Re: Creating A Studio... In Your House
darkshadow54321 said:
Wow... :saeek: That's a lot of cash.
Thanks for the advice guys... from this I have gathered that I need the following:
1. A good computer with an excellent sound card
2. An excellent mixing desk
3. Loads of mics
4. A decent room
5. Good ears
Are Macs really that much better than PC's? You can get some really amazing sound editing programs for Windows, so is a Mac really necessary?
Macs tend to be alot more stable than PC's because of the way they are built (all the parts, etc. having to go through QC checks by Mac itself). I do my recording on a PC and it works alright, BUT I have about a $1200 PC, not including the sound card. You don't neccessarily needs tons of mics, just the right ones. Sure, years down the road, after your ears have been extensively trained, you may hear a tone in your head and go "Man, I could get that sound with so and so mic." But for the most part, a few well rounded large diaphragm condensers, a couple small diaphragm condenders and some good dynamic mics for drums and/or guitar should do you just fine.
The key for me is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS a good drum sound. If you can't get that, your recording is always going to sound amatuerish and weak. So what I would reccomend doing is save up your money to buy an 8 track sound card/preamp (M-Audio makes some good ones that aren't crazy expensive) that has XLR inputs, that way you don't even have to worry about getting a mixer yet (but you'll need one later). Then go and buy up some SM57's, a kick drum mic and some cheaper small diaphragm condensers on ebay. This should give you a pretty good drum mic setup and the SM57's can double as guitar mics, the SD condensers as a vocal mic, and the kick drum as a bass mic (but you can usually DI bass).
You're probably looking at about $1200-1500 right there. And that's just the beginning. But you can use that for a year or so and just work on mic'ing techniques. No mic, no matter how expensive, will give you a good sound if you don't know how to use it. So use these mics to learn the ropes while you save up money to buy better gear. If you can put down some decent sounding tracks with that stuff (and you should be able to after a while) it'll only get better as you get better equipment. It's like learning to play guitar...only way more expensive.
One more thing....padding up the walls won't help your sound much. Sure it'll get rid of the really noticable echo to a small extent, but most of that stuff will only capture high frequencies, so your mids and bass are still reflecting just as much as ever and that can make your recording muddy if you're not careful. So search the internet and build some bass traps. They're actually not hard to build at all and pretty cheap. Hope this helps...Good luck dude.
