The Material published on this site was recorded using the various items of equipment as listed below :-
| Fostex R8 (sentimental value only !) Studiomaster 16-8-2 Mixing Desk Intel Pentium III 500PC with 128 Mb RAM SoundBlaster AWE64 8 Mb Soundcard Casio DA-7 DAT Recorder Jazz Midi Sequencer Software N Track Audio Software Yamaha DX11 Keyboard Roland D110 Expander Korg DDD1 Drum Machine Fender Strat & Precision Bass Westfield SR380-D Acoustic Guitar HHB Circle 3 Monitors Various Mic's & outboard effects. |
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| Oh Nearly forgot, a HP 8100I CD-Burner. | Ahh.... Good Old Analog ! |
None of the above is particularly 'State of the Art' and can all be found at reasonable prices second-hand, the two software packages which can both be downloaded of the Internet for what amounts to a paltry registration fee represent great value for money and both have become a great help in the home recording set-up allowing some stumbling first steps in the digital era !. To be honest it has to be said that my dear old R8 and DA-7 have been slowly pushed into the background as my knowledge grows with the use of recording within the PC, (if there's anyone out there who hasn't given recording on your PC a whirl yet, then give it a go as it's bloody good fun and cheap!), in fact the recordings released on this site have been recorded only using N-track and Jazz.
Both these programs have proved to be much so much easier to learn to use than the big league software (cubase, cakewalk etc.), with N-track handling the Audio side, whilst Jazz handles the midi. Even though N-Track has now got quite good midi facilities, I still tend to work up a the midi side of things (drums and keyboards) in Jazz, then import this into N-Track, this just being the way I'm use to working .To use the old adage 'If it's not broke, don't fix it'! It's then I start to add the rhythm guitars, bass etc. and record the midi tracks to a stereo wave. This forms the backing track to which finally the lead instruments and vocals are added.
The above process is what I've adopted to ensure that I never have too many wave files recorded at any one time i.e. I like to build the song without having too many redundant parts(a throwback to my previous P200 computer) which is a fairly standard approach, which then leaves me with some raw processing power left over to add some plug-in effects as and when required, basically a case of trial and error until I found something that worked for me.
It's only recently that I've managed to acquire some decent monitoring (having previously used my 'Mission II' Hi-Fi Speakers), but now since purchasing a set of the 'HHB Circle 3' nearfield monitors in conjunction with a 'Samson Servo 170' Amp this situation has somewhat improved ! For their given size the Circle 3's give out a great punchy sound, which is ideal for the small home hobby studio where of course the physical size of a speaker cabinet can be an important consideration.
Also a pair of speaker stands have been made to mount the speakers on and a copy of the AutoCAD .dwg file in a .zip will be available to download in the new 'DIY Projects' section to enable others to manufacture there own versions based upon this drawing. To view and print AutoCAD drawings you will need to download a copy of the free Autodesk 'Volo View Express' Viewer obtainable from http://www.autodesk.co.uk/volo/index.htm
Finally it should also be pointed out that the material recorded is all original excepting the odd obvious influence or two for which no excuses are made!
