I’m a guitarist/singer and I’m looking to record some acoustic stuff. I have a condenser mic, but I would need an audio interface. I’m not looking for a fancy setup, just bare bones really. Any recommendations for an open source audio workshop? What’s my cheapest quality option for an audio interface?
Thanks!
For quality, I’d recommend Focusrite Scarlett. I’ve used the solo and the 18i20 and i love them across the board. A 3rd gen Solo is about $100usd, but you get a mic input, line input, RCA outs for speakers, and a headphone output and control. New also means software (ableton live lite, at least when I got mine way back when) so you can use the interface right away.
…realizing I’m on lemmy, so just in case: can’t help much on the software front because I have a dedicated music pc with windows, but can confirm the Solo works like a charm with pop, zorin, and mint at least.
Focusrite is great, I have a 2i4 I got >10 years back mainly to route sound through both headphone and speakers on desktop with analog volume knobs for each, but thing has XLR and phantom power and all that. I’m not musically inclined but I’ve ran an electric guitar and a midi control through it to Ableton without a hitch a long time ago. Their entry level stuff seems rock solid for this even
Don’t forget the acoustics of the room you’re in and perhaps get a pop-filter for your mic. These are simple things you can do that don’t cost much. I saw a video once where the guy used a bunch of towels to dampen echos. Worked pretty well.
This will be in a my basement with carpeting and a drop ceiling. Probably a 10’ x 12’ area with 3.5 walls. If it’s not sounding good enough I might invest in either panels or an isolation shield.
Focusrite Scarlett interface, Audacity software as others have said. A nice pair of headphones helps too if you want to add a vocal track later. FYI after you hook everything up you’ll have to fiddle with input and output settings to get it all to work. I’m sure there are videos to help you. Once it’s done you won’t have to mess with it again
The most commonly recommended USB interface is Focusrite. Cheapest is to get a Behringer or similar brand.
My opinion: For a home studio, any interface will do fine for recording demos and practicing or just getting into it. If you ever become successful enough that you need to record better quality, you should go to a real studio anyway. There’s really no reason to own expensive gear unless you’re into owning expensive gear…
The normal interfaces are usually capable of live monitoring. You’ll want live monitoring for practice and because the latency from the recording is too long to also use for listening while recording regardless of how low it gets.
The limitation of a cheap standard interface is that they usually only have 2 inputs, but it is sufficient for guitar and vocals, and it’s usually not necessary to record more than one input at a time anyway.
Personally I do not have an interface. I use a USB mixer instead , because I have more instruments hooked up at once. There is a trick to set this up up for live monitoring, so I’ll skip the details, but just to let you know that you might need more than an interface if you want to hook up more instruments or microphones eventually.
most of them are usb class compliant and so just worn. Beware of the expensive ones with built in mixers as often those need sbecial drivers that won’t be ported toethe next version of windows. Some expentive ones have good linux drivers thourh and a last generation con be found cheap, still work great.
