Encouraging a young singer

zico martin

My daughter is a bit of a singer and is looking into recording some good professional cover versions to post on youtube, is this feasible on an old ipad 2 or should she save up for a decent pc? Any suggestions at what other hardware she may require?

technoman28

@zico martin, difficult question to answer. If she is going for a good professional cover version, I would have said a pc, but having said that, there are other ways around it. When my son started on a music course at college, (now on a degree course at uni), I looked at ways to set up recording stuff on the cheap. I ended up getting an old Mac G4 for around £60, and Logic Pro 8 for about £30. I already had a condenser mic and various other bits and bobs including a mixer amp, (£25), which I set up so that he could record stuff. My view was that as I was only going to be using the Mac for this purpose, it did not need to be all singing and dancing, plus the fact that this stuff wasn't ancient and was well thought of in its day, no reason for it not to be as good as I needed it to be.
It worked really well, and has been very well used.
Is she planning to sing to backing tracks and film this for YT, or record the song and add a video to the background? (suppose I should have asked this first), I would recommend the second of these if possible as with a reasonably cheap set up, you can produce some good results. I went Mac as it is industry standard, (my son could take stuff on a USB from ours, and work on it in the latest version at college). If you could give a bit more info on your requirements, budget etc, there are lots of folks on here that have dreamy set ups that I am sure would be more than willing to offer more serious advice on the way to approach it, I on the other hand am just saying that you do not have to spend a fortune to get a decent set up. I also haven't recorded onto an Ipad so can't really offer advice on that.

zico martin

thanks for your response and sorry for my subsequent failure to return the favour!  Budgetwise we dont want to spend a great deal and are looking at entry level - find a simple way of her recording her voice.  Ideally I like the idea of her doing a lot on her iphone 6 but perhaps this is not feasible. We have an old laptop which i guess may be ok to plug a mic into to record her voice, but what kinda mic should i be looking for?

duncfunk

Low budget you can pick up a usb mic for the iPad. Something along these lines:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/SAMSON-SAC01UPRO-Samson-USB-Microphone/dp/B00HXE4BYW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1480682740&sr=8-2&keywords=samson usb mic

Or you could look at picking up a Zoom recorder or similar. The cheapest Zoom is £70 on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zoom-H1-Handy-Recorder-Matte/dp/B0144JHW4E/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1480682681&sr=8-3&keywords=zoom recorder

Definitely a good entry point until you decide to go for a full computer/audio interface/DAW setup.

nero0410

I second the Samson C01U, specifically the one that duncfunk mentioned (it's £54, the older version is £70), they are fantastic mics for the price. I have the previous version I use for voice chat on games, then two of the newer versions that duncfunk linked for vocals and duel micing my acoustic guitars.

If you have a search on youtube, you'll find a fair few video's, just search 'Samson C01U cover' and you'll get some good results. Remember Youtube cuts the quality of what your hearing, be sure to listen with some good headphones to get the most accurate sound

A laptop is great, especially if she'll eventually end up doing music at college. I, eventually, started using my gaming laptop, literally replacing the desktop I was using, as I moved to using Pro Tools. Colleges usually use Logic X or Pro Tools that she would learn to use. Garage Band is free on pretty much any mac, though I'd disagree now that macs are industry standard now, as a lot of studios are using Pro Tools and PC's have come a very long way, so the quality you get is pretty much the same across both mac and pc these days. Macs are easy to use, so simple, whilst pc's/laptops require a little more work, but when used to it, it'll be fine.

Budget can get pretty high as you move up, but to start a cheap laptop and and that Samson C01U would be perfect!!

I can't song for the life of me, but damn I enjoy 'singing' This was sung with the C01U in my 'studio', far from professional, and has the original music video in the background that I'm singing along to. Took me some years to get my vocal on the net due to mental health issues, but now I have done it, it's a lot easier
                               
I have a big black wind filter on my mic, also made by samson, but it's the same one.

It's all recorded in Mixcraft Pro Studio 6/7. There is plenty of free software on the net, just experiment and see what one she likes the best. Then when it really becomes a passion, say goodbye to the contents of your wallet for a while

tris