Probably need to invest..

[Steve1234]

Unfortunately I'm on a bit of a tight budget at the moment but I know I need to invest in some new gear. Currently the PC that I use has just a dual core processor with 2GB of RAM and a fairly average sound card. When I plug headphones into it I can quite often hear the computer through it as it's quite loud.

I don't have any way of recording bass at the moment I have no bass guitar or VST and the only way of recording drums is through Addictive Drums which is OK but I hear that it's not great for metal. At the moment I haven't really looked into mixing drums so it's something I need to improve on. I have a PRS SE guitar which I record using a Line6 PODxt. However, I don't actually use the sounds of the PODxt I mostly use it as a way of recording directly a pure clean tone and from there I tend to use amp sims and impulses. I do have a laptop which is slightly better than my PC however it's kind of impossible to record guitar with because I get some sort of awful noise in the recordings.

So I was wondering what do you think would be the best thing to invest in first? I mostly just do home recording for myself and there's no way that I'm good enough to do production for anybody else or another band but I'm keen to learn for my own sake

 

[LeSedna]

If your current dualcore PC is not so old, it should be okay for demo or personnal production. Maybe 3gb of Ram would be better, but depends on how big are your sessions. My dualcore was enough for normal scaled sessions (like 3 bass tracks, 10 for the drums, 4 to 8 for guitars, 4 for vocals, a few FX etc) so I guess this shouldn't be a big problem if your windows is clean and you know how to maintain it clean.

If you could just avoid vista, and stick to XP or move to windows 7 if you can, it would be good.

Addictive drums should be okay, you can have decent results from it if you learn a bit how to process drums.

Best thing to invest in should be a decent external soundcard, and decent headphones, in my opinion. A 2in/2out one from a well known brand should not cost you too much.
With that, you should not hear any noise in your recordings, just a normal very light noise floor. I personnally record my DIs through my profire until I'll buy a good DI box, it's okay and with free vsts you can have good guitar/bass sounds. I would suggest then to sell your PODxt since you only use it as a DIbox, which would help to pay the soundcard.

There is really not much to invest on to reach a decent home personal production level. You already have a good guitar. Just add a cheap bass (forget everything about vst basses except if you cannot have another instrument, or if you do some electro stuff) and you have all you need to start. Use some free or cheap vst plugins in your DAW and you're done.

What you need in your case is :
- A not too old PC (checked)
- A good guitar (checked)
- A drum VSTi (checked)
- A DAW (I assume checked)
- Good cheap plugins
- A bass
- A good soundcard
- Good headphones or monitors (but for a low budget I suggest good headphones)
- Mikes for singers

 

[Robert W]

Unfortunately I'm on a bit of a tight budget at the moment but I know I need to invest in some new gear. Currently the PC that I use has just a dual core processor with 2GB of RAM and a fairly average sound card. When I plug headphones into it I can quite often hear the computer through it as it's quite loud.

I don't have any way of recording bass at the moment I have no bass guitar or VST and the only way of recording drums is through Addictive Drums which is OK but I hear that it's not great for metal. At the moment I haven't really looked into mixing drums so it's something I need to improve on. I have a PRS SE guitar which I record using a Line6 PODxt. However, I don't actually use the sounds of the PODxt I mostly use it as a way of recording directly a pure clean tone and from there I tend to use amp sims and impulses. I do have a laptop which is slightly better than my PC however it's kind of impossible to record guitar with because I get some sort of awful noise in the recordings.

So I was wondering what do you think would be the best thing to invest in first? I mostly just do home recording for myself and there's no way that I'm good enough to do production for anybody else or another band but I'm keen to learn for my own sake

I was in the exact same boat as you only a few months ago. My solution was to get a better desktop which I did. I dropped $650 on an Asus bundle and it made all the difference.

 

[timislegend]

i would say... your best investment (at this point) would be an audio interface.

and depending on your budget... you have a large selection to choose from.

sometimes using the "line-in" on your built-in sound card can generate unwanted noise because it shares the same circuit path as everything else on the daughter board so it's good to have a discrete audio interface that uses usb or 1394 protocol. but if your card is discrete PCI than it should be ok.

all the same... you would benefit from upgrading to a pro-sumer interface.


second recommendation: monitoring solutions.

buy a pair of near field reference monitors. this will assist you with translating the audio from recording to mixing to finalization (master/mp3/cd).


you can also improve your pc by upgrading a few things as well as preparing/optimizing the machine for recording into a digital audio workstation.

this is a small list of changes that you can make in windows to optimize the performance of your machine.

there are (of course) a lot more changes that can be made, it just depends on the purpose of the machine.

 

[Steve1234]

Thanks for the replies I have a pretty good pair of headphones for monitoring at the moment so I'm not too fussed there. I sometimes use the amp only out of my PODxt but not that often as I quite like being able to tweak everything in my DAW (which is Reaper by the way).

I'm not too bothered that I can't get a good recording on my laptop at the moment as most of my stuff is done through my PC. What would be the advantage of getting a DI box instead of using the PODxt for DI recording?

Also are there any good bass sim amps like the guitar ones?

 

[timislegend]

Thanks for the replies I have a pretty good pair of headphones for monitoring at the moment so I'm not too fussed there. I sometimes use the amp only out of my PODxt but not that often as I quite like being able to tweak everything in my DAW (which is Reaper by the way).

I'm not too bothered that I can't get a good recording on my laptop at the moment as most of my stuff is done through my PC. What would be the advantage of getting a DI box instead of using the PODxt for DI recording?

Also are there any good bass sim amps like the guitar ones?

pod farm has bass amp sims.

or you can use ampeg svx.


if you are gonna pay for an amp sim, you might as well just purchase a sansamp bddi

 

[Steve1234]

Would I be able to plug in a bass into my PODxt as I do with my guitars and use a bass sim that way or would I need a different DI box?

 

[SimonTaddio_Qc]

Trying to mix on a slow-ass cpu just kills creativity. When you have to use, say, Superior 2, a couple ampsims and some stuff and your cpu usage jumps like crazy, all of a sudden doing something relatively simple can become a pain in the ass, with the lag and glitches.
I say invest a couple of green bills on RAM and see if it helps.
Getting a bass is also a no-brainer, tho you can always borrow/rent one for cheaper

Would I be able to plug in a bass into my PODxt as I do with my guitars and use a bass sim that way or would I need a different DI box?

It'll do fine, especially if you're broke

 

[UncleBob]

If it helps at all, the one pc I have that I use to lay down ideas with and can achieve quite a decent amount on, is an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ running at 1.8ghz, 1,5g DDR 300 ram, an ancient 400mhz front side bus nforce2 MSI mobo and just 160gig hard drive, you have to do a lot of synth freezing and applying of effects but what you have is light years ahead of this so you should be able to do a decent amount.

Just get an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 for dirt cheap and you should be good to go.

 

[Steve1234]

I remember trying out a copy of a friends Cubase not too long ago and it would crash more often than not but now I'm using Reaper and it's not really a problem so my PC probably isn't good enough to take Cubase.

I can lay down guitar tracks and drums however I suck at it at the moment so I guess it'd help to get a cheap bass in there