I'm taking a little break from recording so thought I'd look on here
We're putting together an ep and decided to record as much as we could at home/by ourselves, so I've been scouring ebay, forums and the like to bring my gear up to a standard that can deliver the sound I want, while not busting the bank.
Heres what I started with a few months ago:
Røde NT1-A
Røde M3
Phonic m1002 mixer
Audiophile 2496 interface.
Cubase 5
First thing I did was throw some rockwool around the room (nicely sewn up in fabric of course) at a cost of about £10. This nicely mopped up nasty reflections. Then I set to work on ebay getting the gear. Setup is now:
cubase 5Røde NT1A
Røde M3
Shure SM81 - small condenser microphone that I was told would be great on acoustic guitars. Turns out it is!
Golden Age Project R1 Mk2 - The Røde NT1A was a little too bright for our female singer, so I looked into ribbon mic's which have a reputation of having a warmer sound. This mic was raved about in soundonsound as being completely awesome on vox, considering it's more budget price.
Focusrite ISA one. The BEST budget preamp in my opinion. Focusrite basically took their classic preamp out of the expensive channel strip and boxed it up as a single unit for much much cheaper. Has made the crappy phonic mixer redundant.
Revox PR99. Unnecessary buy for most home recorders, but I'm after an older sound, so I had to buy an old reel-to-reel. Bargain off a 2nd hand website.
Golden Age Project Comp54 A hardware compressor isn't totally necessary when recording to computer, but I find having the near-perfect sound going in makes things much easier when mixing, plus these hardware units just add a little extra something. Like with the ribbon mic, these guys seem to have managed to recreate the classic analog compressor sound at a much lower cost.
Lexicon MPX200 Again, reverb is not necessary hardware, but I find it much easier to get the right sound on this dude than with plugins. Lexicon is a great reverb.
Samson Media ONE 3a Pair of monitors is absolutely crucial for mixing. These are at the lower end of all monitors, but are very decent.
Well, I'm still on the lookout for a nice EQ if one comes around, but apart from that, I think I could be putting together the best budget signal chain possible. So I wanted to reccomend it to everyone.
The raw necessary basics would be:
Røde NT1A -> Focusrite ISA one -> Audiophile 2496 -> DAW (cubase or whatever you have) -> Media 1 3a (monitors)
Getting a free daw (which are awesome - if I hadn't already paid for cubase by the time I found out about them, I'd be using reaper or traverso) puts the cost of this signal chain at around £700 Thats assuming you pay full price for everything, with the preamp being the most expensive, so if you can pick that up 2nd hand you could slash that price by 1/3, maybe more.
If you want to add a bit more variety then I would suggest first going for the sm81 as a great mic for acoustic guitars, then the ribbon mic as a vocal alternative and then I would think about the compressor.
If anyone has good alternatives to any of these things (in the same price range), I'm all ears!
