I have some QA for building a home recording studio

general questions, comments and ideas about recording, audio, music, etc.
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cjtowner
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I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by cjtowner » Wed Jul 09, 2003 12:17 pm

I want to record some songs I wrote at home. I am not going to push the envelop right now to record electric guitars, drums, etc... I am going to play all the songs with my acoustic guitar which is a Fender DG-11E. There will be vocals to record also.

I have a budget, of course, and have been looking at the MBox at the digidesign.com website. My questions are:
Is this a good choice for a home recording studio (acoustic guitar and vocal recording mainly)?

What other mics will I need for my guitar and vocals?

Make whatever sugestions you think can help me get rolling with this.

I have also considered building acoustic baffles that were in TapeOP's #34 issue to make my room a sound enviornment for recording.

What I have:
Mac G4 Titanium 867mghz 768mb RAM
External HD (plenty of drive space)
One SM58 Shure Microphone
AKG K141 Headphones

Thanks
Christian

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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by Kyle » Wed Jul 09, 2003 12:37 pm

You have a good start. The baffles in TapeOp won't really help your recording environment, unless you are multi-tracking. You should take a look at these bass traps.

http://www.recording.org/cgi-local/ubb/ ... ysPrune=20

They are amazing and inexpensive. I wouldn't worry about it now, you need an interface, but save your money as these will help a lot.
Kyle

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tbstudios
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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by tbstudios » Wed Jul 09, 2003 12:58 pm

Christian,

The Mbox should work just fine for what you are asking. It will come with ProTools LE which I'm sure you've already researched. I had used the ProTools LE software on my PC for a short time but had issues. From what I understand the MAC version is a bit more stable out of the box. (I hadn't made any tuning changes on my PC, just a default install)

The Mbox has 2 inputs so you can record vocal and guitar simultaneously or you can "build" the song one track at a time. For seperation/isolation purposes, I would recommend tracking the guitar by itself and then come back and do your vocal. It will provide two tracks with no bleed and you can adjust each individually.

If you don't want to spend the money on the Mbox, you can get some software packages for free/shareware as well that do similar recording functions. (ntrack comes to mind) It will record seperate wav files for each track and is only limited to how much your computer can handle. Save money on the software and then maybe buy a little nicer mic.

Have fun!

-Tim P.

Tour Bus Studios

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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by dynomike » Wed Jul 09, 2003 12:59 pm

is your sound card any good? it doesn't need to have a lot of channels, 2 is fine for what you're doing, but some good converters would help, like on a lynx or something like that.

you really only need a 2 ch. preamp, how about an FMR RNP? They're about $465. if you want something cheaper, you could get an aphex 107 or something like that. or even a 2 channel soundcard with preamps included.

Your sm58 isn't really too good for recording vocals or acoustic in this setting.. but pretty much any decent large diaphram condenser will do well for either. for cheap... a Studio Projects C1 is okay but it sounds really quite bright (might not work for your voice), a rode NTK would be nicer, but theres another $400 bucks.

So basically, one good mic and one good preamp. I mentioned a two channel preamp just because you might conceivably want to record stereo in the future, and because they are not that expensive either. Just record the guitar first then the vocals, which is typical, and you'll only need the one mic.

As far as your room... try to get your computer off in a closet or something, and run the cables under the door to your monitor, mouse, keyboard etc. Thats what I'm doing and the noise level dropped SO much. Its great. If you want to treat your room, do some measurements if you can and make some of Ethan Winer's bass-traps and mid-high absorbers. They're cheap and effective, they even look good!

www.ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html

Mike

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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by Madness » Wed Jul 09, 2003 1:08 pm

A new M-box will, as you know, cost you about $450. A used digi 001 will probably be about $100 more, but you'll get a few more inputs. Just a thought.

The M-Box is great, nonetheless. Get a good mic, though. If you can find a decent large condenser mic on ebay, you'll get a better result than what the 57 will offer.
Phil

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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by tbstudios » Wed Jul 09, 2003 1:10 pm

Also, if you want to use the SM-58 I would suggest unscrewing the wind screen and taking that off. The SM-57 is actually a more suitable mic for various instrument recording and actually has the same element as the 58 with a less rugged wind screen. It may make for a better track for your acoustic that way. Remember not to leave the mic that way as dust will interfere. I would put the wind screen back on for your vocals.

Just a thought... 8)

-Tim P.

Tour Bus Studios

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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by stillafool » Wed Jul 09, 2003 10:45 pm

I ordered the m-box but cancelled because I couldn't justify the price/performance. First of all, because of the limited bandwidth of usb, you get extremely limited performance, both in terms of the number of tracks/realtime fx, and the latency. Although, digi advertises "zero-latency" it seems every review I read stated there was an unavoidable 40-80 ms hardware latency. The only reason I would get the m-box is for laptop recording where I didn't need to overdub, and where I needed limited tracks. Having said that, if all you need it for is guitar and vocals, it might be an ideal way into pro-tools; and it does have two passable mic preamps.

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Re: I have some QA for building a home recording studio

Post by jajjguy » Thu Jul 10, 2003 9:35 pm

first of all, it's perfectly fine to just start recording using your built-in sound inputs (you know, that 1/8" mic-in jack) recording into protools free (which is actually free). your upgrade path from there may become obvious very quickly. you'll need a good mic or two right off, at least one LD condensor (for vocal) and one SD condensor or maybe another LD (for gtr). the sm58 may be useful for vocal in some cases, but will usually not top whatever LD condensor you get, in think, and probably won't ever be the choice for guitar. mbox may be a good next choice, or maybe just a mackie 1202, if you can use the added mixer functionality, then at least you can use the line-in on your PC and not rely on its mic preamps.

(if your mac has no sound-in jack, a $30 iMic will do fine.)

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