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All the threads are gone, so forgive me. I’m setting up a home studio in order to track simple, good sounding guitar/bass/vocal recordings and this quote in the pre-amp thread got me thinking:

Nate Dort wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 1:52 pm I think preamps are probably like the 5th or 6th most important thing in the signal chain.

If preamps aren’t necessarily high on the list, where are the most important pieces of gear to invest your money in to start?

I have been looking at mid-priced interfaces, just assuming that’s where my money needs to go at this point, as i already have a small collection of fair bass, guitar, vocal, and percussion mics from playing in bands. Just classic $100-$300 SM57 range stuff of the type that would come up in discussion here from time to time as the stuff to get

I also need monitors, headphones, and I assume a pre-amp. I just want to move mics around at this point, not that interested in plugins.

I am not at all trying to start out buying gear that costs thousands per item, but I also don’t want to sell a guitar for cheap gear will never hold value and that I am going to be in a hurry to replace.

I wish I had more specific questions but thats it for now

Invest in the unsexy stuff up front. Spend the extra $$ on stands from K&M or Atlas. Learn how to solder if you don’t already know, so you can roll your own cables, and then get a nice stock of connectors from Neutrik or Switchcraft or Amphenol, and you’ll be able to whip up any weirdo cable adapter you might need, when you need it. It will pay for itself pretty quickly.

Adam P wrote:Invest in the unsexy stuff up front

Adding to this: some inexpensive/DIY acoustic treatments would probably go further than X dynamic mic is slightly nicer than Y dynamic mic.

If you're recording yourself, it's nice to have some isolation headphones so you can hear the recording chain over the acoustic sound level.

That's my quote!

Preamps on interfaces and budget mixers are so good nowadays due to advances in electronic components. Modern opamps are fast and low-noise. Metal film resistors are the norm (less noise). C0G/NP0 and film caps are relatively cheap and ubiquitous.

There's something to be said for having a "color" preamp that imparts a certain sound, but even then, you really would need to use it on every track in mix to really hear it. There's a reason people can point to a specific song and say "oh, that's the Neve sound." It's because they had a 24 channel Neve board and ran everything through it. You throw a couple drum overheads through some 1073 clones and everything else through your mackie preamps and nobody is going to be able to pick out the overheads as having a Neve flavor.

I wish I had started out spending my money on nicer utility items. Better mic stands, better cabling, better room treatment, better headphones, better monitors. Those are the things I eventually broke or found flaws with and had to replace anyway.

I did an experiment this summer where I recorded the same multi track (short) song repeatedly through 5 different preamps to test the discernible difference and the "build up" theory of a particular pre's sonic fingerprint.

The results were staggering. There was maybe 3-5% difference between the most unlike sounding modules. My Alan and Heath board pres hung right in there with API and Sytek. The Great River sounded ever so subtly nicer, and the Chandler had just a hint more harmonic saturation. It totally killed all of my preamp gear lust. I could have recorded my last dozen projects on only my board pres and no one would have lost anything in the process.

File under "duh" maybe, but something that didn't quite occur to me until recently, after having recorded some things, is the importance of owning some low-level tripod-style mic stands made for recording sources not far off the ground. Stands that aren't just squat bass drum mic stands but can extend forward a bit for smaller amps.

The vast majority of mic stands you'll find at stores, rummage sales, etc. are going to be waist-level. They can usually go a few feet up (to record the vocals of someone who's standing, for instance), or a few down (to record something about a foot or more off the ground), but they're not always ideal for mic'ing a small combo amp (1x12), where the center of the speaker cone is lower to the ground. I'd been using a desktop RE20 stand, heavily weighted, on my combo amp, but it wasn't quite right, in that it didn't extend forward enough and I had to move the whole pedal board (which I normally keep in front of my amp) to the side in order get it where it needed to be. A low-level stand with an extending arm alleviates that issue. They're handy to have around.

