How To Make Pro Recordings On $500 Laptop

[LoRaynmusic]

on my page there are a bunch of old samples

all made on a $500 laptop with a 2 gig mem ram 80 gig HD and a couple of crappy sure mics an electric guitar and acoustic

no midi keyboard just the laptop keyboard keys were used using a simatel sound card using Asio drivers.

and I was able to produce as good as quality recording as any pro studio could offer and I can prove that making music is about the brains in your head not the brains in your wallet

using the following vst plugins :

all using flstudio

Kore 2

B4 organ

Hypersonic 2 ( a worthless peice of crap in terms of sound richness and depth but with some kickass eq and a few efx and manipulation of sound combos is well worth the buy )

miroslav philharmonik plugin

real guitar strat and acoustic

stienburg groove agent 2

addictive drums

vanguard

albino

korg collection

N.I. guitar rig

N.I. Absynth

Nexus

CW sudio instruments

pro 53

Sylynth 1

Predator

wavelab

....... countless of other vst plugin synths too

i played all those plugins using the laptop keyboard ............mixed them down the same way too

all with a $500 laptop .....................

it took me a few days to work out how to play simple major and minor chords for piano and keys on the lap top

and a couple of days to be able to play the addictive drums drum kits on the laptop .......

it was just a case of doing what a drummer would do, keeping it simple and practising for a few days

hitting the hi hat with middle finger right hand ..........hitting kick drum with middle finger left hand

and using middle finger left hand to hit the snare and toms ...........it feels great playing a real drum kit on the laptop keyboard

or you can simply drag and drop the midi files into any channel ( playlist in flstudio ) and you have your drums ready made

play the bass guitar same as you would a piano .... just learn a few major scale and minor notes and you have it

thts all it takes

smiles man

[Prometheus]

Pro Studio recordings made on $500 worth of equipment? At first I thought that was quite a boast.

Then I noticed, Wavelab, B4 Organ, FL Studio and the rest?

You've included a lengthy list of Pro Apps here. The three I've mentioned above are alone going to cost you the guts of a thousand dollars and there are over a dozen more. I don't see how you could get all this for $500 unless it's from Pirate Bay.

[john]

whoa tiger he said a $500 laptop not that all the gear was $500, that said it is a little misleading, as you rightly point out to do this legitimately would cost a lot more...

[LoRaynmusic]

Pro Studio recordings made on $500 worth of equipment? At first I thought that was quite a boast.

Then I noticed, Wavelab, B4 Organ, FL Studio and the rest?

You've included a lengthy list of Pro Apps here. The three I've mentioned above are alone going to cost you the guts of a thousand dollars and there are over a dozen more. I don't see how you could get all this for $500 unless it's from Pirate Bay.

me bad, sorry , I used to live with a producer friend who had all the gear, he let me have the lot for nothing, but yes those proggies are worth a lot of money but still, the sytem/soundcard/laptop/recording/guitars I used . & environment in general was gear all second hand shit even down to the cables .........................

ok i was lucky enuff to get the proggies for nothing but the point I was making here is that it is possible using a crappy second hand laptop with no music recording set up on it of any kind and a few cool vst plugins it is posible to sound just as good as any pro studio ...............................

even with a crappy vst like Hypersonic knowing how to manipulate it you can create sounds that will blow your mind, its all about tweaking what you got, not tryin to get the best of what can be got in equipment like most folks do.

the best equipment helps produce great sounding songs,

BUT THE BEST SOUNDING SONGS COME FROM KNOWING HOW TO MANIPULATE THE EQUIPMENT YOU HAVE"!

huggs man!

Edited April 11, 2010 by LoRaynmusic

[Prometheus]

BUT THE BEST SOUNDING SONGS COME FROM KNOWING HOW TO MANIPULATE THE EQUIPMENT YOU HAVE"!

You should check out Kjaerhus Audio and Voxengo for free plugins. They have some fantastic Pro quality stuff that they give away for nothing. SSL also give away a VST recreation of their famous talkback compressor that Hugh Paghdam used to make the Phil Collins drum sound free of charge.

I agree with you, experience is far more important than a perfect studio setup and a veteran with two stage microphones and a laptop is certainly going to do a better job than a rookie fumbling around in Abbey Road.

That said, I'll still stick with my high fidelity capacitor microphones, my rack of outboards and my 24 Bit state of the art A - D converters that sample well above the human Nyquist Rate. As a veteran sound engineer, I've found that there's a certain sparkle you get with exhorbitantly expensive signal processing equipment that's far more difficult to achieve working in an untreated box room with cheap stage microphones and a high latency, high noise floor soundcard on a laptop. A Neve Audient doesn't cost $50,000 because it has a slightly higher build quality than a Behringer Eurodesk.

That said, I have a Behringer Eurodesk in my workshop here. It's a handy gadget to have for location work...

Edited April 11, 2010 by Prometheus

[thepopeofpop]

You can record at home on a regular laptop AND use some decent equipment as well. Good studio mics/good preamps and a bit of class in the outboard effects department, plus whatever you can afford on software plugins. That's how I do a lot of my stuff - although I can take tracks into a studio if need to. I can record all my home stuff at 24 bit/96 kHz if I want - although in practice 24/48 is generally adequate.

Of course it helps if you know what you're doing - there's no substitute for experience and know-how.