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By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY
Wed Jun 8, 7:03 AM ET
By day Josh Phoenix, 25, hawks cell phones for a living. At night, he returns to his apartment with a city skyline view and transforms into the second coming of Quincy Jones.
An Apple Mac G5 computer with a 23-inch screen dominates his cramped living room. It is flanked by a microphone, synthesizer, mixer board, monitor speakers and other gear that gives Phoenix the ability to produce music CDs of high sonic quality. (Related audio: Josh Phoenix sings)
Not long ago, only professional recording studios, stocked with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear, could do what Phoenix does in his apartment. Quantum leaps in digital technology in the past decade have changed that.
Today, anybody can easily set up an amazingly capable home recording studio, called a digital audio workstation, or DAW. All you need is a decent computer and a modest amount of cash for some digital recording hardware and software.
Imagine fabled music producer George Martin sitting in the multimillion-dollar control room of Abbey Road Studios about to mix and master the Beatles' raw recording tracks.
For about $3,500, including the price of a new computer, you could be sitting in front of a DAW on a kitchen table with capabilities Martin never dreamed of. A DAW converts analog audio - vocals and sounds from a musical instrument - into a digital file that gets etched directly onto a computer's hard drive. It then puts hundreds of editing, mixing and mastering options within mouse-click reach.
This little collection of hardware and software has replaced racks upon racks of analog gear used in the storied studios where Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin laid down the rock classics. You can edit, mix, add effects and polish endlessly. If you don't like what you hear, start over.
"Technology has really broken down some doors for musicians and producers," says Mark Miller, founder of Seattle-based Kalara Studios. "An artist can work from home in an environment that allows them the freedom to work at their own pace, without the pressures of a high-priced studio."
As with any complex system, a DAW can be complicated to set up and requires diligence to acquire a basic set of skills. The good news is that companies such as Apple and Yamaha view home-music recording as an important growth market. Both supply plenty of customer support. And new Apple Macs come with GarageBand, a program for creating music loops by stitching together samples of different instruments.
To set up a DAW, experts advise following these basic guidelines:
•Start with ample computing power. Because each nuance of sound gets processed, audio work is one of the most demanding tasks a computer can do. Figure on an Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon processor of 2.8 GHz or better, or an Apple Mac G4 of at least 1.6 GHz.
Don't scrimp on memory or hard drive space. You can get away with 512 MB of RAM, but you should double that. Also boost hard drive space to at least 100 GB. A simple way: Add an external hard drive.
•Choose your platform. Windows PCs or Apple Macs both work well. But if there's a choice, it's worth weighing the trade-offs.
Apple has become the professional recording industry standard by controlling the design of computers that work well with digital editing tools. Apple fine-tunes its motherboards, sound cards and graphics cards expressly to integrate with digital editing systems.
By contrast, you should anticipate major tweaking to get a DAW running on a Windows PC. "Some of this stuff isn't as plug-and-play as it should be," says Jake Ludington, technology reviewer at MediaBlab.com.
That's partly because dozens of companies make motherboards, sound cards and graphics cards for Windows PCs sold by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Toshiba and others. Windows' compatibility with digital editing hardware and software is rarely straightforward. "PCs are for tinkerers who don't mind puzzling things together," says Scott Perry, an Austin independent film producer. "Apple does a brilliant job of coordinating hardware and software so the least-experienced user can use it immediately."
But expect to pay a 20% to 30% premium for a Mac. Keep in mind that chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices is pushing hard to popularize Windows PCs for digital editing. It has partnered with HP to supply a line of HP Pavilion laptops with enough heft to do audio work. Plus, it is helping Yamaha popularize a new protocol, called mLAN, designed to make it much easier to network audio gear around a PC hub.
AMD has made converts of Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Dweezil Zappa and other musicians who now swear by DAWs that use AMD's efficient Opteron line of chips. (Athlon is the consumer version.)
"AMD's technology is ridiculous as far as speed and reliability," says Elliott Steiner, who used PCs to record and mix Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival concert last summer in Dallas' Cotton Bowl.
•Pick your editing software. The top-selling programs include ProTools, Cubase, Sonar and Logic. Each comes in a pro version, with prices ranging into the thousands of dollars, and features that go deep.
But each also comes in powerful starter versions that go for about $300; bare-bones versions are often packaged free with peripheral hardware. The starter versions are full of enough features to satisfy most serious hobbyists and semi-professionals.
•Pick your peripherals. You'll need a microphone to lay down vocal tracks and record accompanying instruments. The Shure SM58, the longtime standard for live performances, is a safe bet for recording and performing at around $100. Budget another $60 for cable, stand and boom.
Or you could opt for a condenser mike designed mainly for recording. The choices are endless. The Shure SM86, runs about $180. You could earn cool points by choosing the angular Behringer B-1, about $100, or the spherical Blue 8-Ball, about $200.
You need to plug the mike in somewhere. The 1/8-inch mike jack on a computer isn't designed to push rich audio data onto a hard drive. PreSonus, Motu and Digidesign make a device, called an interface, that pre-amplifies an audio signal, converts it into a digital file, then transfers it to a hard drive for editing.
The $600 PreSonus Firepod is the simplest, least expensive way to simultaneously plug in and record up to eight mikes and instruments. For $200 more, add an external controller, such as the Behringer BCF2000. A controller lets you eliminate your mouse and replace it with buttons, knobs and sliding control bars, called faders, that sync with your editing software.
Yamaha is staking out turf with the $1,000 Yamaha O1X mLAN studio. The O1X is an all-in-one interface and controller. As a bonus, it also functions as a smart digital mixer, capable of memorizing the finely tuned audio settings you'll set up for each musician and instrument you record. You can save and recall mixer settings for different venues, such as a basement vs. a church hall.
Though all of the processes are happening inside a computer, and can be enabled by a keyboard and mouse, devices such as the BCF2000 and 01X let you adjust multiple slider bars, buttons and knobs all at once, just like George Martin or Quincy Jones.
Mike (Shmoo)
DeadMan2003
gdZiemann
Capt-n-Jack
