Part I: Gear Selection, or, One Man’s Insane Choices
Welcome to the first in an ongoing series of articles revolving around my trials and tribulations in getting a semi-professional recording sound, on the cheap, with no experience whatsoever. I’m going to go through this step by step, and with our forum members input, which will revise (with credit given to the forum member of course) and edit each part of this series as necessary.
Given that what are we hoping to accomplish here? Fun for the most part – give our forum members a chance to contribute to the site. And to learn. From any source I can, forum members, the web, and trial and error. But it still really all boils back to the first point. Fun.
The first part of this "process" for this learning exercise was to figure out exactly what we’re trying to record. At first I had planned on limiting it to just the drums, as this is after all, a drum site, and I am, to some extent, a drummer. I decided to expand that and include the following as things I’d want to know how to record:
Drums
Keyboards
Bass
Electronics
Guitar
Vocals
This means not only having all of the above gear, but the necessary accessories to do it with. (Cables, pedals, amps, etc.)
Now, given all of that it also meant deciding exactly how I was going to record this. I decided against analog recording right away. I’m computer geek by trade so that lead me straight to digital.
That leads to my next quandary. What am I going to use to interface with my PC? What am I going to use for a PC for that matter? How much is this all going to cost? When will my wife decide enough is enough and take my credit cards and wallet?
Well – here’s my evil plan.
First, I’ve had for some time, my bro Kyle’s Roland VS880ex. For anyone not familiar with this, it is a digital mixer, with a built in hard drive. Sort of old school:
...and not really what I wanted to use as my plan for recording my band meant I would need the following inputs:
Drums: 8 + 1 stereo pair for my Alesis D4
Guitar
Bass
So that adds up to 11 inputs if we bring the bass and guitar straight into the mixer from their pedal racks as I am planning on doing. Obviously the VS880 doesn’t cut it, not to mention there is no phantom power on that particular console. I need at least three inputs that supply it.
So I looked at all the PC recording options out there I could find and nothing in my budget range except this that fit my requirements:
"Why Tim! That’s just a mixer!!! How on earth are you going to get all those channels into your PC without some type of interface?!?!"
And to that I answer:
Firewire baby.
This is the Alesis Multimix 16 Firewire. It outputs 16 channels (8 mono and 4 balanced stereo pairs) + 2 monitors, discreet, thru the 1394a connection into the PC. I’ll be doing a separate drum centric review of this bad boy later.
That’s how.
(As a note, if this mixer intrigues you, better hurry and get one now, because Alesis, for some insane reason, is replacing this with a USB 2.0 model. I am clueless as to the logic behind this as 1394a is a superior protocol, even over USB 2.0)
So that’s my control interface to my PC.
What about the PC? One thing I’ve read about is the latency issues encountered when recording this way so I wanted to have the best machine I could have to not have to deal with this or at the bare minimum deal with it as little as possible. So I’ve built a machine, mostly from spare parts (I am geek in real life, so I have a lot of stuff laying around) to the following specifications:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
Scythe MINE Heat Pipe cooler (<20db on the fan)
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 Motherboard
2GB DDR2 667 RAM
ATI X300 PCI-E Video Card 128MB Passively Cooled
2 x 500GB SATA-II Hard Disk Drives
16X DVD Rom
52X CDR (No need for DVD Burner in this box as I’ll be burning straight audio CD’s)
InWin Mid Tower case with silent 120mm fans
Currently I have a lousy 17" CRT monitor on this setup but am planning on replacing it with a 20" widescreen LCD sooner rather than later, as soon as I can slide that one past my budget manager.
I also have various audio cards in this machine – a SoundBlaster Live MP3 and EMU 404 and the onboard audio for the motherboard. Some of those may go as I progress in my knowledge and use of the Alesis mixer and get more comfortable with the setup as a whole.
Instrument wise I will be using my Sessions, of course, for drums.
For a guitar, as I’m learning the ins and outs of the process here, I’ll be using my sons Dean Evo XM guitar. It’s a cheap Dean, but you’d be surprised at the quality of this guitar.
For keyboards, I’ll be using this old cheap 88 key Yamaha board I bought for my daughter when she was taking piano lessons. It’ll do for now.
I currently do not own a bass, I’m planning on buying the cheapest bass I can get (the $89.00 Rogue from Musicians Friend caught my eye) but I’ll be browsing the local area pawn shops as well.
The only electronics really will be coming off my Alesis D4 and Pads. While those could be considered "drums" I class them as their own thing as eventually I will be using 5 different triggering devices so I could conceivably do an entire recording just off this gear.
What about microphones?
Ok – this is where I’m probably cheapest so far. I bought my drum mic’s a long time ago and I’m going to stick with these for the bulk of this project. If I end up changing out for something different, it will be noted.
From Left to right.
Overheads: 2x Audix Fusion F15
Snare: Shure SM57
Toms (8, 10, 12): Audix Fusion F10 (3)
Tom (14): Audix Fusion F12
Kick: AKG D550
All told those mics cost me about $300 give or take. I talked the local GC guy down to $259 for the Audix Fusion 6 package. The D550 was on sale for cheap so we’ll see how it does with my kick. The SM57 is on indefinite loan from a bud.
For vocals I’ll be borrowing my daughter’s MXL 990 mic:
...along with her voice whenever she’s around. I really can’t sing so if any of the coming samples have my voice in them I apologize in advance.
For software on the PC I am going to start out with a package called Reaper (www.reaper.fm). It is a fairly comprehensive DAW package that is free to use for 30 days, is unrestricted shareware, but only costs $50 for non commercial use, or $225.00 for commercial use. Given what I’ve played with in this software so far I think it will fit the bill nicely and I will at least be registering it for non-commercial use. Even at $225 a package with the feature’s I’ve seen so far (and given that I know almost next to nothing compared here about this stuff, take it with a grain of salt) this software is a tremendous value.
All of this recording will be done in my garage. I will be building some portable audio panels to use to control sound in the room and to cut down on as much background noise as possible.
There are some other odds and ends I’ll be picking up along the way – a four way headphone amp for when I start working with my band, possibly another SM57 or two to try to mic amps vs. direct recording, and as I said above, another monitor for the PC that is larger and widescreen. Other stuff as needed or suggested (assuming I can swing it with the aforementioned budget manager as always).
So that’s it for part 1 of this odyssey. Please feel free to comment, suggest, recommend, and we will adjust this article accordingly depending on what we hash out on the forum.
Part 2 will consist of hooking all this stuff up and making it work. I’ve already done some preliminary testing with the Alesis mixer and I have to say what goes into the PC is clean and gives a GREAT wave file to work with in the mix. Reaper hasn’t been too difficult (yet but I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface still) and the stuff I’ve done as test is very clean.