The Story (...part 2)

So going into the Christmas season, there was a general level of discontent with our equipment. Guitarist was basically without amplification, drummer couldn't be effectively recorded, and I was unhappy with the tone of the vocal mic. As it turns out, bassist was unhappy also but more on a general level.

Guitarist ended up fixing his amp rig and selling it off. The VOX AC30 CC (with the AlNiCo Celestion Blue speakers) is it's replacement. This thing is seriously top of the line! Great tone, doesn't get muddy in the low end even when distorted. He was also gifted a neat pedalboard for Christmas.

I looked around and found a great article on Mac Idol about recording vocals in a home studio. The recommended mic was the Audio Technica AT2020. I looked around and was able to locate one on eBay for around $50. Testing it out was another story, you see condenser mics require phantom power, which we did not have at the time. We imposed briefly on my wife's cousin to make sure it is in working condition when it arrived. All is now well on the vocal front and the difference is noticeable.

Drummer's issue was a little harder solved. He found a set of drum mics that got great reviews and his folks even offered to get them for Christmas. The next issue is how to get multiple mics into multiple tracks on GB. We searched around and found the best solution for the money: the Alesis Multimix 16 w/firewire. It has eight dedicated XLR inputs and sends the whole signal to the MacBook for processing. GarageBand and Alesis play very well together. Set up was easy and gratifying. Next issue was the cables to connect multiple mics to the mixer...

After some lucky happenstance and a impatient trips to Radio Shack, we have enough XLR cables to do what we need to do. We will probably be getting more cables from Monster soon so we can use the mixer as a PA base station for live situations also.

That pretty much brings us up to date on equipment. Stay tuned for "studio set-up" and "sound can be upside-down?"