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I’ve got thousands of dollars worth of recording gear. If you want to spend that much, and get the best sound you can, here’s a list of what I use.

If you’re on an extreme budget, here’s some really cheap stuff you can get away with to record on your computer.

All-in-one kit - $169 for all this:

Samson C01UCW Studio Condenser USB Microphone
Cakewalk Software
Mike Stand BL3
Microphone Pop Filter
SP01 Shock Mount
10 ft. USB 2.0 Extension

–Carpet remnants to nail up on walls: free (pulled out of dumpster behind carpet store)

If you have a room you can sacrifice, it would be good to nail up carpet remnants on the wall for the place you do your recording. An echoy room will make a shitty recording. You can always add reverb in your editing program, but you can’t take it away.

I did this to a room in our old house:

In our new house, I only did that in a small closet, because I’m only recording voice and guitar in there…not drums. I record bass direct into a tube preamp, and use drum loops.

It’s a lot less work to sound-condition a closet than a whole room:

If you’re recording live drums, There are lots of ways, partially depending on how many mics you have.

1 mic: hang it overhead.

2 mics: one overhead, one on the bass drum. Or two overhead, crossing each other in direction.

3 mics: one on bass drum, two overhead, crossing each other in direction.

4 mics: one on bass drum, one between the snare and high hat, two overhead, crossing each other in direction.

5 or more mics: one on each drum and cymbal, two overhead, crossing each other in direction.

If you’re recording live with other instruments in the room, you should try to get some isolation, with gobos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobo_%28recording%29

You can make gobos pretty easily.

By crossing the overhead mics, I mean this:

If you wanna go old school (non-computer, non-digital), you could pick up a cassette 4-track Portastudio on eBay cheap. (maybe 100 bucks?) That might be a good choice if you’re not very computer literate.

Here’s a page with MP3 links:
http://www.hitsofacid.com/SexKissCage/sex_kiss_cage.html
to the demo Bomb made that got us signed to Warner Brothers. Was recorded on a portastudio with an outboard compressor, two Sure sm58 microphones (about 80 bucks each…they’re the mics usually used for the vocal mics in clubs)

One of our guitars player engineered it, and I think it sounds pretty good for no-budget.

You could skip the outboard compressor if you were REALLY careful with all the levels.

We recorded the guitars, bass and drums live to two tracks with two SM58s hung from the ceiling, about ten feet apart, in the practice space. Then we overdubbed my vocals to one track, then added more guitars (both at the same time) to the last track.

You’d still want to hang up blankets or nail up carpet. A good dead-sounding room is important.

Happy recording!

–Michael W. Dean

This entry was posted by Michael W. Dean on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 12:51 am and is filed under The world is a strange and beautiful place. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.