odontophobia wrote::idk:
If you just want to record some guitar tracks it takes almost no knowledge whatsoever. It's pretty basic with Garageband out of the box.
Conky,
I think you'd be fine with any of the newish MacBook Pros. Doesn't have to be a Retina or anything, I'm talking like just baseline MacBook Pro. Easy to max out RAM later on if you wish and you can upgrade the hard drive at any point in time if you want. Won't run games but I don't think you give a shit about that. Biggest problem would be CPU bottle neck if you're trying to record the whole band live -- Skip might have more insight as far as that area goes.
If you pick up something used/older than you should ideally aim for 2010-sh or newer to get some life out of it. If you're planning on going new pleas consider PMing me as I may be able to assist you further.
Yeah if your just doing guitar tracks its no biggy, super simple and easy. My six months was more jumping into recording full on albums and learning mixing, signal paths, fx chains, how to properly produce a mix for mastering, etc , etc.
And your spot on right about the MacBook pros, the CPU bottle neck shouldn't be an issue as since 09 they used multi core processors like PC's that have pretty much eliminated that to my knowledge.
D.o.S. wrote:Agreed. Getting the right interface for what you want to do is another huge part of it, too. For me,I'm running oscillators and delay pedals into a PC that really isn't optimized for recording, so being able to monitor what's going on independently of the DAW was a must. All I use Ableton for, more or less, is arming the track and recording it, but all my sonic architecture stuff is happening outside of it.
I imagine having to record my bass rig into my current setup would be hair-pullingly annoying, but I've got engineer friends with their own recording rigs (who are way, way better at that shit than I am) that I can avail myself of, you know?
Very much agreed on the interface, I use tascam stuff due to cost to input ratio. They aren't the best preamp's but they do just fine for my shitty mixes. As far as ableton its almost overly complicated for just simple arm and record, but it does that excellently. I use it for full on recording of albums and songs and its intuitive GUI is so much easier to navigate than PT.
With out atleast a 2 channel interface and a decent mic yeah it would be annoying, and if you have someone you can easily visit with a better recording rig than you don't need more.
