If you are going to record vocals yourself, you will need a good microphone. I will mention mics, and also recorders, power amplifiers and speakers, in detail shortly for the other types of home and project studio.

One last thing in the DJ section: for legal reasons I have to say that you must get the permission of the copyright owners of the music you sample and also of the recordings that you sample, whether or not you are producing recordings for commercial release.

The object of the MIDI studio is to use MIDI controlled synthesizers, synth modules and samplers as 'live’ sound sources, without doing any recording of audio signals until the final mixing stage. There are two advantages in creating music in this way: the first is that MIDI systems don't have any rewind time and you can get to any part of your composition instantly. Secondly, it is possible to change any part of the composition at any later date. This can be very important if you are recording music for a video sound track and the director suddenly calls and tells you that thirty seconds have been cut out of a scene. One of the disadvantages of MIDI systems is that the musical notes and sounds are held in memory and on disk as computer data, and computer data has a nasty habit of corrupting, or simply not coming back the way you expect the day after you created it. The problem is normally human rather than computer error, but it is terribly frustrating to lose something which you have been working on long and hard.

A good starting point for a MIDI studio is a synthesizer, a sampler and a sequencer. The three S’s if you like. With a sampler, you have access to a vast range of sounds, particularly if you can connect a CD-ROM drive and access the growing library of CD-ROM sounds that are now available (at a price!). The advantage of a synthesizer is that it is usually easier to fine tune a sound from not-quite-right to absolutely spot on. The combination of a synth and a sampler is very powerful. Since in a pure MIDI studio you have no means of storing sounds on multitrack tape, your equipment should be able to produce several different sounds at the same time. For this you need multi-timbral equipment. Samplers can have four or eight outputs, sometimes more, each of which can produce a completely different sound. Synths are sometimes internally multi-timbral, but several sounds are often constrained to come out of a single stereo output, which does restrict versatility. The sequencer will be in control of the whole system. Most people use computer sequencers these days, although there are still excellent stand-alone sequencers available which have certain advantages. Figure 1.2 shows how to connect the MIDI cables in a small system.

The mixing console you use in a MIDI system need not be as complex as one that is used for multitrack recording. In fact a PA mixer can offer all the facilities you need: plenty of channels, a stereo output, EQ and auxiliary sends. Look for a separate monitor output with a monitor volume control so that you can adjust the level in your speakers independent of the level of the stereo mix going to tape. Not all PA mixing consoles have these features.