How much money should i save up and be willing to spend on a DECENT home studio... (mind you, nothing very extravagant...just enough to get at least a semi-professional sound)

See, right now my setup is

Shure SM57 ---> Laptop Soundcard ----> Cakewalk.


Bland. Really Really Bland and probablly crappy, and would only work for probablly "pre-demo" demos...if you get my drift.


I know i need at least:

A mixer
Moniters
Headphones
A few mics (the less money i have to spend the better, could i get away with just one or two SM57s, one vocal mic, and one condenser?)
Something to record the music onto

Cakewalk should save me a lot of trouble though, right? With all the built in compression/gating and such? Do i still have to drop assloads of money and rack compressers, gates, EQs, and the like?

i just use-
shure sm57-->tascam 4 track(as a pre mixer thing)-->computer in the external microphone jack. computer running pro tools.
It gets the job done.

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cubase/nuendo - NO CAKEWALK !!! or if you want to use cakewalk, use it only for recording purposes. mix on nuendo.

upgrade your soundcard first of all. we use a m-audio audiophile 4-in 4-out card (its certainly not the best but is pretty good). you'll need monitors & the extra mics if you plan on recording live drums (i get the feeling thats what you want to do, but i said this cuz a lot of studios over here dont have live drums). if you want to program the drums, then just a good headphone would do.

as for the rack compressors, gates, eqs and all, the software takes care of it all. like you said, you just want a decent home studio to get a semi-professional sound. click on the narsil link in my signature and download the track carcinogenia. that'll give you an idea of how it can sound with even less resources than this.

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I have just started pc recording and I went and bought a tascam US-122 digital interface, I plug directly in through my pedal into the interface and thats it. It just plugs straight in the USB input and it gives a fuckin crystal clear sound, easy.

http://www.tascam.com/Products/US-122.html

Edit - it cost me $400 aus.

thanks...i'll talk to my friend (whose computer we record on) about using that program instead.

And i use FruityLoops for drums. (can actually sound very good if you do it right)

^^^ can you incorporate tempo changes using fruity loops?

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Yeh i'm pretty sure you can add tempo changes.At the moment I'm using Sequbeat7 for my drums, it's pretty cool but I would like something different, I couldn't figure out how to work fruity loops 3 well, I need to find the full version somewhere and spend some serious hours on it.

Yeah, in a metal band tempo changes are usually pretty common...i forget exactly how right now since i actually havent worked in fruityloops for a week or two and it slipped my mind, but it's like under "edit events" or something similar to that....

yeah i'm stupid.

Fuck no!, their is no tempo changes in Fruity loops 3, fuckin ridiculous. I am finding out about fruity 4, see if they've changed it, but that really is just plain gay, "uhhh nah you can't have a tempo change in your song, we have fuckin every over stupid electronic effect, but you can't incorporate a tempo change". BAH...

For a good home recording studio, I would say 1,000-2,000$. That's how much I plan to spend on one a year from now, anyway.

I'm currently running my PC with a M-Audio Delta 44 card which has a handy breakout box, a pair of awesome Behringer Truth active monitors, my dad's old Soundcraft mixer and Reason/Cool Edit Pro 2

Mic-wise all I have is a 58, but I have access to a couple of my dad's condenser mics. The mixer has phantom power on it so I no longer have to screw around with an external psp, and I'll be running the inputs from the desk into the s/card via auxes, cause that's the only way I can do it right now

I'm gonna invest in some outboard gear sooner or later, I can't stand using plugins for compression and stuff like that. Effects are alright, but anything dynamics based I prefer to do with hardware rather than software