Give us a few more clues - you singing solo, you with guitar, you with the London Symphony Orchestra..?

The microphone is a good starting point, but it matters quite a lot how you are going to use it and whether you need multitracking or live mixing.

Boswell wrote: Give us a few more clues - you singing solo, you with guitar, you with the London Symphony Orchestra..?

The microphone is a good starting point, but it matters quite a lot how you are going to use it and whether you need multitracking or live mixing.

thanks for the response. its just going to be me and my electric guitar.

OK, well presumably that's you and your electric guitar AND the guitar amplifier.

You have two ways of doing this:

(1) Sing and play at the same time: You need two mics, one for your vocals and one for miking the guitar amplifier cabinet. An SM57 is fine for the cabinet to start with. You need to record both mics to two separate tracks for later processing. But the other variable in this is the room. You will get bleed of the guitar sound into the vocal mic, and a bit of vice versa. You could try putting the amp and its mic in a different room and listening on headphones, but better is..

(2) Track the guitar first using your one mic, then replay that on headphones while you sing on to a second track.

You can't just do this in your living room and expect to get good results. The room is like another instrument and it has its own characteristics. Do some reading on the Acoustics & Design forum on this board to see how you might improve things. If you want to put down a decent demo CD, you should really be considering renting studio time.

thanks for the input. see im not trying to get TOOOO serious right now. i really just want to hear what i can sound like on a decent recording, and then record a rew songs for fun.

now i guess instead of buying the eqiupment myself, it would be more cost efficeint just to rent out a studio for like a couple hours. what kind of rates could i expect??