Retail Therapy, A Music Breakthrough, and zomg Firewire

I have decided that I not only love retail therapy for myself, but I love retail therapy on behalf of other people as well (aka. shopping for people). I admit, however, like most "Americans" that sit in the middle class tier of the young(er) United States I worry about money more than I should.

A close friend of mine told me once that people who incessantly worry (aka stress) about money live shorter lives than those who don't. I have been much better about it as of late (promotions at work certainly help ease the looming fears), and discovering that just setting a savings goal and balancing my bank account twice a month really helps me put the worries of the impending economic doom plaguing our nation on the back of my mind.

With this new mantra of taking things as they come and working towards financial goals, I've found that I have a bit more freedom when it comes down to being able to shop. My hobbies lend themselves to big ticket items that I won't let other people gift to me (it has happened on rare occasions, and I commend the loved ones in my life that support my hobbies and passions).

Anywho, moving along:

I made somewhat of a 'breakthrough' track last week that has set me off in a firm direction for producing my new materials-- ultimately working towards a new album that I intend on full professional release. In doing so I realized that I needed to take a hard look at my home studio.. if you can even call it that.

I run a very rogue set up composed of hardware I have obtained in 1-off purchases since I was about 16. I will spill the guts on what I have in a later post, but let's just say that I have hit the limits of my USB bus on my PC.

During a session in Ableton Live! I was attempting to record some electric guitar parts in 96khz. I'm using a small Edirol USB interface that has a guitar-level input. It works farily well, but at 96khz I seem to get some periodical buffer-crunching (crunchy sounds). Everything is configured and updated, however, after digging around I learned something new (which made me feel like such a llama [nub/n00b for you new-schoolers] ):

The most generic way to put it is that USB allows devices to send and receive data whenever they want within any 'spectrum' of the bandwidth. This means that if I have a bunch of devices doing USB data stuff back and forth while I am recording music, there is a possibility I can have data collisions that drop my data in the middle of my recording session-- which is exactly what was happening given I have just about USB-everything.

Firewire, on the other hand, has established relationships with each device such that each device carves out its own bandwidth for communication.

So rather than eyeing some of the cheaper USB 2.0 audio interfaces, I'm going to invest my money wisely into Firewire interfaces that will give me the most reliable performance capacity for home recording and live performances.

You really don't realize how unequipped and ill prepared your "home studio" is until you sit down with a pen and paper, write everything out that you have, take inventory of what is all connected to eachother, and to the brains of your opertaion (in my case the PC).

Why the sudden need for more equipment? Well in said track that was a 'breakthrough' for me, I managed to track vocals to a song-- but seeing as how I have no interface with any music mic inputs I ended up hacking and recording vocals on my crappy Logitech headset boom mic-- oh my god it is craptastic.

Here goes the first major step towards beefing up the audio arsenal.

I am currently looking at adding the first pieces below:

Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) 8PRE 16x12 Firewire Audio Interface

or maybe...

PreSonus Firestudio Project FireWire Interface

AKG C 1000 S Condenser Mic - I will probably buy a 2 pack.