Any recording musicians here? Need a decent soundcard upgrade!

[Koldov]

For a long time I've been happy just recording into Garage Band on my old Mac Book Pro and find drum loops on the 'net.

 

I'm a guitarist and a big 'analogue' fan, I've never been a fan of the digital plug-in/VST thing so do it all old school (ish), I use a microphone in front of my amp and actually record pretty much what I hear and shape the sound with the amp and effects pedals.

 

Recently I acquired a copy of EZDrummer 2 as I was looking for an easier way to make drum tracks for my songs.

 

Then I thought I would like some sort of Midi Controller to tap out the beats instead of relying on the supplied loops (I got a Korg nanoPad2 - big mistake, but that's another story).

 

With it came some bundled software (mainly Propellerhead's Reason Lite) and I decided to use my Windows machine as a music PC, but it made me realise that the onboard Soundmax chip isn't going to cut it... I had to use the ASIO4ALL driver, but honestly my ASIO/MIDI/REASON (music software in general) knowledge is minimal meaning the learning curve is near vertical! Probably why I like the plug and play aspect of Garage Band...

 

Anyway, first thing is to upgrade the soundcard I guess? I'm looking for mid-range (I'm not running a professional studio after all) PCI-E internal card, but good ASIO/MIDI driver support (obviously) and hopefully in the £100 range...

 

Anyone use any of this software/hardware in a school music department (or as a private individual) got any advice?

[3s-gtech]

Are you definitely ruling out any USB stuff? With modern kit, the old issues of latency and bandwidth are pretty much negligible - all of our Macs use external cards (Roland Duo-Capture mk2) with good results.

 

Otherwise, the ESI MAYA44 eX seems to be about right on budget, https://www.esi-audio.com/products/maya44ex/

[bald_pig]

I'd be looking at something like the UMC22:

 

https://www.gear4music.com/Recording-and-Computers/Behringer-U-Phoria-UMC22-USB-Audio-Interface/POU

 

Internal cards are expensive for any decent quality

[Koldov]

Yeah I looked at the external recording side of things, but as it turns out I bought a 'Line 6 Helix LT Multi-Effects Guitar Processor' a while ago and that does the 'guitar in' part for the recording of the guitar (so I'm losing the old school analogue vibe I guess).

 

I don't need to plug in microphones any more and I don't use midi keyboards (although I'm looking at getting rid of the Korg nanoPad and getting a Korg microKey - but that's USB to the computer anyway).

 

It was more for the processing power to able to use the DAW (Reason) and have much better MIDI support for the VST/plug-ins etc....

 

Am I getting it wrong?

[bald_pig]

MIDI is a funny old beast, if it were me, I'd be looking at an old sound canvas, the MT-32 is pretty much the gold standard.