making internet music with not much equipment

[Fortunate Son]

First off, I think I could learn a lot from the people here, because I know nothing. So I'm really excited about this site. Secondly, I'm interested in doing some music collaborations but all I have is an amp and a cheap radio shack boundary mic. I'm pretty good at guitar, but I don't really have any recording or mixing experience. I can't think of a better way to learn though. Any tips?


p.s. dwoz cheated on the bar exam.

[Spock]

I'll take a first shot at this as to what you need.

1) Computer.
Must have CPU, memory and disk space do to the job.
High speed internet connection.

2) Recording Software.
Depending if you have a MAC or PC will be the biggest thing in picking your software. You also have to ask yourself what you are going todo. Are you going to try to do the final mix, or just supply your parts. To just record and supply your parts then you could use something lower end, or maybe even some of the shareware stuff like Reaper.

3) Converter.
You need an A/D - D/A converter to get the audio in and out of the PC. The builtin sound card just isn't going to hack it. In your case, just doing your self, a 2 channel unit with good pre-amps would do the job. The exact model depends on what you comptuer can take, a PCI card, USB, Firewire?

4) Mic.
Go get a SM57. No I'm not joking. If you can get a good tone out of your amp, then this mic should get started.

5) Listening.
Something to hear the output from converter. Good monitors and headphones.

And the biggest thing in internet collaborations. Working well with others, having a good attitude.

Good luck.

[Brendo]

I'll take a first shot at this as to what you need.

1) Computer.
Must have CPU, memory and disk

So that's what I've beeen doing wrong!

[seagate]

So that's what I've beeen doing wrong!

http://www.msc.id.au/private/tmp/rotflol.gif

[Spock]

So that's what I've beeen doing wrong!

OK, I stepped in it on that one.

But just for the people that care for real answer. Let's think about disk space for a minute. How much do you need?

Warning math ahead.

Take you song length in seconds, times your sample rate times your sample depth divided by 8 and thats what you need for one mono track. Now how many tracks will you need to keep, plus versions of some scratch parts. Don't forget about all those takes you make before you have a keeper. Now add a bit more for mp3s you might cut to send around.

Let's take an example. a 6 minute 50 second song at a smaple rate of 44.1Khz, 24 bit with about 80 tracks (It's a Otek production, that's why it takes 80 tracks), would take .....

((6 * 60 ) + 50 ) * 44100 * ( 24 / 8 ) * 80 is 11,571,840,000 Bytes or aprox. 11G

If you looked at what most of the teams used for the last CaPE is was around 1.5G to 4G per song to hold everything.

So look what happened to the hard drive, a few songs, family pictures, a load of porn, and oh yea, that pesky OS, and before you know it you have no space left.

"Data expands to fill all available disk space." It's a law of the universe, just learn to deal with it.

Now before you go out a buy some big old drive, check out some other specs. RPM and transfer rate. If you can't get all those 80 tracks off the drive at the rate to keep up, then you will pops clicks and pauses in the playback. I'll leave it you to figure out the math for what transfer rate you need for our sample song. The other thing to worry about is how the drive is connected. If it is on a USB buss with your OS disk, then you may run into a problem where the disk can move the data, but the buss is the bottleneck.

Some of these other guys have some good rules of thumb for number of tracks for an X RPM drive connected to and Y buss.

[J.G.]

^^Yup, and patience too--it really is a virtue, not just virtually.

; J

[Brendo]

OK, I stepped in it on that one.

But just for the people that care for real answer. Let's think about disk space for a minute. How much do you need?

Well, ya gave me what I was looking for. Cheers:lol:

[eagan]

Just to pop in a quick note on the basic computer needs, about something Spock overlooked mentioning.

Bad Spock. Bad. Bad Spock. Go lay down.

When looking at your computer hardware, and considering what you have already, and what you might need to add or change, you need to figure on setting yourself up with TWO harddisks.

One as primary, for the OS, all software you use, other general data related to the computer's other purposes in life.

Then a second physical HDD (not just a separate partition on one HD), to be dedicated to only audio data files, and nothing else. There are multiple good reasons for doing this. Trust me on this one. Just get a dedicated second HDD and keep nothing else on it. That means no OS swap files or temp folders, too.

Keep in mind what you're going to do to back up those humongous piles of data, also.

Still on the subject of just the computer area of this, give some serious thought to just the basic (but easily overlooked, until you've already made an awful mess for yourself) topic of how you organize the work data. In other words, don't get all excited and start cranking away and find yourself a few months down the road with a single data folder called "music" with 500 files named "audio1" through "audio500". There was a whole thread on that alone a awhile back in the MARSH recording forum.

Aside from all that, just keep in mind that there is a lot more to learning good recording than just getting a computer up and running and figuring out how to set up to record tracks and set levels to keep things out of clipping.

And you're only going to learn so much from a few things on the web. All anybody can really do here is kind of point you in general directions on what things you need to learn and work on. It's a very technical craft and it's a subtle art. Take a clue from the fact that this place is populated by people who have been doing this stuff for years, and are still asking each other all kinds of questions, constantly.


JLE

JLE

[Spock]

Just to pop in a quick note on the basic computer needs, about something Spock overlooked mentioning.

Bad Spock. Bad. Bad Spock. Go lay down.

When looking at your computer hardware, and considering what you have already, and what you might need to add or change, you need to figure on setting yourself up with TWO harddisks.

One as primary, for the OS, all software you use, other general data related to the computer's other purposes in life.


You are right, I wasn't crystal clear about that but I did touch on it.


... If it is on a USB buss with your OS disk, then you may run into a problem...


Let be me very clear about this.

SEPERATE YOUR STUFF

This is just not a matter of making it easy to find. You have to put things on different spindles. Not on different partions on same physical spindle. None of this C: and D: stuff on teh same disk.

It's all about being to get more than one disk seek and data transfer going at the same time.

As an aside, I run into this crap daily with database folks that have read in some 20 year old Oracle whitepaper to put data on different mount points. Of course this was back when one mount point equated to one spindle. Now days you have all kinds of things the virtualize your storage, so unless you know exactly where it is going on the backend, you can make some bad choices that can kill IO performance.

[Fulcrum]

And if I may elucidate further: make sure your two hard drives are on separate busses. If you have two IDE buses, or two SATA buses, or one of either, don't put them both on the same bus.

The reason you don't want to do that is because the bus has to stop long enough to close the connection with the read drive and start the connection with the write drive. If the drives are on separate buses, neither bus has to stop and the connection can stream from read drive to write drive.

And if it hasn't been mentioned before, you want drives that rotate at least 7200rpm.