Basic audio recording set-up?

[brite2006]

Equipment: iMac (2007) running OSX Leopard and Logic Studio 8.

Korg X5D synth, Behringer C-1 XLP microphone, Takamine EG510SC semi-acoustic guitar.


Previous I'd just spend my time composing in MIDI, *or* playing the acoustic guitar by myself.

But now I'd like to start recording my music to audio.

I recently bought a Focusrite 2i4, hoping to run everything through that. But volume levels with my microphone are awful - I need the gain knob on the Focusrite input turned up almost to full, just to get an almost decent recording level, and even then I'm toying with hiss.

Plugging my guitar directly to it results in almost no volume, as if it requires a pre-amp.

I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to audio recording, and it seems as though I keep doing things wrong.

Could anyone please suggest what I should be looking at in terms of audio recording equipment and set-up, so I can actually start recording my instruments layers - synth, vocals, and guitar - to Logic, please?

 

[brite2006]

Discovered my problem - when setting up a new audio track to record to, I wasn't selecting the correct inputs. Now I've realised I need to select input 1 OR 2 for recording audio, it's finally working properly.

The mic is just less sensitive than I'd expected, but that's fine for the moment as I'm not in a particularly quiet room.

EDIT: Correction, the mic was recording inputs 1-2. It's a lot better quality when I just set it to input 1.

 

[madelefant]

I was gonna say, input level shouldn't be a serious issue.

 

[madelefant]

The Alchemy synth in logic has a huge set of instruments. Is the Korg a synth module? Do you have a midi keyboard? You an just use the Alchemy stuff and input nots via keyboard if you have it. What type of music are you recording?