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Many people like to focus on having the best equipment. This makes sense because our favorite professionals spend thousands of dollars on their gear and they produce great results -- whether we are talking about music, podcasts, or any audio project. However, they also have the expertise to get the most out of that gear. On top of that, they also spend a lot of time and money on their studio or their techniques for creating an environment that will enable their gear to work to its full potential.
A simple example illustrates this powerfully: someone with no experience or knowledge can use the very best gear and create a terrible project, whereas someone with that experience and knowledge can use the least expensive gear and still create a wonderful project -- even without a fancy studio. If you spend the time finding or creating the right space for your project, you will see much better results than if you buy a more expensive piece of equipment.
All of the audio gear available through the Library Makerspace Take & Make is consumer level (less than $1,000) and yet is capable of producing amazing results. If you're wondering how to get it all to work for your project and need some pointers, read on.
There is a lot of wonderful gear in this guide, but it's not always clear how you can use it. Are you making music on a computer? Playing music live to an audience? Recording? These are all going to require different hardware, and sometimes also requires software.
Some of this gear works well on their own, like the digital recorders, some work great with computers, like the Apogee HypeMic, and others can do both, like the telecaster and Spark Go amp. Many musical instruments and microphones produce analog signals that need to be converted so they can be used with a computer. These will use non-USB outputs like 1/4" (phone) or XLR connections. The Scarlett audio interface is one way to make this happen: you can plug in a line level instrument like a guitar or synth and then output it to a computer. The Scarlett is also great for simultaneous multi-tracking (when you want to record multiple instruments/mics all at the same time).
Any of the USB devices:
Things that work great as standalone gear:
Audio interfaces, like our Scarlett 2i2, are used to connect non-digital (e.g. most things that don't have a USB output) gear to a computer.
Even once you've figured out which pieces of gear you need to make your guitar connect to your computer, it's not so obvious how to get it all to work with your software. Unfortunately, it will be different for each piece of gear and for each computer, but thankfully the general ideas are the same. Below are some links to make things work with BandLab, our recommended digital audio workstation (DAW).
This is a very important thing to understand for recording multiple instruments or voices at the same time. It seems like it should be easy, but it's a tad complicated, depending on what you are doing.
It's not as simple as plugging in two USB mics and then hitting record. It's different for every computer but most likely you will only be able to use one input (in this case a mic) at a time -- unless you do some preparations.
Aggregate audio devices will allow you to create one single audio device that has multiple devices grouped within it. In your software, you'd choose the aggregate device and within each track you select the individual device in that aggregate device. Apple has a pretty helpful tutorial for creating an aggregate device.
You many need to install an ASIO driver for Windows computers. This is frequently done with ASIO4ALL, These instructions from Sweetwater walk you through the process of downloading and installing ASIO4ALL. Another free and user-friendly driver is KoordASIO, which can be installed from the Windows app store.
An audio interface is a device that will accept analog signals (like those from microphones with XLR outputs) and convert it to digital so that you can basically plug analog equipment into a computer or tablet/phone. These come in various formats, from mixing consoles to simple single input devices with only a gain control. The library has several available to borrow:
As noted above with the Zoom M4 and H4n, some digital recorders allow you to record analog signals without having to plug into a computer. All of the digital recorders we have that accept an XLR input can also be used as audio interfaces, but beware that some digital recorders outside of our collection do not function as audio interfaces.
Using a digital recorder is a great option if you don't want to lug around a computer and/or if you are recording live and don't need computer software while you are recording. They are great for recording live music performances, podcasts, interviews, and more. However, some features are not normally available with digital recorders, such as MIDI support (for keyboards) and only a few digital recorders have multiple headphone outputs for each person to monitor their own microphone.