A friend of mine recently asked me to make a recommendation for a Pro Tools music recording system and a new Mac. He didn’t give me much to work with, no price constraints or possible usage scenarios, so I wrote him the following. What follows might be of some interest for people who are thinking about setting up a home recording studio.
First, for the protools interface, I’m assuming he doesn’t want a $10,000-$40,000 pro level system, so if he has a decent budget the 003 is a good system with lots of inputs for audio and midi and has a 8 channel automated control system (mixing board) for around $2000-$2500.
http://digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=100&navid=125&itemid=5025
If you don’t care about real time mixing, the same system comes in a rack mount for half the price at $1200, but will require you to do all your board work on the computer using the mouse and keyboard.
http://digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=100&navid=126&itemid=5028
There are other, cheaper, solutions available ranging from $500-$1000 but they’re mostly meant to be portable and do not have the same kind of power and flexibility as the units above.
For the Mac itself, you only have two reasonable options for recording more than 2 or so tracks at a time. You need either the MacBook Pro or the Mac Pro.
The MacBook Pro starts at around $2000 and can be upgraded to around $6000 for top of the line, and does not include a monitor (other than the 15″ built into the laptop - but that is far too small to get any work done in ANY audio software. 20″ (at $599) is the bare, bare minimum, the bigger the better. If he can afford it, the 23″ at $899 is better, and the 30″ at $2,000 is much better to work with. If I had to choose, I’d probably go for the 23″ for the price. All these monitors come from apple. You can get them slightly cheaper from other vendors, but they’re missing some features and require a $20 adapter to work.
If he wants a tower instead of a laptop, the Mac Pro starts at $2799 and is a very fast machine, which will easily handle anything thrown at it. You can upgrade this machine to the point of obscenity, for a top end price of over $30,000. You will still need a monitor, as discussed above.
If this all seems too much, price wise, a PC system can be built for much less, and will perform similarly to the pro tools setup. When I was recording I actually preferred the interface to systems like Sonar XL and Nuendo…and the hardware was a non issue for me since I couldn’t afford $5000 Pro Tools software plugins anyways.
Note that for any system, Mac or PC, to sound good, you’re going to have to invest in some nice Mic Pre amps and at the very least put your final mix through them for the master. Avalon single channel Mic pres sound pretty good and can be had for around $500-$1000 a piece. Stereo channels can get a bit more.
Decent cables, microphones, all that stuff matters. Pro Tools is pretty dry on its own, so without great equipment it just doesn’t really shine. Pro tools, and all DAW (digital audio workstations) sound best with software instruments or synthesizers. Its very difficult to make a traditional band sound good with pro tools consumer level gear. Even the best of the best Pro Tools setups still sound flat compared to high end traditional studio gear. For an example, check out the difference in sonic quality between Aerosmith’s Get a Grip, which was recorded in 1993, predating many new technologies used in recording now, and Just Push Play, recording entirely on pro tools and sounding much worse because of it (pay special attention to the shimmer of the cymbals and the kick from the guitars.)
For final masters, its still wise to head to a studio, where you can commonly use hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear for a few hundred per hour, thus making the choice for the home studio a little cheaper since you can afford to get something a little less powerful, that supports getting your ideas down so that you can later record that stuff in a studio if you plan to distribute the masters.
Expect to upgrade any recording solution completely in 5-8 years, due to exponential power growth in the computer itself and more sophisticated algorithms for recording hardware. Analog gear (like the mic pre amps) doesn’t usually suffer from this being a very mature industry, so if you plan to spend a lot spend it on the Mic Preamps and the instruments being recorded and be cheap with the recording gear.
Also keep in mind that many people use rack mounted 24 track recorders that use hard drives or DAT when they don’t find themselves doing a lot of complicated editing. For good musicians that can make it work in 2-3 takes, you really don’t need any more than that and exceptional instruments, cables, and analog audio processors. If you want to stay pretty cheap overall, these units can be had for $2000 - $10,000 and often include monitor outputs for easy editing.
