Quote:
Originally Posted by Knives&Guitars
[INDENT]**** Microphones...are what I personally value as the most important part of the recording chain.
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Some would say room treatment first, but mics are definitely high up on the list for recording acoustic guitar. It think it's a good idea to devote a good chunk of your budget to that.
Maybe it would help to break the whole process into 3 parts:
1) Analog world. That includes your guitar, voice, other instruments, the room you're in, and the microphones.
This includes room treatment if your space has bad reverb or echoes, and mics.
2) Analog-to-Ditigal Interface. You need a way to get the analog stuff into digital with some kind of hardware.
Standalone digital recorders like Zoom, Tascam or the Spire can capture the analog (mic) input digitally. In most cases, you can transfer files to step 3, and some will do a few simple steps outlined in step three "in the box". But often this a separate "audio interface", with mic inputs, that passes the digital signal to a computer for step 3.
3) Digital domain. You've recorded your audio, what can you do with it now?
On standalone recorders, you can't do much here. Just save the audio to an mp3. But if you have a DAW on a computer, you can take that audio and do all sorts of things. Create multi-track recordings. Re-record mistakes. Add effects. Clean up noise, pops or squeaks.
(There's also sort of a "reverse step" #4 at the end we tend to gloss over: getting the digital audio back into analog at the end via speakers and/or headphones)
Many on this forum are just doing guitar and maybe voice like you, so the first two steps are really all they care about. A Zoom, or the Spire, suits them well. Others may want to add other musicians. Some like polished final recordings doing lots of editing in a DAW.
Here's my final two cents: Zooms and Spires are nice and simple ways to get started, but have limited expandability down the road. If you go the audio inteface+computer+DAW route, not only do you have the most capability, but it's also modular so you can change out each piece at a time for better stuff as you grow.
My advice would be to get a laptop, audio interface and DAW. Audio isn't super intensive so you don't need a gonzo computer. Something with an i7 and decent amount of RAM (8G+) will be fine. There are good audio interfaces in the $400-600 range, and a DAW can be anywhere from free to several hundred dollars.
If you budgeted around $2K for mics (fwiw there are perfectly good options for half that; Knives&Guitars is steering you towards "never have to upgrade again" models
) and $2K for a laptop, audio interface and DAW, you'd have $1K left for the misc stuff: mic stands, cables, speakers and headphones.
Laptops are portable, and most 2-channel audio interfaces are small enough to tuck into a bag as well, so IMO you don't lose that much portability vs a Zoom and you'll have your full DAW wherever you go. You can just use headphones or even built-in laptop speakers just to hear generally what you're doing when recording tracks, and wait until you get home to listen on speakers.
That's a bit more than my two cents
but I really think you are limited if you don't at least get your tracks into a DAW at the end.