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If you are interested in recording at home, whether as a budding songwriter, a movie maker, a podcaster, or an experienced musician, figuring out how to get started and what kind of tools you need can be overwhelming. Let’s talk about some of the basics and suggest some good tools to get your started.

First, you will probably need a microphone. If you are a beginner, or someone who wants to save money, getting a cheap microphone is a great starting place. Nady makes a great dynamic microphone in their Starpower series called the SP-4C. It is highly reviewed, and very cheap at under $20. If you are already an experienced musician, you may want to get a condenser mic, which will run at a higher price but will capture sounds very nicely. Condenser microphones also need phantom power, which brings us to our next point.

You will need some kind of audio interface. If you are using a computer, you can buy a decent USB interface for a little over $100. If you are not using a computer, you can buy a cheap 4-track cassette recorder or a reel to reel that will have an audio interface built in. This older method is less used these days, but (especially in music) it can produce some wonderful sounding analog stuff.

If you do end up using a computer and not a 4-track or reel to reel, you will need some kind of digital audio workstation (DAW) if you want to have any editing power over the audio you have recorded. If you are using a Mac, a great cheap and standard software solution is Garageband. If you don’t own a Mac, there are some great alternatives to Garageband for Windows. If you don’t want to spend any money at all, you can try Audacity, which works for Macs, PCs, and Linux and is a free download online.

Using the above basic tools, you can soon be writing and producing your own music in your very own home studio setup.

Neil Young was interviewed by MTV about studio recording in digital format.  Neil commented, “We really needed good control over the sound and we got that with digital, but we lost the sound.  We don’t have the sound anymore unfortunately, it’s gone.”  So what the heck is he talking about?  Everyone knows that digital music is superior to analog music, right?  Well, it all depends on what aspect you are talking about.  If you are looking for a format that can easily be saved in multiple formats, ported to various devices for playback, edited, and remixed, then digital is definitely your format of choice.  But if you are looking for the truest form of sound reproduction, the analog is your only choice.

The reason for this is that an analog recording is a continuous sound wave that includes the entire spectrum of sound that was originally produced.  If you take an LP record and play it on a cheap turntable with cheap speakers, it will obviously sounds inferior to a CD.  But if you take the same LP and play it on a good stereo system, then the sound will be richer and if you listen closely you will hear things on the LP recording that are not present on the CD recordings.

The reason for this is that a digital recording is merely a sampling of the original sound wave, so things necessarily have to be cut out.  The BIT RATE of the digital recording defines how many samples per second are captured.  On a typical CD recording, the bit rate is 44.1K or 44,100 samples per second.  The BIT DEPTH defines how much information is stored in each of those samples, or basically how high are the high tones and how low are the low tones.  On a standard CD, the bit depth is 16-bits.

The industry is moving towards improving these standards to 48K and 24-bits, but at the end of the day it will still be a sample of the original sound and not a true reproduction of the sound like an LP record is.  This is why a lot of artists are insisting on analog studio recordings.  They are willing to pay extra to have the master produced in the truest form.

This is the time of year when all kinds of deals are being offered on satellite television.  My brother just moved into a new home in my area, so he decided to do a little research on what he could get.  Of course he first was looking at getting one of the triple play deals that are available through cable television.  That looked pretty good at first glance to him on the surface, but once he got down to the nitty gritty with what Xfinity charges, the rate will jump up so much during the second year he knew it would be intolerable.

That of course led to checking into the latest Direct TV deals being offered.  Since we are originally from South Florida but now living in the Rocky mountains, we are starved for some Dolphin football.  With Brandon Marshall coming onboard for the 2010 season, it looks like we might actually be in a dogfight with the Jets and Patriots for the division.  The problem of course is once you move outside of your regular region, you don’t get the games you want on the network.  Now the Denver Broncos are fine for folks in this area, but for us to keep up on the latest with Miami, one of us was going to have to pony up so to speak and subscribe to the NFL Sunday Ticket package.

Fortunately for me my brother jumped all over the latest deal.  Basically, he paid for Sunday Ticket which is spread out over five months.  Direct TV then gives him access to the Premier package, which has over 260 channels for free for those five months.  After that, he can either stick with it at regular price, or downgrade to a lower priced offer.

The downfall of it all will hit us next year, when we will have to pay full price for the package.  I’m sure that I will be willing to split the price with him, either that or I’ll be responsible for all the pizza and beer next season.