a few basic questions about sound recording and hardware..

For all of you who are interested in what good gear is, keep this in mind. Audio is very subjective. Some people like high-fi digital production, some people like one cheap mic in a garage type sound. What you buy depends on the sound you are striving for. One thing you could do is consider bands/songs that you like the sound of, and try to find gear that was used to produce that sound. As far as studio equipment goes, a lot depends on what features you desire out of your equipment. Some people don't use midi, so there is no sense in buying an audio card with midi capabilities. Not all gear is created equally either. Really the best thing to do is to try out a lot of different gear at your local music shop. In my area we have a store called Guitar Center and you can test out the gear right there in the store. They will let you use a quiet room to compare microphones. You should buy what you like, not what someone tells you to buy. Keep in mind, sometimes you get what you pay for. Now I am in no way endorsing you to go out and buy a 3,000 dollar microphone, but I've learned that with guitars and amps, you generally get what you pay for. I broke down and bought a Gibson Les Paul and a Mesa Boogie F-30. I love my sound. I finally have the sound I've always wanted. It cost me 2,000 dollars to get that sound. That is my taste though, you may have a very different palette. If you take anything away from this, remember this, buy something because you like the way it sounds and it fits your needs, don't buy it because people tell you it's what you need. Daniel, I personally would like to thank you on behalf of the inquisitor as you have been more than helpful.

Dear folks and Daniel, I have been reading about microphones on the internet a bit and looking at prices. I do have some microphones but they rather old now I guess. What is odd is that there seem to be fairly cheap microphones like the Shure SM57 that are regarded as being excellent and others like the Neumann U87 or whatever it is that are unbelievably expensive that are also regarded as being very good. E.g. for recording a snare drum it seems that an SM57 is first rate. Recording vocals with an SM58 is also pretty good it would seem too. But better for vocals seems to be to get a microphone with a condenser and a dynamic function in it i.e. two microphones in one and blend them together in a mix and match fasion that I think you can control to some extent if it's a fancy enough microphone. If you are recording drums you are supposed to also have overhead microphones as well to get a stereo image and I guess some surround sound or whatever it's called. These ones I think are supposed to be condenser microphones. I occured to me that if combining the sound of a dynamic microphone with a condenser one is good for vocals why not buy an SM58 and a relatively cheap condenser microphone and then use both in parallel through separate channels or even tracks and then blend the sound yourself to get the apparently better result that is claimed for the combination..... There are some of these fancy double barrelled microphones that are sold by e.g. AKG and Audio Technica that seem to be cheaper alternatives to the Neumann U87. Do you have a favourite one here. Also which microphones do you think are good for the following: Vocal Acoustic guitar Bass Drum Tom Tom Crash/Ride Cymbal Hi Hat Piano Flute Saxophone Guitar Amp Bass Guitar Amop Trumpet Harp. I have a list of suggested mics for these applications but opinion varies on different web sites. I am not going to prejudice people's responses with these recommendations. I am interested in your opinions on reasonably economic choices. Another comment about recording drums in a home studio. I have been reading web pages on this. People recommend funny things like putting mics in an adjacent room to get ambience etc. When I was a kid my pals and I recorded the drums in a glass conservatory attached to the house. This got plenty of ambience and did not sound like it had been recorded in someone's living room. We used to put a towel over the snare to get a less rattly sound out of it. We also used to stick cushions and so on i the bass drum to fix that as well. We found that with various tricks and farting around we could get a cheap drum kit to sound quite alot better. The snare always took a good 40 minutes of messing with to get it sound OK. In those days I used to think that adding electronic reverb, echos and delay type effects seemed to be a good way of altering the drum sound so that you couldn't really tell that it had been recorded e.g. in a living room. Maybe that was a dumb idea. We used to make jokes about "mineshaft recordings", with too much reverb/delays, not enough close mics and general incompetence. Hints on ways to avoid the mineshaft recording problems especially recording drums at home with not too many microphones would be appreciated. There was also a tendency to get carried away with the vocals..... Comments appreciated. Regards Michael Fothergill

Hi Michael, It's not strictly neccessary to have a 'studio' soundcard in order to make music, any interface supported by the ALSA (PCI, USB) or ffado (FireWire) drivers will work. Having said that, many of the 'consumer' grade soundcards are poor quality, and lack features. Many of them have hardware which can only operate at 48KHz sample rates, which is a pain if you're trying to use the Jack sound server at 44.1KHz sample rate for CD production. Also, the A/D conversion tends to be poor and the analogue noise floor is high. The Delta 1010 is a good interface, but it doesn't have mic pre-amps - you'll also need an 8-buss mixer or an 8-channel pre-amp to make the most of it. It also has MIDI I/O, which you can use with your standard MIDI gear and apps like Hydrogen and Rosegarden. You can create a system like this yourself from Debian package repositories and a little source code building, but it's a great deal easier to use 64 Studio as a starting point. I'd suggest you try our distro first, then research the various audio/MIDI interfaces available and see what meets your needs.