Post by p***@aol.comHi,
I want to connect my Yamaha DGX 505 and a microphone to a sound card
to record a .wav file.
Can I connect a vocal microphone to get a decent sound or it has to
be a PC microphone ? Can I coonect them both directly to the sound
card ( I have currently a simple motherboard sound card but I want
to buy either 'SoundBlaster Live 24bit PCI' or "SoundBlaster Audigy
2 PCI accessory 5X") or I will need a mixer?
I will probably need a "Y" splitter (3.5 mm for the mic and ¼"
for the keyboard to 3.5 mm for the sound card) - can I buy such a
thing?
Okay, first off, forget about the mic input on the sound card -- either
the built-in sound or on the Sound Blaster. Second, for recording use,
most Sound Blasters are about the worst possible choices (without going
into details, they do strange things with the sampling rate that you'd
almost certainly rather not have happen). Replacing the sound isn't a
bad thing, but Sound Blasters are really designed primarily for games
and if you're interested in recording, there are better choices (at
least IMO).
If you're reasonably certain that all you want to record is two
sources, you can probably get by reasonably well with your current
on-board sound and a small mixer. You probably won't do any real mixing
on the mixer, but it'll have at least a halfway decent mic preamp and
it'll let you route your voice to one channel and the keyboard to the
other channel so you can record both at once.
Another possibility is to use the USB MIDI output from the keyboard,
allowing you to use both sound input channels for mics. This changes
what you're really recording from the keyboard though -- instead of
recording the actual sounds, you'll be recording the performance --
when and how you pressed and released keys. You can then feed that
information back to a synthesizer of your choice (including the one in
the keyboard) to produce sounds. This allows greater flexibility
(editing the performance) but it's also usually at least a little more
work. Along with this, you'll connect the mic(s) through an external
preamp to the line input on your built-in sound.
Oddly enough, however, a mic preamp won't usually save you a lot of
money compared to a mixer that includes a mic preamp. The external
preamp might be better (at least for some definition of the word) but
it probably won't be a lot cheaper. Then again, if you can beg/borrow
one and not the other, that can cut the cost of one option a lot in a
hurry... :-)
--
Later,
Jerry.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.