Not sure where to go from here - recording setup advice please!

skullfunkerry

My laptop died last week, and I’m in a bit of a quandary. Work are getting me a new one which will cover everything I need to do during the day.

I’m not sure what to do for recording music though: at present (well, until last week) I was using my Katana directly into my Presonus interface, and recording in Reaper with drum tracks either from Hydrogen or bought from guys on YouTube.

My interface is iDevice compatible, so I could use the same setup I have now to record with my iPad. I can’t make head nor tail of GarageBand but I hear it’s very powerful; I downloaded n-track Studio from the App Store and it seems to do pretty much everything I need (I’m mostly only recording demos and suchlike).

I’m not sure whether to bother getting my old laptop repaired (or replaced, if that’s not possible), or just to stick with my iPad. The only thing I can think of that I wouldn’t be able to do on the iPad is adjust the settings on my Katana with Boss Tone Studio, but since I’m still on ver2 of the firmware (so that I can use the Rockerverb patch), I’m not sure that’s a dealbreaker.

So my questions are:

1. Any suggestions or advice on whether to go back to PC or to stick with iPad?

2. If iPad, then what are people using to record?

thegummy

If you're sticking with your current workflow then there isn't really any advantage of a PC other than the katana software.

If you did get a PC though, instead of buying pre-recorded drum tracks you could get BFD3 which comes with loads of recorded drum parts that you can chop and change to suit your arrangement.

You can even edit individual hits, e.g. add a snare roll or a crash cymbal at specific points. You can also change the drum sounds in many different ways.

Note: the deep editing is optional, you can just use the recorded tracks or you can edit to whatever level you want.