Essential Stuff? Options

[macshark]

Hello all. My name is Scott, and I am a newbie. Hello, Scott...

Okay, now that's out of the way, let me say that I have dug thorough this entire site as well as others, and I am still a little (lot) confused about the necessary equipment.

I have used/demo'd - Ableton Live, Bias Peak and Deck, Spark ME, Storm, Reason, and Metro. Haven't tried PT or Logic yet. I am on a G3 slot-loading iMac, OSX 10.2.4. I may be upgrading the computer w/in the next year if necessary.

All I want to do is record electric guitar and vocals into my imac, and do multitrack and editing on the computer. Also, I need some type of drum machine, beats, etc. Basically just looking to record my own songs for my own use (for now).

I don't have any other hardware (keyboard or midi-controller), but would consider getting an inexpensive one.

After all that, finally to the question at hand. What do I need to effectively do this? Live, Deck, and Metro seem to be the same to me in that they will let you multi-track. I like Spark a lot, and don't see where Peak is any better as a pure recorder. I could not figure out Storm or Reason. Not sure I really need all the midi-synth stuff. But I do NEED drum tracks.

Any suggestions, on software and hardware that I should look into?

Sorry for such a long request. Thanks.

Scott

[xingu]

So, you can program a drum track with Reason, and input it into Deck and combine with guitar tracks and vocal tracks?

In a nutshell, yes. Now some programs like Live, Cubase, and Logic 6 feature Rewire 2 support, which enables you to link the output of Reason directly into the sequencers of the other programs. However, Deck and Logic (versions 5 and under) do not support Rewire 2, so you have to export whatever you do in Reason as an audio track and then import that into your multitracker. Not as efficient, but certainly not difficult.

Those packages seem like pretty good deals, but unless you really think you'll use Peak for mastering, I'd just get Deck LE on its own for $79. Are you sure you only want 8 tracks of audio? It's pretty easy to fill them quickly - especially if you're going to import drum sequences from Reason. To explain, Reason (at least to my knowledge) only exports songs as stereo audio files. I'm not positive with about the regular Deck LE, but the bundled version that came with my US-428 (an audio interface from Tascam) doesn't support stereo interleaved audio files, so the drum files take up 2 tracks (one for the left channel, one for the right). Add a couple guitar tracks, double up on your vocals - well, you get the picture. You just don't want to be stuck down the road limiting yourself and then wind up spending the extra money anyway if you want to expand.

There are tons of differences between Logic and Deck, but the simplest distinction between the two is that Logic handles MIDI sequencing, Deck does not.