Home recording on a budget (Part One) - Hardware

Hardware

Hardware

Jon Penny writes...

While the lure of the professional studio is still strong for most artists wanting a good quality marketable recording, it is amazing what can be achieved with the right gear in the confines of your own home. Anyone with a home computer and the appropriate hardware and software can produce recordings of broadcast or CD quality - how close these come to true professional recordings depends on how much you are willing to spend on the equipment, and how good your mixing and mastering skills are…

I vividly remember taking up the offer of some fella in a pub to record my former band’s EP for £150, to find that his ‘studio’ consisted of a Mac, a mic and a couple of preamps in a spare room. Having been through that, and coming out with a slightly woolly final mix, it seemed logical to buy a bit more kit and give it a go myself when it came to recording our next CD.

These articles will be looking at how to get started at doing just that. I will be looking solely at recording on the PC, but there are a range of other recording products out there. Digital multi-track recorders are very popular with those who prefer actual physical faders and knobs to play with, and multi-track tape recorders can still be picked up very cheaply - some prefer the greater warmth of sound that tape gives over digital recording.

Generally, however, the computer provides the most versatile and cost-effective home recording solution, allowing you control over every stage of the creative process, from recording to mixing to mastering, even to designing CD covers or uploading your music to websites as MP3s.


Hardware
Essentials | Sound | Microphones | All-in-one solutions | Audio vs MIDI

1. Essentials
A PC with plenty of hard-disk space is the first essential. As a rule of thumb, a mono WAV file (e.g. a single guitar track recorded for use in a sequencer like Cubase) takes up about 5MB of disk space per minute of audio at CD quality. For stereo files, it is around 10MB per minute, so a final mixdown of a four-minute song will probably be around 40MB. It doesn’t take long to fill up a small hard-disk with that kind of file size, particularly if, like me, you are prone to recording dozens of takes of each guitar in the pursuit of perfection…

My own current system is a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM and 160GB hard-disk space. Ultimately, the processing speed and amount of memory you will require will depend on what kind of software you are planning to run. If you are simply recording a few guitar tracks into a sequencer and are content to use the resulting recording in this raw, unimproved state, the chances are you can get away with slower processors and more limited RAM. The more tweaking and processing of sounds or use of software instruments that you desire, however, the better your computer will need to be to handle those demands.

2. Sound
A good soundcard is the next obvious need. The job of producing audio is specialist enough not to be left to your computer’s main processor to carry out, unless you count the horrific beeping noises that older computers used to make through the internal speaker.

The soundcards that are generally supplied as standard with PCs will usually be too basic for the needs of the home recordist. For one thing, inputs and outputs will usually be the smaller 3.5mm jack size and be tucked away at the back of the computer; so you go to plug in your 6.35mm guitar cable, realise you need an adapter, then realise the jacks are so close together you have to unplug your speakers to get the adapter in, and irritation is the net result. This is the point you realise you should have splashed out on a better quality card - after all, this is the hardware powerhouse for your music, so it makes sense to get it right.

There are many, many options out there. Some soundcards are the traditional type that sit in the back of your PC, with inputs either taking the form of cables, ‘breakout’ units that sit next to the computer, or as a panel that takes up one of the slots normally occupied by spare CD drives or suchlike. This gives you easy access to Line-In, Auxiliary, Digital, and/or Optical inputs, and headphone jacks. Creative Labs’ Soundblaster cards are perhaps the best known of these, and the X-Fi series seem to provide the best options for musicians. Professionals are more likely to choose cards by digital audio specialists such as E-MU or M-Audio.

www.creative.com | www.emu.com | www.m-audio.com

Equally, there are a number of stand-alone products on the market that make use of the versatility of the USB port. This handy little port, standard on newer computers, performs the dual function of providing power for any device attached to it and transferring data between that device and the computer. Audio interfaces, such as the Tascam US-122, M-Audio Fasttrack Pro, or Alesis IO2, can thereby be attached to any PC or laptop and provide sound processing and audio inputs in one handy box. All three devices mentioned above give you two channels to play with, and crucially also have XLR mic inputs with Phantom power, allowing you to attach condenser microphones for clearer recording (see Section 3: Microphones).

www.tascam.de/en | www.m-audio.com

There are similar products that use FireWire, a higher-speed (though older) connection commonly used by digital camcorders. FireWire audio interfaces tend to be higher spec and consequently more expensive than USB ones, but worth a look if you already have a FireWire port on your computer.

