Recommendations for recording equipment for original music?

[rw120555]

My 13 year old son likes to record his own music. He doesn't play any instruments himself, but he gets beats and loops from programs like Cakewalk Clubtracks and Ejay Hiphop. Also, musician friends give him beats sometimes. He records his own vocals using a Plantronics stereo headset with mike. The sound card is a Montego A3D that came with the 3 year old machine. We have a good CDRW drive already.

Anyone have recommendations for other equipment that would be good? In particular, are their microphones that would give significantly better voice quality, and if so what are they?

As for soundcard, would it be worthwhile to get something like the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live Platinum? The ability to hook up various instruments sounds nice, although he'll have to find friends who play those instruments. Also, he's expressed interest in learning to play a keyboard.

Also, any other software recommendations? Cakewalk has all sorts of other, more expensive programs, but darned if I understand what it is they all do.

If he wanted statistical software and hardware, I could give him all sorts of recommendations! But this is a pretty alien field to me. I'm willing to buy him some stuff (or better yet, let him spend his own money) but I don't want to spend hundreds of bucks on stuff that will only make marginal improvements at best or that require a real pro to be worthwhile. Thanks for any recommendations. RW

 

[iamthebear]

Well, it all depends on your budget
The Live! isn't a bad card for recording if you plan to use MIDI at all, the Soundfont support is great and you can download them everywhere. The only problem with the Live! is that it processes everything at 48,000 as opposed to 44,100 which is CD standard. This can cause latency in applications like Cakewalk and Cubase. If MIDI is not a concern, cards like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz offer better sound to noise ratio and use 18 bit converters. If you want to go high end, the Delta 44 is a great card with 4 ins and outs and a breakout box. Another good high end card of you don't need multiple I/O's is the Delta Audiophile 26/96. As far as mics go, a Shure SM57 would be a world better than what he is using now, and they are pretty cheap, and a standard in every studio. Some alternatives to Cakewalk (which I personally don't like) are: Cubase (which I use), Logic Audio, Sonic Foundry Vegas, Samplitude 24/96, Nuendo, Sonar (the newest version of Cakewlk - I've heard good things) and few others. These are all pricey programs though that can run upwards of $1,000. Thats al I can think of, if you have any more questions, ask away.

 

[rw120555]

Thanks Bear. Just doing some quick checking, it looks like we could easily get all that stuff for well under $10,000 The Shure mike looks like it could be had for a $100 or less, so maybe we'll start with that. My willingness to keep funding beyond that depends, in part, on just how long-lasting and serious this interest is. But, I've been fairly impressed with how much he has been able to do just in the few months since I got him the cheapie cakewalk program. I think with Sonar and maybe other programs, you can get demo versions to try out for 30 days.

To further show my ignorance, what is latency and how much should I be worried about it when buying a sound card? I sort of vaguely know what midi is -- but if you get midi files, do they have to be converted to wav in order to be used in programs like cakewalk? Or do programs just do that kind of conversion automatically? I notice that various programs refer to wav, mp3 and wma files as audio files, but my impression is that midi files fall into a different sort of category. Is there a nice place to read up on midi files?

Thanks again. RW.

 

[ProviaFan]

/* To further show my ignorance, what is latency and how much should I be worried about it when buying a sound card? I sort of vaguely know what midi is -- but if you get midi files, do they have to be converted to wav in order to be used in programs like cakewalk? Or do programs just do that kind of conversion automatically? I notice that various programs refer to wav, mp3 and wma files as audio files, but my impression is that midi files fall into a different sort of category. Is there a nice place to read up on midi files? */

