My ultimate goal is to be able to record every genre of music at the best quality possible. A lot of this has to do with technique, mike placement, proper mixing, but a big part in this is also gear.
My personal setup: I have three mikes, a senheiser 609, aidix i5, and a sterling audio ST 31.
I'm in the process of buying more mikes, specifically for drums, but whenever my band records my bandmates bring more mikes anyways, so thats not really what this post is about.
Right now I just plug these mikes straight into a Presonus Firestudio Project, then straight into my iMac with garageband.
When I read about other people's setups, they also have various external preamps, and compressors that are added to the chain.
I have none of these but I can get the tracks sounding very balanced and full when I play them in garageband, but when I export the files to disk, they sound a lot quieter and muffled, its really frustrating because I have no idea how to remedy this situation except to over-EQ things to makeup for the loss of brilliance when the tracks get mixed down and exported. This is really time consuming and frustrating because then mixing becomes at best guess-work and trial and error. I've tried turning normalizing off in Garageband preferences and this helped a little bit, but my recordings are still extremely quiet alongside regular recordings.
I've thought about upgrading to Logic Express or Logic pro, but I'm not sure if this problem is inherent with garageband or if there's something I need to upgrade on the signal chain to get the desired results.
Any help is greatly appreciated
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EDIT: As with anything like this, its something that will get put together over time. So I'd like to keep induvidual purchases under $1000.
