Turn Your Mac into a Home Recording Studio - Part 2

In*Part 1 of this guide*we began discussing home studio essentials, covering mic selection and input method options. This week we'll look at how to find the right Mac for your home studio and interrogate the two most popular multi-track recording apps on Mac for their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Opinions will vary on adequate specs for multi-track recording, and I'm not one to tout the following as gospel. All modern Macs are capable of producing amazing music when paired with the right software. They may not all be cutting-edge in terms of specs, but even on the low end, any Intel Mac is up to the task of some fairly serious multi-track recording. If you've purchased a Mac in the last few years, you already have what you need to get started.

But what if you don't yet have a Mac, or want to buy a dedicated machine for your home studio? There are many options, and some are better than others for mixing large sessions. Let's look at the main factors affecting the best choice of Mac for your home studio.

Inputs and Expansion Slots

First and foremost, you need to be able to plug the right stuff into your Mac. For basic recording, USB interfaces like Avid's Mbox 2 will do the trick, meaning any current Mac will suffice (as all have USB). USB-powered devices are usually limited to only a few simultaneous inputs, though, on account of the format's unreliable bandwidth. Firewire, on the other hand (as discussed in Part 1), can take as many simultaneous inputs as I've ever been able to throw at it. This offers more long-term flexibility if you're ever likely to track more than a few mics or inputs at a time, so you may want to bite the bullet and start with a firewire interface and firewire-equipped Mac right off the bat (FW400 or FW800, either will suffice. FW400 devices can be plugged into FW800 ports found on current Macs using an adaptor cable). This, of course, excludes the MacBook*(standard/white)*and MacBook Air from your list of options from the current range (even Mac Mini has FW800 and can make a great basis for your home studio).

If you're made of money and thinking of jumping straight to the wallet-chafing Pro Tools HD (to which I'd ask, why?) or some other PCI Express module, you'll need to jump straight to Mac Pro, end of story. It's the only Mac that has the slot you need. The most notable advantage of working with a dedicated card like this is that the DAW offloads processing of real-time plugins to the DSP chips on the card, rather than hitting your Mac's CPU with every task. This is very useful when mixing very large sessions as it offers enormous headroom, but the cost of such systems is hard to justify for non-professional use (especially when you realise just how much work a modern machine can do without any such assistance). An 8-core Mac Pro currently sells for $4,899 and can handle an army of real-time plugins on its own. A Pro Tools HD2 Accel card (pair) costs just under $15,000. For this, you get the luxury of a bigger army and the letters 'HD'*at the end. Worth it?
Granted, there are some nice HD-only features in Pro Tools (including higher bit depth and sample rate recordings, which can introduce new issues of their own) but these are non-essential and the list grows shorter all the time, making host-powered Pro Tools LE more and more attractive to not only hobby musicians and enthusiasts, but many professionals, too.

Resources

This leads us to the next major factor affecting Mac selection. CPU and RAM. Both will be used heavily if you plan on adding a lot of real-time effects and plugins on your recorded tracks or using large libraries of sampled acoustic instruments (like drums). Real-time plugins and effects are great because they can give you greater creative freedom and flexibility. Here's a simple example of their advantage:

Imagine you're tracking a guitar line and you use a 'real' effects pedal to punch in some delay and reverb on the way in. You record a single take and absolutely nail it in a way you can't imagine ever matching again. It was fresh and natural and without fault. Listening back, though, there was a little too much reverb and the delay interval was a little off.

In this case, there's nothing you can do to change the effect parameters. The guitar was recorded with the effect applied before being digitised and entering your DAW, and there's nothing Pro Tools or any other software can do to remove it. If, however, your guitar was recorded*clean and you used real-time effects, you could mix and match different sounds and tweak them to your heart's content (even after the fact) without any risk of damaging the original recoded track.

This flexibility, however, comes at a cost. Plugins can be quite taxing on your CPU (especially long reverbs and delays) and if you start going crazy with large combinations of them on many tracks (which you probably will, and why not?), you'll start getting "Out of CPU" messages before you know it. If you can see yourself doing a fair bit of experimentation, it's worth getting the best CPU you can afford.

From the current Mac range, I think the quad core iMac (27 inch) offers the best bang for buck in terms of CPU and is perfect for the aspiring home composer. It's a formidable machine and will handle huge track counts and many simultaneous plugins. It's a lot more Mac than I've got in my studio, and mine has so far served me well (a lowly 20 inch aluminium iMac with 2.4GHz/4GB, for the record).

Screen Size

This a big one. If you're thinking of buying a MacBook Pro for your home studio, you might want to reconsider (unless you're happy to go with an external monitor). Navigating large multi-track sessions is a hateful chore on smaller screens and it's worth investing in something with serious real estate. Even 20 or 21.5 inches feels very restrictive. Personally, I'm busting to upgrade my studio iMac for this reason alone.

