Slashdot Mirror
The Incredible Shrinking Recording Studio
what_the_frell writes "Wired has an interesting article on the increased use of laptops as a replacement for a recording studio. The article touches on how music schools are requiring the purchase of a Powerbook and software for this very reason, and also highlights artists like Steve Vai who are moving over to the more portable platform. Does this mean I can finally record that rock opera I've always dreamed about?"
... I can say that things are getting smaller, cheaper, lighter and faster. Duh. Of course.
... say it after me kids ... OVER!
... in their big haughty studios.
:)
The days when a pro recording needed a 24-channel mixing desk, ProTools TDM hardware, a quiet room and a team of engineers are
With my tiBook and a Firewire Audio interface, I can record any band, anywhere in the world, produce their tracks live at the gig, and by the end of it have some polished material ready for distribution.
The whole "pro studio" machine is well and truly facing the same reality that "computer rooms" once faced from the PC onslaught.
Most of the reasoning for big-studio budgets these days is just dick-waving. Fact is, you can do with a $2000 collection of gear what most 'pros' would've charged $15,000 to do 'for cheap'
Amen, I say. There are far too many good artists out there (every single human can write a song) and its high time a lot of them were heard. The current 'music industry' is too elitist.
RIP, Pro Tools. Long live CoreAudio!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Actually, professional recording studios still cost quite a bit to build. Isolation booths with different kinds of hardwoods for different timbres, extremely high end consoles, seperate mixers for each musician in the grandroom for their own monitor mix, etc... all adds up. If I were to show up for session work in somebody's garage, I would expect garage quality, and be pleasantly surprised by anything better (which is what this article eludes to). But if I were to pay $85+/hr for a studio, and $85+/hr for an engineer, I would expect an extremely professional studio with all the trimmings. Just expereince talking...
That being said, there is still no reason for the high price of CD's these days, but this article isn't justification to lower them.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I may answer if it can be of any help...
... just not the same. I use digitals one to, but I prefer a combination of both then only a digital one.
;)
I am nowhere near a professional sound engineer, I am a programmer and I had been playing the cello for over 15 years so lately, I wanted to try to mix both my taste for music and my taste for computers...
What I bought is an Audiophile 2496, it is a very good sound card (use the ice1712 chip), does 24 bit recording / at 96khz which in my case is quite overkill.
I also bought an external mixer, a Behringer ub1204-pro. It is a fairly inexpensive mixing console but it is quite a good one for my purpose, for the price, it is unbeatable. The reason I got an external mixing console is because while you can use a digital one, there is nothing like moving real buttons, it's faster, it's
Now, because my cello pickup is using a piezo pickup, which have a very high impedance, I also needed a very good DI-Box/Preamp, but this is not needed depending on what your son is playing. Also, some person just prefer to mic their amp (use a microphone to record the output of the amplifier).
For about 800$ CAN I bought the cables, the DI box, the mixing console and the sound card, remove 280$ of that if you do not need a DI box (it was an expensive one, almost as much as the sound card AND the console together, but with those, you really got what you pay for).
On the software side, I use Jack and Ardour, with Hydrogen for my drum needs (it is a drum synth).
Well, I am not the best one to talk about all this stuff as I am only fooling around with this stuff. One good place to learn about this "hobby" however is to read all of Tweakz tutorial on www.studio-central.com . He explain EVERYTHING you need to know, about soundcard, mixers, everything. It is totally windows-centric, but the audio hardware part is pretty platform neutral (except the audio card, but a cheap Audiphile is quite good, tcheck the Alsa website to see what is supported) linux-soung.org is very informative for the software part, if you would want to run on Linux. For my part, I run on linux but I could not care less. It is only because I have no Windows installation. Software on windows are quite good but I have been able to get much lower latency on my linux box then on windows. Jack and Ardour works very well together also but Ardour is not very well documented yet... Things will get better on the software side I'm sure. I also had much less problem recording thru the audiophile with alsa then on windows using the maudio (the company's) drivers, don
Anyway, I was just giving you my experiences, the best thing you can do is to make your own! The best advice I can give you is to take a month or two to research what you are buying. This kind of hardware is getting cheaper but it is still quite an investment to do so you better be knowledgeable about it then to be disapointed. Be an informed customer
Hope this helps a bit, sorry about the formatting or any spellling errors, I do not have much time to proofread my post this morning...
Ciao!
I'd rather be sailing...