Help Me With My Home Studio

[Stephen S]

Afters hours and hours spent reading all kinds of conflicting and indecisive material, and asking Wrong Robot millions of questions, I've decided to come to the TalkBass gods. I have a lot of questions, so here we go.

I want to spend as little money as possible to put together a good studio that is capable of recording good tracks. I want to be able to release home made CDs of my music. So I'll make a list of things I have, and things I want and why I think they might come in handy.

Things I have:
-Fostex MR8(which isn't getting much use)
-Behringer UB1202
-Sony Vaio with 126mb of RAM, 13 Gigs, a Pentium III and 2 PC card slots
-1 DRVX1 Audio-Technica, 1 DRVX2 Audio-Technica, and 2 Nady SP1 mics (all Dynamic mics)
-one live wire XLR-1/4
-2 cheapy XLR-XLR
-1 Monster Instrument cable, 20 feet
-3 cheapy instrument cables 20 feet
-two 1/8-1/4 adapters
-two 1/4-1/8 adapters

Stuff I want:
- condenser mic even though I'm not quite sure what it does
- more good cables, cause the cheaps ones cut out
- Line 6 PODXT amp modeler with effects, for getting good guitar tones directly to the computer.
-boom mic stands for micing amps and the drum set
-some monitors for reviewing my mixes
-some kind of DI box so that im not going through the headphone jack on the laptop.
- Some PC cards of RAM and anything else i can add, what can i put in place of the removable floppy drive?
-an external hardrive for more storage

any ideas, tips, anything, is appreciated. I'm looking to spend somewhere under a thousand.

 

[Dr. D]

Well, a good start would nr to up the memory on the Pc. I think 512 would be a starting minimum. I am running 1.5 gig ram. and it is smooth.

For a condenser mic. I suggest one I bought last week at a bargan basement price. It is a shure Ksm-27. I paid $250 for it new. PM me a for where from. What Impresses me about it, I was expexting it to pich up everything in the room, and really messing up a vocal recording. as I have heard stories on here about condenser mics being soooo sensitive , I have found this mic to give me some great vocals without picking up a lot of backgroud noises.

From What I have read about the fostex, It should be able to make a decent recording. Then usb it to the computer and burn it to a cd.

 

[Tash]

I'd ditch the laptop entirely and get a real PC. You should be able to get an Athlon box with over a gig of RAM and a decent audio interface for under $1000.

P3 and 128meg? That's barely adequate to run Windows, its nowhere near enough to do audio. Being a laptop its not really possible to upgrade either.

 

[DWBass]

Yeah, your current PC in it's current state ain't gonna cut it! You need at least a PIII, minimum 512mb ram, 80+gbHD(w/8mb cache and 7200rpm) and USB 2.0 or Firewire. Once you have this situated, you can shop around for a variety of USB/Firewire interfaces which will cover all your connections including XLR inputs. Cakewalk Sonar or Sony Acid Pro are good programs to use that won't break your bank account. Both can use Acidized loops as starter tracks and you can build from there.