Budget Gear Gone Wild

A few weeks back I wrote about my portable recording rig. I use a lot of affordable pieces of gear to get the job done when I take the studio with me, but I don’t lose on quality at all. In fact I love the sound I’ve been getting with this rig on the last few projects I’ve done. Today I wanted to breifly encourage you home studio guys out there by playing you a track recorded on a modest setup. I think this song has turned out great and gives me great confidence in this “budget” gear craze that I’m in!

Behringer And Beyond

I used a lot of Behringer gear on this record. Starting with the drums. We recorded 8 channels of drums into the Behringer ADA8000 preamp/converter. I wrote about this puppy before and it is rock solid. Simple to use and sounds great. All the guitars/amps were miked up with the Behringer B2-Pro condenser. Love this thing. I ran the B2 into the Behringer MIC200 tube preamp for a little flavor. I then fed that preamp into the ADA8000 for conversion into Pro Tools. Vocals were recorded with the exact same signal chain. Behringer all the way in.

The only non-Behringer gear we used was a few Audix mics on the drums and then headphones by AKG, a cheap Samson C-Control for talkback, and a pair of Alesis studio monitors for reference. The setup was made up of very affordable and accessible gear. Each piece had a purpose for the recording and then I used the heck out of it all!

Judge For Yourself

Ultimately, all that matters is what the final mix sounds like. If you get a great recording no one will really care what you used to get it. If you get a bad recording, no one will really care what you used to get it. What is important is results. So take a listen to a song from this session and judge for yourself. My goal for this blog and for your music is that you stop seeing gear as the “answer” and simultaneously the “limitation” to your musical success. That ultimately rests on YOUR shoulders as an artist developing your craft.