There are tons of good resources out there on recording. I’m going to audio-techno-geek for a bit in a couple blog posts and eventually write up a proper page under the Music heading on my full kit and process, but I’m still learning, fixing, and figuring things out for now.
I attended Master Philip’s Home Recording for Bards at Pennsic 43. One of the most valuable things he pointed out was that it’s very easy and not too expensive to get decent sound into your computer. However, it’s rather tricky to get a professional-sounding recording produced. I have the right equipment to get a good recording, for the most part, but that’s only part of the puzzle. Here’s the equipment I’m using for my current recording dabblings:
- Condenser Mic: Rode NT1-A
- Dynamic Mic: Shure SM57
- Preamp: PreSonus Firebox 6×10 (soon to be swapped out)
- Software: REAPER
- Headphones: Sony MDR-V600
- Computer: MacBookPro Retina with SSD
I wouldn’t use this as a shopping list for a beginner. This is equipment I’ve collected over the past 6 years, and the headphones are closer to 15 years old.
Now, connecting all these things together gets a little more tricky, and here’s where I ramble a bit about technical specifications that 95% of people reading this won’t really care about. When I bought the Firebox, I was working off a Mac Pro tower which had Firewire input. Firewire is preferable to USB (at least USB 1.1 and USB 2.0) for two reasons: speed and isochronous transfer. The latter as best as I understand it means less potential corruption of data, particularly during periods of high data transfer. In theory USB supports it, but I’m a bit fuzzy on the details and am given to understand that Firewire does it better. The problem is that my laptop doesn’t have a Firewire port. It has USB 3.0 and it has Thunderbolt. There are dongles to plug Firewire into Thunderbolt, but I’ve had 3 die on me in the past year because they’re cheap plastic pieces of poop. I have a Belkin thunderbolt dock with Firewire input, but the point of the dock is to let me plug in all my peripherals and not have to keep plugging and unplugging, and my office (with said peripherals) isn’t a good place to do recording. One option I considered was getting an analog audio-to-USB converter, but the only option I could find was only 16-bit, and industry-standard is 24-bit. Especially given that I’m going to want these tracks professionally mastered, having proper audio resolution is important.
The other option is to buy a new preamp that’ll plug directly into my computer. Thunderbolt is a new enough standard that the only thunderbolt compatible preamps are mucho pricey, and all the USB preamps seem to be 2.0. I have one expert telling me that USB 2.0 can wonk up timing synchronization, but that’s a networking expert, not an audio expert. There are two audio experts, though, who approve of the preamp I just bought and should be arriving any minute now, the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. (Said experts are Ken Theriot and Ben Dechamps, both who produce superb quality recordings.) Even though the Scarlett 2i2 is USB 2.0, I’m only using it for two inputs at 24-bit, 44.1 kHz recording, so the USB 2.0 should be plenty. The things I like about the Scarlett 2i2: two XLR inputs, on-board monitor jack, phantom power supply, and it’s bus-powered so I don’t need to plug it into the wall. [Feel free to contact me for more explanation on those terms.]
Now that I have the proper gear that will make recording more convenient and a bit more portable, I can start focusing on, you know, the actual *content*. Garbage in, garbage out, after all. No amount of gear can make a mediocre performance sound good.