged in and assign effects on the board for monitoring without it going to the computer for tracking.

First off, let's say there's really no 'typical' set up. Everyone is going to have different needs and a different setup.

Sounds like you've got a good start, but you don't mention what you want to do. Like vocals?? Are you writing and performing your own material?? Do you plan to work with others?? What will the end result be?? Personal listening? Demos? Songwriting scratchpad?? Sellable CD's?

Two priorities for most home studios are a quality monitoring system and an acoustically treated room (balanced freq response).

I'm not familiar with Guitar Rig, but I'm surprised you can't get anything consistent with it.

Peace,

 

[falter]

Yeah I like the Helix, its definatley easy.

Guitar Rig is a really cool idea- you basically record a dry signal(no effects/distortion) and Cubase will run the recorded sound through Guitar Rig on playback which will apply all of your sounds on the fly. Its cool because you dont need to re-record if you want to try a different sound and you can tweek it while the song is playing. It has a ton of different sounds and effects.

You can check out some of the stuff Ive done with it myspace.com/pyroakaian
The first two("Stay" and "Untitled") used Guitar Rig.

Im a tube amp guy so I usually end up making myself crazy trying to get the right tone out of it. Plus between Cubase, atleast 2 instances of Guitar Rig, and Battery running on my PC it soaks up a ton of memory. My PC errors out and freezes a lot when Im recording. I have 4Gigs of memory and a 2.2GHz processor so that really shouldnt be happening.

Ideally what I want is to be able to produce some fairly high-quality demos of my own stuff, Im not terribly interested in recording vocals right now. I feel like what im doing will suffice but it could definatley be better.