audio/midi interfaces

ledhed43

I am thinking about buying an audio/midi interface to upgrade from a tascam 4 track. nothing against the 4-track but its time to get some decent quality sound out of my recording. i heard the tascam us122 was good but it got some horrible reviews on every site that has it for sale. the Mbox looks nice but a bit pricy for something with such limited capabilities. the in between option is the lexicon lambda which just came out and i can't find product reviews anywhere. does anyone own this that can tell me if its any good? also any other suggestions would be helpful. i am looking to spend less than $500 and for that price i dont expect professional studio sound, but i would like something that doesnt hide my music behind tons of white noise and is fairly easy to use.

Meine liebe

bump. same boat here. hell, same band.

can somebody help a 2 piece out?

enharmonic

Presonus Firebox. Quite honestly, had it been out when I was putting together my songwriter setup, I might have saved myself a few grand. It's only $300 bucks, and comes with Cubase LE.

Sure, my Great River/HEDD will do a better job, but not THAT much better...not quantifiably better for the added 2800 bucks. And I didn't even get free software

Seriously, check out the Presonus Firebox. The guys at Pro Audio Review liked it, and they are usually pretty tough.

dsvelund

i just bought the presonus firebox on ebay for $225 shipped for a used pedal in perfect shape. i'm sure you can find it even cheaper if you are patient. i read a ton of reviews and it seemed like that was the way to go for that price range. however, i guess it depends on how many inputs you are going to be using and all of that as well. for me, it's one or two tracks at a time; i'm not recording a full band w/ drums. so i guess this isn't really a review at all, but i researched the hell out of this question during the past month and that's what i found... for my research, i went to the different forums (macidol.com, harmony central, etc...) and searched under audio interface. some others that i considered were the maudio 410, the mbox, and the focusrite saffire. good luck.

ledhed43

i plan on using my laptop for the recordings and i dont have a firewire hookup. so i was more interested in usb at first. but now all the research i have done has led me to firewire devices. seems like the way to go. i know there are firewire connections that work through the pci cardslot, so i guess i can go with one of those to get the connection. we are only a 2-piece band so 2 tracks would be the most we would do at once. i am thinking we just need enough inputs to decently mic a drumset, then put the rest over the drum track(s). that said we dont even have the drumset yet, so i have no idea how to mic one or what is necassary to do so properly.

pjfanfromsd

I have the M-Box that I use with my Mac PB. I love it. It's only a two track interface but it comes with Pro Tools LE and can plug into the USB so it's plug-n-play.

I know you read a few bad reviews on the MBox but honestly I use mine alot and have had no problems..Check out eBay for better prices.

ledhed43

my laptop has a pentium 4 with 3 ghz processor, also i have 512 mb of ram and a 100 mb external hardrive. this is enough to run most of these devices right?

enharmonic

ledhed43 wrote:

we are only a 2-piece band so 2 tracks would be the most we would do at once. i am thinking we just need enough inputs to decently mic a drumset, then put the rest over the drum track(s). that said we dont even have the drumset yet, so i have no idea how to mic one or what is necassary to do so properly.

Well, there a lot of info here that we need to clear up before you spend your money.

1. Depending on your mic technique/room/production goals, you are going to need at least 3 mic's for your drum kit, and that is being extremely light. I use upards to 8 inputs on a 4-piece kit, but have also used 3 when I've had a great room to work in and a phenominal drummer.

2. Track count...you will want to assign at least left and right drums, unless you are recording mono for a reason. You might be getting crossed up with track count vs. inputs. They are two different things. Unless you are doing stereo recording of you and your drummer, I wouldn't suggest the Firebox. Not enough inputs...and to be completely honest, you're not going tobe able to get 8 decent inputs + good conversion for anything less than $1500...and that is probably pushing it...a lot.

3. If you can work with VST drums, you can get away with murder using the Firebox. Your drummer might be bummed, but your demo's will be exponentially better than they would be trying to put all of his/her drums on 1 or 2 tracks. He could get piezo midi triggers to play the VST drums inside the computer, and that will give you 8 triggers in on the Midi port. Pretty slick

pjfanfromsd

ledhed43 wrote:

my laptop has a pentium 4 with 3 ghz processor, also i have 512 mb of ram and a 100 mb external hardrive. this is enough to run most of these devices right?

You might want to bump up the ram to at least 1 gig but 512 should be fine for now.
Processor and hard drive are good though for what you want to do.

ledhed43

well we have a drum machine. we just dont use it that much. we like to use tamborine, congas, or improvised percussion like clapping or beating on a table cause these techniques are "bluesier" than a drum machine. we aint afraid of grassroots, but cheesy drum machine stuff never really appealed to us. maybe its time to really work with the thing and see if we can get anything useful out of it.

we might be getting drums soon, but there is still the learning curve since neither of us have played drums. so i am not too worried about recording drums just yet, and definately not gonna pay $1500 to record an instrument i haven't played(and dont own) yet. we both mainly play guitar and a little keyboards and vocals of course, so these are the main things i would like to record, but it would be nice if it could do drums too in case i need it in the future. i am not surprised to find out that it would be expensive to record drums, everything in this hobby is expensive. almost overwhelmingly. i keep reminding myself to be patient and not try to do it all at once.

enharmonic

ledhed43 wrote:

well we have a drum machine. we just dont use it that much. we like to use tamborine, congas, or improvised percussion like clapping or beating on a table cause these techniques are "bluesier" than a drum machine. we aint afraid of grassroots, but cheesy drum machine stuff never really appealed to us. maybe its time to really work with the thing and see if we can get anything useful out of it.

we might be getting drums soon, but there is still the learning curve since neither of us have played drums. so i am not too worried about recording drums just yet, and definately not gonna pay $1500 to record an instrument i haven't played(and dont own) yet. we both mainly play guitar and a little keyboards and vocals of course, so these are the main things i would like to record, but it would be nice if it could do drums too in case i need it in the future. i am not surprised to find out that it would be expensive to record drums, everything in this hobby is expensive. almost overwhelmingly. i keep reminding myself to be patient and not try to do it all at once.

Then don't buy drums. Get yourself DFHS or BFD, and program your drums. Just a thought. You'll be getting good sounds with the BFD or DFHS in a few weeks. Drums could take a very long time.