Can Someone Point Me In The Right Direction Here? Options

[Percussion_Is_Fr...]

Let me give you a little background so your advice can be somewhat personalized... I'm 21 years old, been a musician since I was 6, I love music, its my life. I play piano/keyboard, drums, and guitar mainly, with a little clarinet left over from high school concert band. I've finally landed a good job and saved up some money, and am in the process of putting together a digital audio workstation to record/create music.

My goals are as follows: I'd first and foremost like to be able to sit in my room, laying down chord progressions on my keyboard or drums, then put on headphones and solo or sing over them, as put my drumset in there too. I'm also interested in getting into electronic music, I really like Fischerspooner and the Faint, that sort of thing, and would like my set-up to allow me to be really creative in that respect. Thirdly, I would like to be able to record my four-person band (standard setup... drumkit, bass, guitar, keyboard, vocals).

Here's where I stand so far: I got a used dual 1.5gig powermac G4 with a gig of memory, two 40 gig harddrives. I've got a general midi keyboard (Casio WK-1800). I'm planning on getting Logic Express, although I'm not 100% solid on this (and any input there would be appreciated too). I figure I'll get some sort of active monitors, I'm not really worrying about them yet.

Here's where I need your help. I'm new at this, and am having trouble understanding the specs of the various interfaces available. Essentially I want to get the least expensive interface, be it firewire or USB, that will allow me to record my band effectively. I've never recorded with a band before, so I'm not sure if I need to be able to get us playing live, or if we could have the drummer and bassist lay down their tracks together, and then add guitar, vocals, keyboard on subsequent takes. Would that work? If so, I could get an interface with less inputs
I'm looking at the MOTU 828mkII. I'm assuming that would allow us to play together, but I don't like the actual appearance/set-up. (I want to have something that looks like a mixing board, with faders, etc., though this isn't a necesity, just a sort of recording-studio fantasy ) The Tascam 1884 would be ideal, but its out of my price range.

So that brings me to the Tascam US428. At 300 bucks, its very affordable. Its got the tactile controls that I like, and I'm assuming it would work with logic express. I just can't make sense of the specifications, they're in a highly unfamiliar language to such a newb.

SO help me guys, I'm just exploding here waiting to make music, help me clinch this decision and order my sheit!

[Riverdog]

You could easily record an entire band using nothing more than a "2 imput" interface if you're band members are good at playing individually...

The 828 is only an "input/output" interface - It can be mixed from an external mixing board or you could mix down to stereo using your internal mixing system in some type of software like Logic Express...

It sounds like you have a lot of flexibility in what you may be interested in doing... Understand as well that as your cost goes down for interfaces - so does your capability...

The US428 would be a good choice for recording if you're interested in recording two audio inputs at a time... Again if your band members can handle this - That would be the most economic value... But understand that you only have two inputs in to record and 4 outputs out to play back... That does not mean that you can't "mix" more than for tracks of sound to an output...

I hope this helps... Perhaps if you were more specific on what was confusing we could offer more help...

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