Getting Started - Total Newbie Alert! Options

[theyesman]

Hello everyone. I'm new here - please be kind to me!

A little background information...

About 18 months ago I bought my first mac - an iMac G5, 1.8GHz, 768MB RAM and a copy of Logic Express V7.01 with the intention of moving my songwriting from an 8track recorder to computer.

However university got in the way and its only now I am getting a chance to get back into writing songs seriously again.

What I want to do is be able to record songs using guitars, bass, drums (roland td8 vdrums) and vocals into my mac.

Can someone please advise me on how to go about this -

what kind of midi interface do I need?
do I need some kind of preamp?
can I plug guitars straight in or do I need to mic amplifiers?
if I want to not use the vdrums can I just program the drums?
etc, etc.

So to summarise:

I have an iMac G5, Logic Express, a load of 'traditional' instuments and absolutely no idea how to make them all work together.

I'm not trying to make mega high quality, polished audio yet, I just want to be able to get my ideas down and mess around with them.

Any advice would be absolutely brilliant. Thanks.

This post has been edited by theyesman: Mon 6 Nov 2006, 21:53

[hahaworld]

I am so impressed with this forum. Thanks to everyone who contributes, and thanks to everyone who has helped me get over some major humps. In the Logic vs. Pro Tools debate, it really does boil down to trying both over a long period of time and settling into a workflow that accomplishes what is unique to you and your situation. This is a hard question to answer because of that. I dearly love working in LOGIC, but I would like to add a couple more minuses if I may, just so you guys don't think I love LOGIC so much that I wanna marry it:

LOGIC (and general Apple) minuses:
I've read the manual cover-to-cover several times, and I still find myself dropping in here or going to Google for answers that the manual just doesn't provide. This program isn't for the faint-of-heart, and neither is the literal logic of the documentation. Sometimes you just want someone to say, "Plug this here, click this here, and play this here," instead of lots of three-dollar technical explanations. I usually skip Apple's website altogether because I rarely find anything of value or practical help there. Apple has become such a huge company that their support system is (in my opinion) beginning to spin out of control. Case in point:

Our friend lepetitmartien has been coaching me on some Logic latency issues lately, and long-story-short, I bought a SATA internal drive to hold my samples. I went to Apple's website to find some installation instructions and downloaded the G5 PDF document for this process. I looked and looked for an hour for the power cable that the document stated was below the "B" bay to no avail. Finally, I Googled it and found a random page written by a saint who said, "The late-model G5 pre-intel Quads combined both power connectors onto one cable above the 'A' bay."

I coudn't find this tiny, important piece of information anywhere on Apple's site. Sure enough, I looked under the hood again, and there tucked flat against the top of the "A" bay was another power connector.

Okay. I'm gonna go have some cheese with all this whine I'm pouring out. See you guys and gals here in the forum!

HaHaWorld