Anybody have Home Studio experience?

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Anybody have Home Studio experience?

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Sat Jun 08, 2019 4:07 am

Post by Flubbernugget »

I'm looking to set up a home studio to start recording my own music. I've been in a studio before, but I've never had to put one together. Right now I'm just interested in doing stuff with me, an acoustic guitar, and maybe a drum machine.

I'm assuming I'm going to need the following equipment:

-> Cardiod and condenser mic
-> Computer with a dedicated sound card
-> Pre-amp/input into the sound card (needs to supply power to the cardiod)
-> Mixing software. I don't know much in this area other than I'm going to be on windows and I'm not going to be able to make audacity work.
-> Sound proofing. Might just end up being egg cartons at this point
-> Sound cancelling headphones

Anybody have experience with this? Anything I'm missing?
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Sat Jun 08, 2019 5:50 am

Post by nomnomnom »

If you can I would recommend to also get speakers alongside the headphones. It's good for adjusting EQ levels. If you can't do that, what I suggest you to do is simply taking your demos and playing them in your car and see how it sounds. How it sounds in the ears and how it sounds on speakers can be radically different so if you're doing this seriously you want both, preferably.

You also probably want a small USB synth. It will save you a lot of time when coming up with melodies and everything.

For the DAW I recommend Ableton. FL studio is also good but I love Ableton's interface much better and it's clearer. FL studio plugins tend to be better baseline though, but it will not matter if you plan to record a lot of guitar, so I recommend Ableton.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Sat Jun 08, 2019 6:19 am

Post by Flubbernugget »

O ahit you're right about the speakers.

Checking the SW now, thanks!
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Sat Jun 08, 2019 6:21 am

Post by Flubbernugget »

I might look into a nice keyboard over a midi synth, though midi would be nice for me in the beginning, as I have a lot of trouble harmonizing without trying to follow the main melody
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Mon Jun 17, 2019 6:55 pm

Post by Skygazer »

here's a quick rundown:
cardioid/condenser mic
it depends;; an SM58 would be a great vocal mic, you can take the little ball off and practically have a 57 so you might be good w just the dynamic? i have a couple of cheap condensers (rode m5s) that i would highly recommend for really detailed stuff but it depends on how noisy ur room is to be honest
Computer with a dedicated sound card + Pre-amp/input into the sound card (needs to supply power to the cardiod)
I just use my laptop and a focusrite scarlett 2i2!! most of the processing is offloaded to the 2i2, my laptop is p old but still powerful enough to do some wacky processing in a live setting so like for recording you can get away with a lot nowadays with a cheap computer. the focusrite comes with phantom power if you use a condenser and provides somewhat enough gain for my 57 if you go dynamic
mixing software
reaper!! its $60 and/or free if ur willing to wait 30 seconds for it to load. i use protools at work and reaper at home and honestly reaper is so much better for my tastes and just as if not more functional, theres just a steep learning curve
sound proofing
at home i mix on headphones so i don't know much about this, sorry :c it can get expensive but like this is also less important if you're using dynamic mics
sound cancelling headphones
don't get the active cancelling !!! at least not for mixing! i'd go with something classic like the sony mdr v6 or the at m50x's, they both have a lot of insulation to block out noise w/o resorting to weird sound altering electronic noise cancellation and they're relatively affordable

lmk if you need any help or advice or anything!!
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Tue Jun 18, 2019 1:01 am

Post by the worst »

You record music? I never knew that! I'd be down to hear some stuff sometime if you don't mind sharing!
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Tue Jun 18, 2019 1:48 am

Post by Flubbernugget »

Most of it has been with bands and a lot of it sucks lol.

Hmnnm there might be something I can dig up that doesn't fit that criteria though
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Tue Jun 18, 2019 2:25 am

Post by Flubbernugget »

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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Tue Jun 18, 2019 9:34 am

Post by the worst »

That's by you??
Sorry for derailing a little btw
Skygazer knows her stuff v v well and I'm not sure how to expand on it meaningfully :P
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Tue Jun 18, 2019 2:51 pm

Post by Flubbernugget »

Yeah, I wrote and recorded that. My friend made the video and uploaded it, though.

Never gonna complain about a derail to show off a little though :)
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Tue Jun 18, 2019 9:55 pm

Post by the worst »

As you shouldn't! :P
Those vocals are pretty unreal.
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Wed Jun 19, 2019 10:08 am

Post by Papa Zito »

You'll probably want a mixing board to handle multiple XLR inputs
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Wed Jun 19, 2019 12:25 pm

Post by Flubbernugget »

Wouldn't a mixing board vs a plain audio interface be a little redundant if I can suffice doing that with a DAW?
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Wed Jun 19, 2019 1:21 pm

Post by Papa Zito »

You gotta get those signals in there first
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Thu Jun 20, 2019 9:02 am

Post by Errantparabola »

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Post Post #15 (ISO) » Sun Jul 14, 2019 3:42 pm

Post by Flubbernugget »

So for life reasons I don't have money to get into this the way I thought I did. But that doesn't mean I'm not working towards it!

Having a decent background in programming I found a bunch of cool stuff that integrates music and code.

First I found Sonic Pi. https://sonic-pi.net/

This is a really cool piece of software that allows you to write music with code! It's based very heavily on looping and works best with synths (although there is some sample functionality). As far as I can tell it best facilitates EDM which uses a lot of vamping and digital sounds, but there really is a *lot* you can do here. I haven't done anything more than looping really simple melodies over half cadences so there's not much here for me to show of my own.

After playing with Sonic Pi for a little bit I wasn't too thrilled with the synths it came with, and I couldn't find any decent ones online without coughing up dough, so I started looking into rolling my own. Doing a little bit of homework I found out Sonic Pi rolls its synths with SuperCollider. https://supercollider.github.io/

This crazy piece of software has it's own DSL heavily inspired by Ruby and C, and lets you build synths literally starting from coding a pure sine/square/saw wave and building your way up from there. Having exactly zero experience with synth engineering I'm starting to build up a repertoire of techniques in this area. Having a very rudimentary knowledge of how sound waves and FFT interact I kind of learned additive synthesis on accident, and mostly just learned that it doesn't work well. A little Google-Fu brought up subtractive synthesis and FM synthesis. I took to learning FM synthesis over subtractive for now since it seems to be newer, but it is a hell of a thing to try and wrap my head around. What's really frustrating is that I don't really have a decent FM synth to play with, and trying to build one from the ground up with SuperCollider while trying to learn how it works doesn't really point me in a direction with many tutorials I could hit the ground running with. And there's a lot of tricky parts to it all! The actual function that creates an FM wave from a modulator and a carrier is a beast to understand at a deep enough level to have any intuition as to how it will generate a synth sound, and even if I did understand that, the interface behind most FM synths is pretty far removed from the math in a lot of unintuitive ways. This is all before additional complexity like algorithms are added!!

I'm thinking that if I can get a decent grasp of this FM synth thing I can combine it with some additive detuning and harmonics to be able to generate very large, resonant, and ambient sounds to feed back into Sonic Pi. We'll see what happens!
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Post Post #16 (ISO) » Wed May 06, 2020 3:30 pm

Post by Flubbernugget »

about 9 months later, I finally did the thing.



criticism welcome!

also congrats i guess you all know my name now
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