Now you know I have given you some snippets of my equipment. But I thought to break the basics down a bit. So what would you need to record a CD at home? Well there are few minimum requirements. First of all, as much as I love analogue, if you are on a budget digital is the way to go. To record and mix an album on an equipment does require lot more hardware: tape machine, studio desk, compressors, reverb units... This list could be endless. Don't take me wrong, I would love to take the band in to a great analogue studio and record this album there. But as we all know, that would not be cheap... probably thousand s of miles away from my shoestring budget. But I do know from over a decade of studio work, that we can achieve great results on digital. And actually, the analogue equipment need to be very high standard before it beats the digital. So lets not get in to the ever so popular debate between the analogue and digital. My point is, today the digital is cheaper, full stop.
First and foremost you will need a computer. Mac or PC? (oh I can hear the warriors from both camp itching for a fight...) Again not an argument I really want to get in to in this blog, but let me just say this much: I tried both for recording over the years, and at the moment the difference is so small I would recommend to use what ever you're most familiar with. The hype over Mac has worn bit thin on me. I mean if Apple can release a simple mobile device with so many bugs and faults (something Microsoft was always blamed of), what makes their computers so much better? I am used to windows, and my Cubase runs smooth even on Vista (note to self: stop getting in the middle of age old arguments...). If you fancy your self on a beach somewhere, producing a track with a thin as credit card mac book, with barely a half an USB port, good luck! Then most of the advice I'll be sharing on this blog is probably no good to you, we are talking about making an album on a shoestring budget after all... I do think, for pure processing power for your hard earned money, PC would be my preference. Mine is an Acer aspire, with 2GHz Intel Pentium processor, 3GB ram and an 160GB hard drive. It has four USB connections. And yes it is a laptop, just in case I want to go to that same beach with my friend on his mac book;-). I would not worry about any fancy sound card. You will be more than likely bypassing it anyway with a USB audio interface. Just make sure you have ample supply of ram, big enough processor, I would recommend the 2GHz, and some storage. Now this you can expand with external hard drive and I would recommend this. Keep in mind that audio recording files are not small, and will fill up your computer pretty fast. To maintain a good working computer for recording does require regular house cleaning and maintenance. Recording software saves everything, even if you delete a take in the software, its still on your hard drive. I'll give more detailed advice on this subject later date. But if you think that an average CD is lets say 700mb for 80mins of music. This is a stereo signal, so two mono tracks. Now lets count that you would have Drums recorded on 6 tracks, (and I'm being very sparing here) Bass on 1 track, Electric guitar doubled 2tracks, Vocal and few backing vocals 3 tracks. So even that is already 12 tracks, and I know you will have lots more. So for that alone you are talking about 4.2 Gigabytes of hard drive space. It's also good to back up your lovingly crafted recordings. If you can get a completely silent computer, great! I would love to hear about it. But as long as it's not an jet engine, you can work around this. Good heavy blanket on top of the computer during recording can work wonders, just remember to air it between the takes, the noise it makes is the cooling fan that stops the computer over heating and if it does, it will not be a happy camper...
There still are lots of recording software that are made either for PC or Mac, so this could be one deciding point. Also on PC, go for a reliable make. Macs are all built by Apple, but PCs are built by hundreds of different companies. So yeah, go for a make you trust.
So that's the first part, the computer done. Next week we'll go through how you actually get the signal in to the computer. But for now, enjoy the end of your holidays. Have cracking start to the new year and I will talk to you next week:-)
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