audiot

Image via Wikipedia

well, this entry is not meant as a guideline or a review or something similar. it’s more like some thoughts about gear needed to do some decent recording.

when i first got into recording i was somewhere around the age of 15 and a friend of mine asked for my help with some tunes he wanted to do. he was a techno-fan back then (ugh), had lots of equipment from an Atari ST (yay!) to multiple synths and samplers – things that were needed back then. he knew how to use these things but had no idea about music, some kind of techie one might say. so he wanted me to do the other half. anyhoo, today i sometimes think about those ridiculous amounts of gear filling whole rooms and causing nothing but trouble. we usually spent one half hour creating music and 5 hours solving technical problems, what a nightmare.

and nowadays the world is more complex, we’re not far away from fridges that only let us open their door if we haven’t crossed our personal calory-barrier for the day and already use wordprocessing software that patronizes us beyond belief. but who would have thought that recording music would be so much easier almost twenty years later than above mentioned teen-memory. certainly, the need for know-how hasn’t vanished (and in my opinion that’s a good thing), there are however lots of people who underestimate this. probably because the very process of producing music has become so much simpler.

back then, to record a standard band setup, you would have needed lots of microphones, at least one guitar amp, one bass amp, a mixing console, maybe preamps for the mics, compressors, gates, maybe expanders, reverbs, other effects – and i haven’t even talked about the actual recording device yet… today you need a laptop and some software – and if you’re really going at it, two mics, a midi controller and an interface. that’s it. no more need for large spaces, no more need to wait until your neighbors are not home. of course, more gear can be helpful in terms of streamlining or more possibilities, but let’s face it, with a good laptop and a program like Reason, you can achieve results far better than even some professional productions from 10-20 years ago.

so how does my setup look like? right now, it’s much more gear than necessary – simply because i piled up stuff during the last decade when those things were still needed. some of it will have to go, but some items will stay, for i use them not only to record but maybe to play live or for other non-recording-reasons. and i’m afraid i couldn’t even list all of it without doing some archeological excavation first….

but i can list my future setup which will be complete before the end of this year:

1. one of them new aluminium macbooks, yummy
2. Reason 4
3. a Motu 828 audio interface
4. some new Ultrasone headphones
5. and some new nearfield monitors, not sure which ones yet…
6. - 759. all the stuff that’s lying around here and that i use occasionally

but almost all of the work is done with the first two pieces (and some listening-device).

the only question left is what do i do with the extra space?