When you're working on a complex project, how much of it you can see in front of you is a really big deal. There are many distractions and technical factors that can interrupt your creative flow in software like Pro Tools, and constant scrolling and zooming is a nasty piece of icing to throw on the wrong-cake. Sure, it's possible to navigate large sessions on a 13" MacBook Pro, but it's also*possible to browse the web on a BlackBerry. That doesn't mean you actually want to do it.

Choosing a DAW

If you've never heard the term DAW, it stands for Digital Audio Workstation, which in Mac software terms basically means a multitrack recording application. A DAW can take many forms, but in this case we're talking about GarageBand, Pro Tools, Logic and other such apps. Choosing the right app for you is probably the most important decision in this whole process, as it dictates the whole experience you'll be immersed in while tracking, editing and mixing your material.

Before delving into more serious software, I'd like to strongly urge anyone who values their sanity to start in GarageBand, even if you've purchased a good input box and are ready to jump straight to a 'higher' level of app. It's the perfect way to get familiar with the basics of multi-track recordings and it's much more intuitive and natural than complex apps like Pro Tools. I wrote Garageband off for years as an amateur-only app until being told by one too many respected peers to give it a go. I'm only a recent dabbler, but I'm amazed by how easy it is to put together a great recording with little or no technical blocks slowing you down. I'm looking at incorporating it into my workflow for writing new material (for me, the writing and recording processes are one and the same; I write new harmonies and instrument layers in-app rather than as a separate process). After laying down the parts and arrangements in GarageBand (the most creatively critical stage for me), I'll re-track them all in Pro Tools or import bits of GarageBand audio where the draft version was just right. This way I'm not having to do all the extra work introduced by Pro Tools when I just have a quick idea. Preserving creative flow is everything!

Apples and Oranges

The two primary DAW platforms for Mac, Logic and Pro Tools, are difficult to compare. They've been built from entirely different philosophies from the start, and ultimately your choice should depend on which approach most suits your experience and needs. Put simply, Logic was built for musicians and Pro Tools was build for audio engineers from the outset. That's doesn't mean musicians can't use Pro Tools, but DigiDesign's decided approach was to conceive a tool that experienced users of analog consoles would easily be able to transition to. It was originally about convincing the existing industry and its engineers once and for all to go digital. Channel strips are arranged much like those found on an analog mixer, which is great for anyone who's spent time recording in a large studio or mixing live. Controls, layouts and even plugins are designed*?skeuomorphically to ensure warm fuzzies for seasoned vets.

Unfortunately,*those who are daunted by all the lights and knobs of physical mixing desks will be just as daunted by the lights and knobs in Pro Tools. It's a heavy app. Its*assumption that the operator is someone who knows their way around a desk has left many a new user scratching their heads, and left me referring to its seemingly endless user manual to learn how to perform tasks which (I thought) should have been quite simple.

Emagic's approach at Logic's inception (Logic was not originally owned or developed by Apple) was obviously more aimed at the musician. It's unbound by the need to look and feel like a physical mixing desk and focusses on composition and ease of use. If you're wanting to write a digital masterpiece using virtual instruments and midi, the choice here is easy. Logic blows Pro Tools out of the water. Pro Tools has come a long way in version 8 in this regard, but Logic has been all about the songwriter from the start, and every aspect of the app makes this clear. It's easier to use and better at preserving creative flow. In many ways it provides a 'GarageBand on steroids' experience. It's also natively compatible with VST plugins, making a myriad of free plugins available to the user (Pro Tools uses a proprietary RTAS format for plugins).

Pro Tools, however, is hard to match when you have a large number of real-world sources to track in a single session. The way it handles routing, grouping and other higher functions is powerful and impressive. It's incredibly able and versatile for tracking live sources if you can take the time to learn the ropes. Personally, I've found the Pro Tools 8 video tutorials on Lynda.com to be hugely helpful.

So, the choice is yours. My decision to start with Pro Tools in 2003 was, for better or worse, based on its dominance in the industry and the fact that I knew I could take my recorded session to almost any recording studio in the world and have it worked on further. If that sounds good to you, it may be the better choice. But the more I see of Apple's approach, the more I wonder how much actual music I would have made if I'd spent less time reading manuals and memorising keyboard shortcuts, and more time actually being creative over the last seven years.

There are many other great DAW options out there, but for this brief series I won't go into detail. These are two most prominent DAWs on Mac and both offer great power and can deliver amazing results. I hope this quick comparison helps you on your way.

In the third*(and final)*part of this guide, we'll look at how to master your own music at home using iZotope's Ozone 4 mastering suite for Mac. Mastering is an often-mystifying art but is easier than you think with something like Ozone under your belt. Stay tuned!