AUDIO EQUIPMENT

Trying to record a demo to shop to labels; should I buy more studio time or buy equipment to record from home?

I’m an ambitious singer/songwriter who is also a piss-poor college student. I recently scraped together enough money over a span of several months to get enough studio time to record two of my songs professionally. The engineer I worked with was an idiot and my songs came out sounding like ass (off-time drum parts, poor mix, just half-ass in general). I’m extremely frustrated now as I had anticipated finally recording some of my tunes the right way. So my question is should I buy more studio time (from somewhere else), or should I buy the equipment to record from home. I was thinking about buying Presonus Firebox (http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/FireBox/), some condenser mics, Cubase 4, some monitors, and a Drum Machine for drums. Would this be enough to get a professional quality demo? I’m fairly confident in my mixing abilities once I sit down and become familiar with the software, and I can always pay for someone to master. What kind of drum machine should I get?

I vote for investing your money into home recording gear.

If you are serious about this, I would advocate upgrading your sound card and using a mixer instead of a digital interface. If you get a soundcard that can handle 24-bit recording and playback you can achieve higher recording quality and be able to hear it on playback… but even if you stick to 16-bit, it’s okay – it is home recording after all. Just get a better one, stock sound cards have crappy line in and mic in’s, they’re noisy as heck…. my laptop’s line in has a noise floor of -30 db! I mean, c’mon! Grrr….

Besides, a mixer (I use a 4-channel Behringer) has phantom power, while I don’t think the Presonus does, and you need phantom power for a condenser. A great tip is to record in stereo, condenser on one side, and a dynamic on the other. Blend them during mixdown for a better tone, hopefully one that will minimize the EQ’ing. I’ve gotten great results from doing this.

I share your frustration over paying for studio time and having it come out jacked up. The last time I went in with my last band the engineer didn’t know how to record heavy music, so he close-mic’d the drums (bleed! the bleed!), listened too much to the lead singer, screwed it all up. I actually had to learn how to use his mixing software and sit in with him to try to fix the egregious mistakes – the bass got recorded in with one of the overhead Drum Mic‘s, oh god it was horrible….

Expect it to take some time to make it all work. But that’s the beauty of it, is that you can take the time to figure it all out. That means if you ever have to go in to the studio, it’s old hat and you can minimize your time (and money!) spent there.

I can’t help you with a drum machine, sorry. I program my drums using midi with Reaper and some vsti’s I downloaded.

Oh yeah – there is no such thing as true “professional” results from home recording. You can get very good, but there is a glass ceiling you will not be able to get past. If it isn’t the noise floor it will be some subtle arcane mastering secret or the thousands of dollars of processing equipment.

That said, you should be able to get some very decent, listenable material out of a home recording setup, once you get it down.

Saul

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Presonus AudioBox 22VSL 24-Bit/96 kHz 2×2 USB 2.0 Audio Interface $199.95 The AudioBox 22VSL introduces a new generation of PreSonus USB 2.0 audio/MIDI interfaces that take hardware/software integration to the logical next step. Using your computer CPU and PreSonus Virtual StudioLive (VSL) software, AudioBox VSL-series interfaces provide reverb and and delay effects and the same Fat Channel compression, limiting, semi-parametric EQ, and high-pass filter, as the PreSonus StudioLive 16.0.2 digital mixer — all with inaudible latency. Now you can monitor and record with or without real-time dynamics processing and EQ! What’s so great about effects and processing on monitors? Tracking without hearing effects and signal processing is like playing a video game with your eyes closed. Musicians rely on aural cues when performing, and their performance can vary depending on what they hear in their monitors. Adding just the right amount of compression, EQ, and reverb can make a huge difference in their ability to hear themselves clearly and to experience their performance as if it occurred in a natural space rather than in the artificial sonic environment of the studio. The result is a better performance and ultimately a better recording. You have plenty of effects plug-ins for your DAW, but processing audio with a DAW takes more time than you might think. True, we’re talking milliseconds, but it’s long enough that if you put DAW effects in your studio monitors, you’ll hear the original sound slightly before the processed signal, which is very disorienting. That much delay might be acceptable for live gigs, where the band is playing together in an ambient space that has natural delay. But you can’t record that way in the studio. Fortunately, our engineering wizards have dramatically reduced processing delay in the AudioBox VSL series. The result: dynamics processing, EQ, reverb, and effects that feel real, with no audible delay. And if you like what you hear, you can record with AudioBox VSL-series effects, too! These are the same high-quality Stu

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