Recording Acoustic At Home - Is This Sufficient?

You do not need the mixer now. If you expand your recording later, you can get one later.

And yes, all you will need is the 2 XLR cables.

Happy recordings!

Mike

Greetings Mike! Thanks - I just wanted to be sure. Off to place my order now, a little early. :)

That hardware is more then enough for home recordings. Try and see if it comes with something like Cubase LE or similar, they are free versions of the more powerfull sequencers but are far better then Kristal/Audacity.

Thanks Arjen - I found out it does come with Ableton Live Lite, or something like that.

Ableton Lite is pretty good, but has some annoying limitations as well...most significantly, it limits you to only 4 tracks of audio and 4 track of MIDI, and many of the newer features are in version 5.0, but usually you only get Ableton Lite 4.0.

Four audio tracks can be plenty. However, you can do all of your midi(drums, keys, bass)in Live and export them to wave which you can then import into Kristal. All of a sudden you have another 24 odd audio tracks to work with.

By the way I saw that promo and tried my best to order it. Unfortunately they won't accept paypal purchases from Canada. Oh well. Their loss. I bought a Tapco Link USB which comes with a full version of Tracktion 2. I happen to like Tracktion a lot so it's well worth the money. Especially since Tracktion on it's own is $150.00 and up. I got the unit with the software for that price. I'll post a review when I get it and have had a chance to play.

Hey thanks for the comments on Ableton. Four tracks should be plenty for my needs. Does Ableton have effects capabilities? I'd like to use reverb and a little compression, probably not much else. And how do I do all that midi stuff? I guess I'll have to read the manual when it comes ... :)

Four tracks is indeed more then enough: remember most classic albums were recorded that way. :D Ableton does have full VST support but I'm not too sure how the light version handles it. If it is like with the free versions of their competitors you can run VST instruments and effects no problem. As for midi and stuff, manuals usually assume you already know that. Your best bet might be a walk to your local library, tons of great books about how you can make the most of your tools. :)

As for midi and stuff, manuals usually assume you already know that.

Unfortunately so do the tutorials ... I was browsing around Ableton's site and saw a video tute titled "How to use Ableton live to record your guitar" or something like that. Well, one guy in the tute played around with a floorboard midi controller, the other guy clicked and dragged tracks into the mix, but at no point did they actually explain how to do a basic guitar recording! :x

- The Lite version does have full VST support.
- For guitar recording, there is actually a pretty good tutorial that came with my Live Lite version. However, I got my Live Lite bundled with Line 6 Toneport,and it is possible that the tutorial was done by Line 6 and may not show up in the other versions.
- There are also some effects bundled with Live Lite. I have not used them, because I am doing most of what I want with Toneport.
- On Midi: it comes bundled with couple of MIDI instruments. But, the presets on the midi synthesizer are a litte strange, as are the ones on the drum synthesizer. I also have Cakewalk Music Creator 3.0, which is a pretty cheap program (< $50 shipped), which seems to do much better with Midi.

Actually, the most annoying thing I have found about Live Lite is something trivial and stupid. There is no count-in until Live 5.0; so the Lite 4.xx version does not have it. And, there is no easy way to mimick it when looping clips, because there is no way to offset the clip starting point for the first pass through the loop to be earlier than all other loops without jumping through hoops and using multiple tracks with pre-and-post actions etc. (Basically, I want to have one bar of metronome clicks before a chord progression starts looping; this is trivially doable in Live 5.0 with either the count-in feature, or a "negative" loop offset. But neither method works in Live Lite 4.xx. But, once you get past the steep learning curve, Live is pretty darn good for quick "session" recordings and improvisation, I think. You don't have to plan out things like you do with the normal linear editing paradigm...

I use Ableton Live 4 at home...I don't record directly into it, I move tracks from my little digital eight-track. The effects are nice, much better than what comes with CuBase, which I use mainly for MIDI. If you've got an audio interface, then it's about the same with Ableton as any other DAW, just arm the track and click the record button. Obviously, Ableton is a lot more than a DAW, but I haven't had time to mess with it's looping capabilities. It's my favorite piece of software...it and Audacity (which I use more than Soundforge). One of these days I'll buy ProTools, but haven't had a need for home.

Thanks again everyone! Sounds like I've got a bit of a learning curve ahead of me. Looking forward to figuring it all out. :)