Also worth mentioning, as this is a guitar website, is Line6’s Guitar Port. Line6 are best known for their effects and amp-modelling in the guitar world, and the GuitarPort incorporates some of this wizardry within a single-audio-input USB device. More than this, however, there is an option to be part of the GuitarPort Online guitar tutoring site, with jam tracks and lessons covering a range of musical styles. http://www.line6.com/guitarport/

For a one-stop comparison of professional products, try: www.nusystems.co.uk

3. Microphones
A good microphone is a real boon to any recordist - you never know when you might need one, even if you are not planning to record any vocals. Electric guitars, and acoustics with pickups, can of course be plugged directly into your Line-In and the signal recorded without any need to worry whether the sound of a flushing toilet elsewhere in the house is going to make it onto your otherwise pristine take.

The resulting recording will have a definite character, which may be exactly what you are looking for - on other occasions, it may be that adding a microphone can help in achieving that sound you have been searching for. If you are recording an acoustic guitar, for example, recording through DI (Direct Input) will inevitably create a sound that has electric characteristics. For a far more natural, acoustic sound, a microphone is essential, however good the pickups on your guitar are. Getting a good sound from acoustic guitars will be discussed in a later section…

This seems an appropriate point to explain the mysteries of Phantom power. This is where power is supplied to the microphone along the same cable that carries the signal back to the mixer, hence the “phantom” epithet. Phantom power is needed to use condenser microphones, the choice of professional sound recordists everywhere. The advantage of these powered mics over the unpowered, “dynamic” mics that everyone is familiar with, is that they produce a much stronger signal, making them more sensitive and better able to capture sounds in all their subtlety. This sensitivity also makes them more prone to distortion, which is why they are seldom used for live performance.

This may sound familiar to those of you using USB ports to provide power and data transfer capabilities for various devices. Coincidentally, Samson have now produced a microphone that combines the two; a USB Condenser mic that eliminates the need for any other interfaces.

www.samsontech.com | www.soundtech.co.uk/samson

Condenser microphones can be expensive, but there are a variety of budget brands that produce perfectly good results in the home studio. Ultimately, as with most things, the more you spend, the better the quality of the recording, so if you are recording an acoustic instrument and looking to capture those subtle shades of sound, you might want to consider splashing out.

4. All-in-one solutions
Increasingly, hardware and software companies are in cahoots, offering sequencing software with audio interfaces, or vice versa. This may turn out to be a cost-effective and simple way of putting together your home studio, with the added advantage that the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ components will be designed to work well together, often with a “plug-in-and-play” simplicity in setting up.

From the software side, Digidesign’s ProTools and Cakewalk’s Sonar PowerStudio systems are tailored for a variety of technical needs and budgets. Steinberg’s Cubase System 4 features the SL version of Cubase bundled with a USB interface.

www.protools.com | www.cakewalk.com | www.steinberg.net

Many of the hardware companies mentioned in Section 2 bundle some kind of music software with their interfaces, which may remove the need to buy separately. However, these tend to be ‘light’ versions of the big-name software, which will be fine for starting out, but may start to get restrictive as you get more experienced with recording. The next article will take a closer look at how to go about selecting the software you need…

5. Audio vs MIDI
Finally, a quick word on different ways of getting your music on the computer. So far, I have been discussing the recording of external audio signals – in other words, a real guitar or a real voice. The chances are that you will also have heard of MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a method whereby electronic instruments (chiefly keyboards) can be plugged into your computer and signals transferred between the two.

MIDI files only contain detail on the notes that you have recorded, such as pitch and duration. In the olden days before MP3s and broadband internet, this allowed someone in Shetland to send their pal in Cornwall their own performance of Moonlight Sonata by email. The tragedy for music fans occurs in the playback: the nature and quality of the sounds depends on the MIDI setup on your own computer, and traditionally MIDI sounds have been unequivocably dire – imagine Beethoven on a Bontempi organ and you are halfway there.

However, as time has gone on, MIDI has remained a useful tool, and improvements in sampling technology now allow you to recreate the sound of the Berliner Philharmonic playing your own compositions. This can be an exciting prospect for a budding composer with only a guitar for company. More on how to do this in later articles…

Jon Penny

Future Articles:
Software
Getting the most from a mix
Mastering

Other articles by Jon Penny:
PRS - SE Custom, Custom 22 and McCarty review