This is why I put small combos up on a chair or table when recording. Helps get rid of some of the early reflections from the floor also, though it can make an amp sound brighter than it would be on the floor due to coupling, or lack thereof. Some of this can be countered by using a directional mic and taking advantage of the proximity effect.

All great advice. Especially regarding the CABLES, and i have definitely had issues with shitty stands getting in the way of my Jimmy Page amp micing experiments.

Now about that interface - I’m prepared to drop around $1000 on one. Is that crazy? It just seems like an important piece of gear. I won’t be using a console.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2022 11:18 am All the threads are gone, so forgive me. I’m setting up a home studio in order to track simple, good sounding guitar/bass/vocal recordings and this quote in the pre-amp thread got me thinking:

If preamps aren’t necessarily high on the list, where are the most important pieces of gear to invest your money in to start?

I have been looking at mid-priced interfaces, just assuming that’s where my money needs to go at this point, as i already have a small collection of fair bass, guitar, vocal, and percussion mics from playing in bands. Just classic $100-$300 SM57 range stuff of the type that would come up in discussion here from time to time as the stuff to get

I also need monitors, headphones, and I assume a pre-amp. I just want to move mics around at this point, not that interested in plugins.

I am not at all trying to start out buying gear that costs thousands per item, but I also don’t want to sell a guitar for cheap gear will never hold value and that I am going to be in a hurry to replace.

I wish I had more specific questions but thats it for now

IF I was wanting to build something for home recording that is extremely flexible and has room to grow on a totally affordable budget, Id probably buy any good 8ch-16ch interface (Audient, MOTU, if you really feel like you want to enter into a closed garden plugin ecosystem plugins... UA) I'd buy a used mid level live sound desk from the early 2000's like an Allen @ Heath GL2200/2400, Midas Venice 320, something like that. and a 4 to 6 channel headphone amp like a Sampson or Rolls like thing. The IO takes it all in, board handles preamp and EQ as well as monitor mixes that feed the head phone amps, as well as gives you a master section for monitoring, and if you want to have fun you can also mix through the board if you want. A decent pair of mid grade studio monitors like the Adam T series, JBL 308p, the Focal Alphas etc... will get you in a pretty good place to mix a record. I almost NEVER use outboard comp or processing other than at the front end anymore. Plugins have gotten too good. I basically just described my home set up and I think it is fantastic for getting going and having a lot of options to grow into later if you want to add cool preamps, and other shit. Cheap 1/4" patchbays are great to add to this type of thing to give you access to hot patching spring reverbs into your snare drum, bass guitars etc.

Mics.
A few (4-6) dynamics. 57/58 (we all know they aren't special, but they work and usually don't break.)
A good mic or 2 that works well on low freq (AKG D112, Shure Beta 52... etc, again, not sexy why fill a void)
A good pair of Small diaphram condensers (get a pair of Oktave mk012. They are great on everything, but also SM81, Shure KSM 137. SDC are total work horses)
A plenty good but cheap LDC for vocal, in front of a drum kit, acoustic guitar... whatever. I have 2 of teh Warm Audio Fet 47 Jr and they are fine mics, also I really like Audio Technica 3035 if you can find them used. I have 2 and never paid more than $100 for one. Way better than that shitty AT2020 that replaced it. A million companies make good quality low cost Condenser mics now and all of mine sound so close in quality to my Neuman TLM 103 that I almost never use it because it has a weird clip that I'm missing.

I know you don't want to hear about plugins but all the Tokyo Dawn plugins are fantastic and the free versions are almost as good as the paid versions. use those. Buy Valhalla Classic and you are done wit reverbs. Daws come with anything else that you really need.

Check the Muscians Friend Stupid Deal of the day for when they blow out Tascam headphones. They do it once or twice a month. THey work fine and are cheap so you can buy like 5 pairs. Also, buy a pair of cheap riffle shooting hearing protection headphones and gut an old pair of headphones into those sound iso bodies, make a pair of iso headphones for drummers to use.

Thats all I got