Constructing a Home Recording Studio on a Small Budget?

Pinball Wizard asks: "I would like to put together a home music studio. When it comes to keyboards, effects, and other electronic goodies, the choices seem pretty straightforward. But when it comes to guitar and recording other analog instruments and voices, the world of home recording seems bewildering. What are the best ways of recording analog sounds onto hard disk? I'm a lot more interested in a clever technical solution that costs less than $1,000 than I am taking out a loan and buying ProTools for $10,000 or more. What are the different pieces of equipment (microphones, preamps, etc) that are needed to do this well?"

Comments

Re:It would be helpful

[clifyt]

Dude, few of the Under $200 cards are REALLY going to give you 24 bit. They MAY record at 96k, but the noise floor of these things will effective lower the bit level to something much less.

Then again, I generally go with the Echo or MAudio cards, some of which WILL fit the under $200 budget.

I've seen suggestions of SoundBlasters...the minute you hear ANYONE suggest a SB for ProAudio on ANY budget, you can discount their advice on anything else. Still the one guy makes mention of the Mackie vs. Behringer...for my money, Behringer makes a damn good board. Its all Chinese manufacturing and done very inexpensively, BUT it isn't cheap. I played with their new board at NAMM a few weeks back and I'm kinda regressing my higher end Tascam board.

As another guy mentioned and is entirely on -- Hosa IS crap for most work (unless you are a plug and forget person that doesn't move equipment) and Monster sucks big time...for christ sakes, they sell ETHERNET Monster cables and try to tell us that the gold plating and unoxidized cable makes digital audio downloaded over the internet sound better. I don't care HOW cheap Monster is, I will never buy their products after that crap.

Anywho, this is NOT something that should be asked on Slashdot. Geeks like to look at specs and buy according to those (yeah, I double duty as a geek in both the Music Industry AND in a day job that is slowly becoming more of a hobby as my music stuff paid more last year than my university research). Look on Usenet or one of the most excellent websites out their like ProRec or even a site like my own -- http://sonikmatter.com. My site ISN'T geared towards a lot of the things you are looking into, but if ya decide to use Proaudio software such as Logic Audio, it WILL be the place to learn about these as well as building a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

Find a forum (NOT /.) and ask the same question there.

As a side note, I am actually taking a break from working on my latest DAW. Its a midrange audio box...just threw a 1.8Ghz and a decent server Motherboard into a box with 512M of memory (will expand to 1.5G as soon as I get other things tweaked). Matrox dual 450 card - great for audio work as its stable and doesn't screw with the PCI bus as most gaming cards will. Echo Darla...this isn't going to be recording more than a stereo pair in, BUT will need to use all 8 outputs occasionally. UW SCSI is a must on this box, I need at LEAST 64 tracks internal before grouped to 8. Gigasampler, Reaktor and Logic Audio Platinum 5 will be installed on this in the next week (as soon as 5 gets here). So far, it has cost me about $800 and most of this box is new (except for the software which was sent to me for beta testing and reviews and the older SCSI stuff that I've pulled out of servers as I upgrade them). Add about $800 for the high end audio software (and there ARE a lot that are lower range and will do what ya need).

You CAN do this on a budget, but ya have to plan everything out and watch Pricewatch / Pricegrabber like a hawk and make sure you get EXACTLY what you planned on, not just what ever might work...audio is picky about what ya put in your machine...especially if you are appreciative of stability. Windows CAN be stable...hardware is mostly the same, its drivers by irreputable companies that keep it from being stable.

Thats enough of my sharing...read what ya can and get an idea from that. Check out the websites and check on Usenet.

clif - sonikmatter.com