Recording gear

Recently tried to construct a nice entry level studio system to try some recording. Here's what I ended up with:

Audio Technica 3035 condensor - nice airy quality, really transparent. It's level is pretty solid but it didn't seem to do my voice or acoustic with a 'near field' effect. In my studio environment (well, uhm, I live in my studio... really! on a few different levels...) it's qualities make it tough to use in lower SPL recordings like voice and acoustic because of its 360 degree sensitivity. However, in higher SPL recording, like with my amps, it works out really well. It shines on both chunk and clean guitar amp micing so I think for now it's going to be the workhorse guitar mic. It does seem to catch the 'sweetness' and 'snap' of my amps so until I move to the next tier of mics I bet i will use this one for recording electric guitar for quite some time...

Audix OM5 - a dynamic mic used primarily for vocals. It's fun to use and seems to have a mid-cut kind of thing going on. I continue to be amazed at how mic manufacturers are more like amp manufacturers - 'realism' is relative. Sounding good is a little easier to achieve with some amount of modest EQing which if you ask me this mic has. Either that or it happens to have a response curve with a mid-cut builtin. They have a graph on the box, I guess I could look at that. Bottom line is that it probably makes my voice sound a lot more interesting than it is, so I have to give it a good mark too.

Mogami XLR cables - I have 2 of these, 1 for each mic. They seem nice made of high quality stuff like rubber or something.. probably some metal in there. Plus, I have the joy of knowing I have brand name cables. w00t.

Mackie Satellite Interface - it has 'Onyx' preamps, an insert (loop), (2) line-ins, XLR, instrument high Z for each channel on the base station, all with phantom too. They are preparing (or already have) discontinue this thing so for now its $200 - about the price of a decent CPU for your computer. It's all firewire, though, and it can indeed do low latency (I monitor through DAW when recording) but this causes major issues on most PCs. In the end I moved to a Macbook Pro and that works fine with garage band. Perhaps with an 'awesome' computer the need to buy CEntrance drivers would be gone. Until then, for me, it's here.

Sennheiser 'cans' - when doing recording it's fairly important to use monitors that work well. I initially got a pair of senn 280s which are 'sealed' headphones. In the end, my ears would start sweating terribly after 20 minutes so I got a set of senn 555s. These are 'open' but still arent .. "heat free". Maybe no full size headphones are. I also use some decent computer speakers to verify what I recorded is listenable.... they work well too.

To get list:

Palmer speaker simulator - I would dig one of these but at $500 its hard to not buy something much more expressive like a new combo, preamp, or even a new axe like I dont have (hollow body, plastic pickguard, or something).

Millenia - recording preamp that I guess Satch uses... I like his recording clarity so maybe I can find one of these on ebay... even then, its a 'ultra pro' piece of gear... maybe for xmas?