Latency is like a delay...in other words, the amount of time from when you click the play button to when the music actually starts.
MIDI files store only the notes and other musical notation info, while WAV files store actual sound data, sampled at a rate measured in hz. (this is where the 44100hz comes in). This means that the notes in MIDIs can be changed/edited, while editing that can be done on WAVs is mostly limited to noise reduction, cropping, volume fading, and equalization. Also, since MIDIs are made of notes that are synthetically produced in real time by the sound card, instead of recorded sounds, a MIDI of "25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago will sound a lot worse than a WAV, besides the fact that there will be no vocals in the former. If I've thoroughly confused you by now, rant about it, and I'll try to simplify this somewhat
Anyway, to get back on topic and answer the Q about WMAs and MP3s; both of these formats use an algorithm to throw away some of the sound data that people supposedly can't hear, and make the sound file much smaller. You start with a WAV file, and run it through a compressor to get a WMA or MP3 file. The quality of one of these compressed files is determined by the bitrate. A WMA (Windows Media Audio, IIRC) at a bitrate of 20 is going to sound like telephone-line quality, but a 192 bitrate file will be almost indistinguishable (sp?) from the original.
A good place to find lots if midi's to play with in Cakewalk (which I like, btw) is www.classicalarchives.com/ . Your son probably will not like this kind of music, anyway, but it is a neat site with almost every classical piece ever written (at least it seems so). If you search around, you'll find lots of jazz, classic rock, and other midi collections, also. www.midi.com (iirc) is a good place to start.

 

[NIelkc]

Hey there hows it going? Ok here is what I would recomend for ya

Soundcard I would get a MAudio Omnistudio it is about $400.00 but I think you can find it for about $350.00 now, go here to check that out. Then you would need a preamp of some sort, ProSonus makes a reallu good one, I cant remember the name of it it is like Blue somthing and can be had for the low $100.00 range. Mic if you want to keep it checp then the SM57 cant be beat, but if you pay a couple extra bills you can get a RODE NT1 or NT5, I think the RODE NT1 can be had for sub $200.00 now. Ok software, if he likes to sequence go get him a copy of ACID PRO 3.0 nothing is better and funnier for that, also you get TONS of loops when you buy the program, and get Vegas Audio, and a copy of SoundForge (They are all made by SonicFoundry, and they all BLEND together, as in you can work in soundforge and send it over to Acid then send that over to Vegas in about 2 steps So for about $1000-$1500 or so he would have a very nice setup. Ohhhh yeh one more thing. Some Headphones or Monitors or both. The Alesis M1Actives are really cheap right now and have amps built in so there is not need for a power amp (I think you can get those for about $400.00 or less) and some GOOD (At least $80.00 but more like $120.00) set of headphone, those are a MUST. Dont let him use the computer speakers or some cheap ass headphone, because when he puts it into a car or somthing OTHER then his computer it will not sound right at all. Usally sounds good but lacking Bass or To much Treble etc....,. If you have any more questions send me a PM, I have been doing this type of thing for quite a few years. So get technical with me if you want

 

[rw120555]

Thanks to everyone for the fine advice I am getting. I'm sure I won't be buying all this stuff this weekend, but I'll definitely hold on to these notes and refer to them as we make further purchases.

Incidentally, here is a piece of advice on microphones I got from a music store. Please let me know if you violently agree or disagree. It seems like a good new mike is a reasonable starting point for additional purchases, and it is the one thing my son has specifically requested (lucky for me, he doesn't even know yet that all these other options exist.)

"The SM57 is a good option, however for recording into a computer my
recommendation would be this one: http://music1online.com/shurevr116l.html
It's a condenser mic, therefore more sensitive. The SM57 is designed to be
used with sound systems and impedance and other variables come into play
when connecting to a computer.

The VR116L is an excellent mic for that and it's a huge improvement from a
Plantronics mic."

Both the Shure Sm57 and the Shure Vr116L cost about the same, so price is not an important factor in choosing between them. I have to admit, though, that if I were going just by the product descriptions, I would think the Sm57 is the mic for music and the vr116l is the mic for voice recognition programs -- at least Shure doesn't seem to be pushing the VR for music purposes. But maybe that is just their marketing strategy.