I Need Help With First Studio Purchases!

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 12:16 am

I am a music teacher with all sorts of aspirations for my basement! Upon perusing this website among others, I felt it was in my best interest to open my problem to the public.

I want to be able to turn this into a very basic recording studio, where we can lay some tracks just to get ideas out. It might not be in the budget, but having 8 tracks record live to track is the goal.

The basement is used for rehearsals at the moment, having standard 'rock/pop' band equipment such as live drums, bass amps, guitar amps, acoustic guitar, horns,and a PA.

I am primarily using my 18x20 basement room for a multipurpose music room. At the moment, I have no software other then reason 3.0 and a midi keyboard that connects with USB.

I have a dell PC with winXP running 2.8ghz, 1ghz RAM, and more then enough hard drive space. I listen from the stock soundcard with goes to an old stereo component rack complete with EQ, Amp, and 4 moderate floor speakers (that are elevated).

The budget is approximately $400 American dollars.

I need any and all recommendations for hardware, software, mixers, mics, preamps, or whatever just to get me startted in the right direction.

I am slightly familiar with working with PT LE and MBox1, if that helps...

I appreciate any and all help from you guys!

Mike

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 5:27 am

$400 isn't a large budget for this. Are you looking at potentially recording 8 tracks simultaneously? Or do you mean recording 1 track at a time and then combining them into an 8 track form?

For 8 simultaneous tracks, you will need not only an audio interface (at least $400 for 8 pre-amps - e,g, Presonus Firepod, Alesis IO|26) but you would also need 8 microphones (which will likely cost at least $500 or, most likely, much more). For smaller numbers of tracks, the cost will drop (e.g look at the Presonus Firebox) but will still likely exceed $400.

You likely would want to use the base software which came with whatever interface you get (most likely Cubase LE. THis is more powerful than PTLE). If you haven't already foudn it, you might want to puruse this off-site reference. It has lots of info about recording, including a good discussion of different studio approaches (e.g. mixerless and with mixer) with several sample studios.

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 8:48 pm

With that little $, you probably just want to get a good mic, and a midling to crappy preamp, with 2 mic inputs. you could record in stereo as many times as you want and sync it all up bit by bit. That's about the best your'e gonna do with so little. Get a free/cheap mixing software, like Ntrack, my brother likes it.
Another idea is to look on ebay for a soundcard with preampbox and shareware mixing software all in one. That's about $150-$200, and spend the rest on a couple of decent large condenser mics, our studio has a pair of AT3530's and they work great. You should be able to find a deal for a little over a hundred a piece.
Good luck!

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 9:49 pm

Do have any suggestions for that soundcard and preamp?

What are your thoughts on getting a bundle such as this one?

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Digidesign-Mbox-2-USB-Audio-Interface?sku=240479

Thanks for your input, I really appreciate it!

Mike

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