outside looking in
<b>Registered Member</b>
I've decided to expand my ever growing list of time consuming hobbies to include home recording. To start, I simply want to "document" or archive a good performance/recording of each new piano work I master (just before they become "unmastered" the day after I stop practicing them and move on to a new piece).
I thought it would be nice later in life to have good quality recordings of what I had accomplished. Since I've dabbled in MIDI keyboard stuff in the past, and a little songwriting here and there, this will no doubt grow into a horrendous hobby devouring all of my time.
Hopefully, it will also allow me to capture good performances of my trumpet playing as well.
OK, so the new toys:
A matched stereo pair of Oktava MC012 microphones. These are small diaphragm condenser mics, pretty good quality... used in many professional studios for acoustic instrument recording.
dbx 386 stereo vacuum tube mic preamp, with 24bit 96kHz analog to digital conversion. A good clean preamp (for a tube, that is), and some nice noise shaping, dither, and "over linear" limiting features on the digital side.
M-Audio Delta DiO 2496 soundcard. This is a semi-pro digital interface card... no analog capturing capability at all (unlike SBLive's, Audigy's, and most PC based audio recording cards, studio or otherwise). Instead, it has a really nice digital bus section, and is sync'ed to the dbx 386 for its source clock.
I should get about as clean of a digital signal as possible (without multi-thousand dollar Apogee converters and such). My piano is probably the wink link in the chain (other than my playing, of course). I'm having it regulated and voiced next week.
After the New Year, I hope to be able to post the first sample of my results.
The only thing left to decide at this point is software... grr. n-Track, Nuendo, CEP, Samplitude, Logic, Cubase, Sonar, Cool Edit Pro, ProTools, HomeSudio, SoundForge, VegasVideo... the list is endless. What a mess.
I thought it would be nice later in life to have good quality recordings of what I had accomplished. Since I've dabbled in MIDI keyboard stuff in the past, and a little songwriting here and there, this will no doubt grow into a horrendous hobby devouring all of my time.
Hopefully, it will also allow me to capture good performances of my trumpet playing as well.OK, so the new toys:
A matched stereo pair of Oktava MC012 microphones. These are small diaphragm condenser mics, pretty good quality... used in many professional studios for acoustic instrument recording.
dbx 386 stereo vacuum tube mic preamp, with 24bit 96kHz analog to digital conversion. A good clean preamp (for a tube, that is), and some nice noise shaping, dither, and "over linear" limiting features on the digital side.
M-Audio Delta DiO 2496 soundcard. This is a semi-pro digital interface card... no analog capturing capability at all (unlike SBLive's, Audigy's, and most PC based audio recording cards, studio or otherwise). Instead, it has a really nice digital bus section, and is sync'ed to the dbx 386 for its source clock.
I should get about as clean of a digital signal as possible (without multi-thousand dollar Apogee converters and such). My piano is probably the wink link in the chain (other than my playing, of course). I'm having it regulated and voiced next week.
After the New Year, I hope to be able to post the first sample of my results.
The only thing left to decide at this point is software... grr. n-Track, Nuendo, CEP, Samplitude, Logic, Cubase, Sonar, Cool Edit Pro, ProTools, HomeSudio, SoundForge, VegasVideo... the list is endless. What a mess.
