Question for Metastasis...

[Willith]

And anyone else really....


I was reading through another thread where someone was having trouble w/ their recording and you mentioned an M audio product...and beyond that you seem to have an infinite amount of knowledge when it comes to home recording (or it looks like that to me anyway)


I'm looking at getting a pro-tools bundle next week and no one has really been able to give me a lot of info on which one is best for ME. I'll just be recording myself-playing guitar; bass and drums will be MIDI.

I'm looking at a M-Audio FireWire 1814 or the 410. The 1814 has a lot of extra ins/outs that I don't really need (at this time) but I'm wondering how much better the sound quality will be on it. I think I would be happier with better sound quality even if it came with some extra crap I won't use.
I was also looking at the Mbox 2, but read some nightmare reviews and have all but trashed that thought.
I'm also curious about what you used for your drums. I'm probably going to have to do mine in Finale and then import them in to protools. I like how finale is set up so you can notate the drums measure by measure. I'm really not fond of programs like propellerhead and redrum. Any suggestions there would be greatly appreciated too.


I also had some questions about plug-ins, specifically- how necessary some of them are, but I'll wait until after I get a response to this.



Thank you in advance for whatever help and advice you can give me.

[Metastasis]

If you want a preamp for only one or two simultaneous inputs, then I recommend the Presonus FireBox, it's a mini FirePod, which has zero-latency monitoring, 24-bit/96kHz sample rate, and good preamps.

I'm currently using Drumkit From Hell Superior samples through Cubase's drum editor and I think it's great. Switching tempos is made simple with the tempo track feature and the velocity dynamics are really realistic and effective.

When it comes to plug ins, I'm just about exclusively Waves - All the eq's, the multiband comps, the bass limiting and exciting (Rbass is great), reverbs and cool effects.

[Willith]

What's the most recent version of Drumkit from hell? I know very little about it...and it looks as if "superior" has been discontinued everywhere, but DFH2 is only like $70? I will probably have to buy it due to Comcast's recent rampage to end all use of bit torrents and the like.


And you would recommend cubase over pro-tools? Any reason?

[Metastasis]

The latest version is EZ Drummer, which I've heard good things about. It is supposed to be much more user-friendly (an actual visual drum set) and overall accessible than Superior, which can be perplexing at times.


Well, Pro Tools is awesome, but the Proprietary hardware kind of turns me off - but if you have the money for it, then it is probably superior. Cubase with a PC and FirePod is a cheaper version that is very comparable (and expandable without having to worry about getting Digidesign work station hardware). For somebody who wants a simple set up for recording guitar, and already has a PC (I'm assuming), I think Cubase with a FireBox (although of you don't already a Firewire connection, you'll need to get one, but they're cheap).

[Willith]

I thought this sounded promising:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAc3XK1Hohk&mode=related&search=

I don't think the bass drum sounds well with the rest of the kit in that sample, but there were some great mp3s on the toontrack site.
I read something about needing a host program for this to work too; I'm not sure exactly what that means...

It looks like this stuff is really hard to get a hold of. Discontinued in a lot of places...