[Hank Neuberger: Getting Into Recording Today- (3rd Wave Productions)]

Because bands, hip hop artists, people doing beat tracks; solo artists are everywhere. They’re in your school. There in you're church. They’re in your town. Their there. If you want to be recording, you can be recording. It's almost like being in a band today. I mean until recently, to get anywhere as a band you needed the president of Sony Music or Warner Brothers to bless you. You don't need that anymore. You want to make a CD, go make a CD. Not that hard. How good it's going to be is up to you, but you don't need anyone's permission. Same with getting into being a recording engineer, or a producer. Um, digital workstations are an entry level. You can get some for hundreds of dollars. For a couple thousand dollars you can get into quality work stations. Some are Mac, some are PCs, some are bi-platform. Pro Tools works on both platforms. There’s a variety of PC based ones. I’m a Mac guy. I’m a Pro Tools guy, but there are certainly competitive ones other than that that are available. Um, Pro Tools seems to be the most ubiquitous. Their everywhere, and their certainly everywhere in the professional world.

I find today, not just in music, but in television, in film, we're asked to deliver Pro Tools sessions. So I still think that is an important education for someone getting into that. But, Pro Tools makes a product, a light product called LE, that is very easy to get into and very affordable. Um, so now you’re talking about a Mac or a pc. You’re talking about a computer, uh, the faster the better. But all these can work natively on the computer for an entry-level person. You need an interface that has some mic pre's in it. Okay, you’re starting with two but frankly two isn't enough. You want to be able to get to the point where you can do multi-track recording where you can put up enough mics to get a good drum balance plus a couple other instruments at one time. So, it would certainly be advisable for entry-level engineers to reach for the point where they can record eight, to twelve, to sixteen, simultaneous live mics. So they need the mic praise and the interface to be able to do that. And then it's microphones. And the classic microphones, the classic tube microphones cost thousands of dollars. And the classic condenser microphones are in the thousands. The vintage mics, uh, you'll see classic mics going for ten thousand dollars and more. But the fact the matter is today that technology changed allot to. And there are wonderful sounding mics at two hundred and fifty dollars, and if you need a couple of decent vocal mics. There’s a couple of decent piano mics. If your prepared to spend anywhere from two-hundred and fifty to five-hundred dollars, you have tremendous selection across four or five good manufactures. And now you've pretty much done it. Now you have your recording system and some microphones and your building up your mic kit, your building up your recording ability.