I need some help getting a FULLY working home setup!

[wahwah]

I'm gonna concentrate on writing original material from now on..hopefully to do a solo album. I have the POD xt and I use Cakewalk but now I want a quick uncluttered solution to getting real drums down on the PC.

Someone mentioned Drums On Demand the other night and I wanted some advice? Years ago people used to loop thru samplers but what I want to know is, is this easy to paste and connect together in Cakewalk?

The bass I'm gonna sort and again use the POD for that side...I'm looking at a cheap Warwick Steamer for me to use.

The last thing would be some sort of a tone generator that I can use with my mini keyboard. I ain't looked at these for years but I remember the Boss SD series being good at the time. How far has this moved on now? It's being able to keep all this stuff in a small corner of the room and not taking up much space...new baby and all that!

The last thing I really need advice on is recording vocals. I have a coupla decent mics but am not sure whether going trhu the mic input of the Soundcard (Audigy) is gonna give me good results. Anyone tried their POD? Does it work on a clean channel or do I need a mic preamp to get it working?

Any guidance would be appreciated. I want to be able to write and get convincing sounding drums, bass, keys and vocals down quickly.

Thanks. wah. [img]images/smilies/icon_thumb1.gif[/img]

[guitarwizard2003]

i have sung through my pod before chris, i cant speak as for whats best cuz im not a singer but what i can say is on a clean channel with some reverb and stuff you can get it to sound pretty good, that is if you can sing lol some of these other vocal guys might be able to help ya better but ya i wouldnt be afraid to try your pod for vocals...i cant help ya on all the other stuff thats way out of my league, i still dont know how to program drums lol

[stingx]

Wahwah, take advantage of the great offers cakewalk gives their customers. If you are a registered cakewalk customer (I know you have 9) you can upgrade via cakewalk's website to Sonar 3 studio for 199 USD. That's dirt cheap compared to what you would pay in the store. Has KILLER features to do a damn good cd in your home studio. Between the pod you have and a good sequencer, you'll be cranking out a series cd of excellent sounding, well mastered material.

[wahwah]

Thanks guys...I'll keep looking into this stuff. Had ALL the stuff a few years ago...Tascam 8 track digital recorder and mixer, Alesis Quadrasynth Plus II, Jazz bass...all went in a big clear out. Back to the drawing board. [img]images/smilies/icon_ball.gif[/img]

[phil28uk]

For vocal recording try one of these:

behringer

They are nice and cheap and supposed to be good.

[wahwah]

Thanks mate...I'll check it out. [img]images/smilies/icon_thumb.gif[/img]

The easiest way to paste drums and loop them is to take care for the time grid. If you set it to 4/4 all the snippets will be justified to quarters. THis will make things quite easy, if the drum tracks arre not too complicated. Of course the punch have to hit the feeling of the song. A long bass drum beat may not fit in 16/16 timing. So if you have any idea, what you want to recard, play some measures and record the drums. Otherwise you might use VST drums, they are no so ugly as the usual MIDI stuff.

Soundwise for the keyboard I would suggest taking one with good dynamics on the keys, otherwise the stuff will sound like a midi juke box. there you also can rely on VST instruments and XG format.
For the singing it would be best to record direct and put the effects on the track afterwards, so you might be satisfied with the mic in from your soundcard. But watch the latency, I recorded my wife once and it was like Mickey Mouse, in case of mismatching samplerates (the card was too slow to pick up all samples in time and than the pitch rans out of tune )

Good luck

[wahwah]

Cheers, I'll take that on board, [img]images/smilies/icon_thumb.gif[/img]

[Bryan]

You could do worse than check out steinbergs groove agent, lots of good presets to mess with quickly, then you can get down and dirty with the midi.

Chris, could you use REX format for samples? I have a lot of them and real wav samples from the Cubase VST Add on.
Mail me, than I could upload them to your server or let you know how to get them. Then you can rumble around with the technique without spending a lot of money in new software.

[wahwah]

Don't I need Cubase for either of those options guys? Don't forget, I have Cakewalk 9.0. Can you tell me a bit more about REX...what it is and how it works? Thanks.

Chris, I've prepared a testfile for you. The size is appr. 13 MB. I will drop it to your private mailbox on your website.
The idea in general is, to cue up sniplets of music together to build a whole arrangement with natural recorded instruments. The misfortune in genral is, that everything MUST be in the same timing, e.g. you have to use the Drums played for this piece of music, and you will NOT be able to mix up with parts from other songs in other timings, but try to look at the file and you may nderstand the idea which is standing behind the concept. Unfortunately I can't find your entire Cakewalk version on the net to test it here, and it is not clear, whether CW is able to import rex files or not. Just give ita try.

[Bryan]

Nobody but me has mentioned Groove agent, I was just wondering if anyone had used it, i find it really good, are the others better? they just sound like a collection of clips on a cd (albeit high quality I guess)

[Bryan]

Ahhh...doesnt it work with cakewalk?...no experience of this

[rockonthis21]

Chris, I am by no means an expert in this area, but I have been a cakewalk user for several years. I have tried a couple of times to learn, understand, and use several different programs to try and come up with my own good sounding drum tracks. I have tried cubase, emagic logic audio platinum, soundforge, fruityloops, etc.
Fruity loops was the easiset to use, as long as you have a good large assortment of samples, but to me using repeating samples sounds unnatural and repetitive. The effort and time required to put together something decent in cubase drove me insane.....or I just didn't have the patience to truly learn how to use it. I have a large volume of tutorials though if you are interested. I decided that if I am going to get serious about recording all my own stuff, the absolute best way to go is to mic an acoustic set (and bring in a real drummer since I would consider my skills adequate at best). Not very cheap or space saving. Nor is it very quiet at 2 am when the rest of the house is asleep. The next option would be to get an electronic set and use a very good midi soundfont and once again record what I wanted. I don't know if this helps any, but I just thought I'd share what I think.