Any Advice for home studio? Options

[MoxieMike]

Hey. I have been lofting about it your forums and you guys all rock.

I am thinking about doing a home studio for my band and was wondering what you suggest. There would be guitar and vocals, some (limited) live percussion, keyboards and drum machine (midi) and some oddball instruments like cello, flute, etc etc.

I am thinking of going iMac G4 and getting some sort of USB interface (the $179 edirol looks good) and a behringer 16 channel board. (like, $250)

I would be using cubase 5.1, reason, b3 and absynth. And a slew of guitars.

Am i on the right track?

Thanks for your help.
m

[macmax]

Nearly, but you guys missed by a little.
USB isnt really much cop as an audio interface protocol.
It lacks the bandwidth to carry serious quality and multiple channels.
Its fine for a midi interface, but i'd steer clear of it for Audio.
If you plan on recording the band live (or at least all at the same time.) or having multiple tracks for drums, Then you need a firewire audio interface such as MOTU's 828. or 896.
These devices can transfer 8 channels in and out at the same time, allowing serious recording, as opposed to fannying about with only 2 channels of concurrent audio.
Ok so they cost alittle more, but they will do whats required of them, under any sequencer.
Be AWARE the Mbox is ONLY designed to work with ProTools! It wont work with most other packages.(currently at any rate.)
You will still need a midi interface, I'd recommend either a product from MOTU, or Emagic. I have used both the AMT8(emagic) and Midi express Xt (motu) on USB connections and they behaved acceptably.
Some of the additional cost would be saved by the fact that the MOTU has Mic inputs and so the Desk is not really required.
I'd connect a decnt set of powered monitors ( Spirit, Alesis, Mackie etc) to a pair of the motus outs.
Thus all you need is
iMac
Motu 828
Motu Midi express xt/ Emagic AMT8
Software of your choice
Active monitors.

In all cases , sadly, in this world, you get what you pay for.
The Motu enables you to record upto 8 tracks at once.
This would enable you to record the drums individually as, for example
Track 1 Kick
Track 2 Snare
Track 3 Right tom
Track 4 left tom
Track 5 Floor tom
Track 6 Room/overhead 1
Track 7 Room/overhead 2
Track 8 Bass guitar (groove led tracks.)
and then once its recorded in Cubase
you can lay down the guitar and cello etc parts.
If you have external synths you'd like to use in an arrangement, then you can patch their audio in thru the Motu 828 and record their outputs in to enable mix down within the iMac .
The quality of the audio thru an 828 is far superior to that of any USb device i've yet to hear.
Having all these Inputs and outputs might seem overkill, but i promise you, you'll never regret having them, and pretty soon you'll wonder how you could live without them!
While the internal disk is reasonably fast, if you want seriuos track counts then i suggest getting an external firewire hard disk as well.
Glyph make one that matches the 828s blue/black rack casing, as well as coming with a 4 way firewire hub to enable system expansion, such as multiple 828s etc in the future.
Again its not cheap, but has shown consistently better performance in Audio specific tests (check out Sound On Sound April 2002 issue)
The thing to remember is that its better to be somewhat over specced in ones system design than under specced.
The point being that running out of processing power or audio channels is pretty distressing, and ultimately can be restrictive creatively, but having more channels and power than you need at first allows your productions to grow with you.
The other point concerning the motu/glyph set up is that its transportable and System independant. By which i mean you can take a neat little 2/3 unit skb rack case with these in it, and plug it in to any firewire equipped mac or pc to record with, thus if you change your Computer , you dont have to change the system you use to record, which can be an issue with PCi card based systems and USB systems,
Given that all modern machines are coming with firewire and usb these days, i'd say it was a safe bet.
(also for future reference and proofing Yamahas mLAN audio networking protocol is firewire based)
.
I'd keep reading the forums for a bit before deciding.
best regards.
max