next purchase advice?

[beatifictatter]

hey.
i've got about £300 together and looking to buy some gear.....i'm in the 'ambitious budget studio' bracket, been recording 'seriously'/gathering gear for just over a year...
not sure what would be a good buy/make a difference/be of most use....
thinking about the following but i'm open to suggestion....

the golden age pre.....i've read good things about it.
sansamp bass driver d.i....hopefully guaranteed good bass sound every time (obviously depending on player/strings etc etc...)
sm7b.....i hear it's a great vocal mic. and pretty good on guitar amps?

my set up/mic collection is the following.

focusrite pro 40 and octopre.
art mpa gold

se z5600a mkII
sontronics sigma
5 x sm57
2 x se1a
akg d112
t-bone rb100

ive got loads of plugins (waves, abbeyroad, sonalksis, altiverb, t-racks, urs etc etc) so im looking to spend on hardware really...

any advice from those with more experience in gathering a good studio setup (at a slow but steady pace....) would be much appreciated......
cheers

[moon_unit]

My advice would be to get whatever you feel is most necessary in order to achieve the results you're trying to achieve.

Seeing as how you already have microphones and preamps ... the bass driver might make sense, seeing as how you don't already have a bass di or amp on your list. Then again, I have no idea how you normally track bass, or what kind of results you're getting, so I can only guess (I also have no idea what kind of stuff you're tracking, how you're tracking it, what kind of space you're recording in, what areas you're happy with and not happy with, etc. etc. etc. and the list goes on).

Very generally speaking, you'll get the largest and quickest returns the more you invest in things that are the closest to ground level in the recording chain; as an example: a good bass that records well will give you far greater returns than the amp you plug it in to. And the amp you plug it in to will have a far greater effect on the recording quality than the mic used to capture it. The mic used to capture it will have a greater effect than the pre you plug the mic in to. The pre you plug it in to will usually have a greater effect than the converters, etc. etc. etc. And the skill of the player and room accoustics will probably have a greater effect than any of these factors (or at least as much effect as the instrument itself).

I realize that's not a very sleek or sexy answer, but then again I'm just some random schmuck responding to a message board post on the internets. I shouldn't be giving advice on what recording gear you should buy any more than I should be telling you what size shoes you should wear.

[beatifictatter]

haha. i can choose my own shoes ta.

tracking my own band, some recent early recordings up at

montage populaire on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Videos

most laboured over of those recordings are the second track 'sorrows well rehearsed'.
the other two were written and recorded in a day each.
have a listen and see if anything jumps out as a problem area?

and getting local bands in to earn a few quid/fund new gear. been getting pretty good results.....
indie, garage, goth, ska, electro, folk, no particular style, im friends with a lot of bands and offering on the cheap while learning the ropes....
been d.i ing bass in to the art mpa til now. sometimes miking bass players amp as well.....
room is untreated but it hasnt proved a problem yet. walls are carpeted, room the size of a triple garage.

i just thought there might be something screaming out that i'd nelected to notice....

[beatifictatter]

i guess what i was basically asking was do any of the mics/pres i suggested, or the sansamp, or anything else that slutz might think of, offer me a significant improvement over what i already have....will the different flavour i get be significant enough to be of great use.....or should i save the money and aqdd to it until i can get something significantly better?

[moon_unit]

Good stuff. I realize you're using it for creative effect, but the excessive distortion on the vocals and some of the other things are getting kind of distracting, and it's effecting the mix.

I would look at finding some other methods of achieving creative/effective distortions that can work a little better within the context of a mix. I would instantly ditch any digital-modeled distortions (this means all plugins or modelers of any sort).

Given the types of things you track and the style of music, you really don't have a lot of requirements. It sounds like everything is either electronic, or it's something you can close-mic, so I don't know if room acoustics will ever be as huge factor for tracking ... but it's all very important for the monitoring environment. I realize your stuff has a pretty cool low-fi-ish vibe to it, but it could stand some better mixing technique -- something that I think could be much more easily achieved in an ideal mixing environment with some careful room setup, bass traps, and a bitchin' set of monitors.

Other than that, I can hear a lot of elements besides bass that could be DI'd, so a sansamp might be pretty cool to have around (it might be the kind of thing where, for inspiration, you might one day decide, "hey, let's try this through the bass driver and see what happens").

As far as mics go, for your style I would be looking at some more interesting old-school stuff. You're not tracking Biance or Justin Timberlake, so a slick-sounding LDC is just taking up valuable mic stand space. I'm thinking a Placid Audio Copperphone ... Electrovoice RE16 or 666 ... and definitely some ribbon mics. I might also get on ebay and be on the lookout for some old spring reverb units (maybe one of the Orban units). I'd also look for some old outboard compressors -- Valley People Dynamite, DBX118, or the Toggle-switch Symetrix 501s. Basically some cool, older vibey stuff. A bunch of plugins, even good ones, will never do justice to the kind of vibe your music gives off.

[M4-10]

Whether or not it's right for you at this moment, I can highly recommend the Sansamp Bass Driver DI. I use it all the time (live and for recording) with good results.

It also functions as a regular DI if you don't turn on the active component.

[rty5150]

so....how's that room sounding?



after that, the sm7b and GAP should be on the list. killer pieces for little cash.