Anybody have Home Studio experience?

[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?

[Flubbernugget]

O ahit you're right about the speakers.

Checking the SW now, thanks!

[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

[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

[Flubbernugget]

https://vimeo.com/238561693

Theres this

[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

[Flubbernugget]

Wouldn't a mixing board vs a plain audio interface be a little redundant if I can suffice doing that with a DAW?

[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!

[Flubbernugget]

about 9 months later, I finally did the thing.



criticism welcome!

also congrats i guess you all know my name now