Recording at home

malcolmkindness

shufflebeat said:

malcolmkindness said:

1) I will probably need to buy a new laptop as the one I have at the moment is quite old and slow. It has been suggested that I need a 500Gb SSD, with 16Gb ram, is this correct?

2) My friends would only have basic stuff like household computer and phone. One of them says she can record something on her phone, send it to me and I can mix it in with my recordings.

It has been said that Reaper is so well coded that it will run on a clockwork mouse I can say with some confidence that the spec that you’ve been quoted is far and above what you need. I suspect your existing laptop will run Reaper with no issues and let you get aquatinted with the process before getting spendy.

When you’re hosting massive sample-banks to run string sections on your soft samplers you’ll need a large capacity drive, major amounts of RAM and a fast processor, but until then I think you’ll be ok getting a second-hand Focusrite interface and a decent set of headphones - and you’re good to go.

If you’re planning to record to a click (I’d suggest at least get comfortable with the process) then your friends will need to do the same. There are some apps that can make decent recordings on phones but unless it’s one person recording a simple tune without multitracking (in your case, listening back to another person’s track as they record) then Android is a dead end, only iOS can do this reliably, although there are many simple stand-alone recorders available that would be up to the job.

Thank you, that's encouraging. I am going to spend a few hours next week with a friend who uses Reaper, to see how I get on with it.

shufflebeat

Cool.
Feel free to come back with questions.