Earlier this year I decided to get some real recording gear. I bought a Behringer 6-channel mixer, a good sound card, a Windows box (boo hiss, I hear you say, but it's a refurb 433mhz eMachine bought for $349 at Fry's), and a Turtle Beach soundcard that's almost as expensive as the computer I put it in :-). Oh, I bought a couple of microphones too. The warmest of these is an Oktava MC-012-01 small-diaphragm condenser mike, which was expensive but well worth the price -- it has a nice flat frequency response curve and a nice warm sound (the vocals on Mikey's Dream were done with this mike, and it almost makes my crappy voice bearable). Its sole shortcoming is that it is very sensitive to air pressure and will sound boomy if aimed at an acoustic guitar and will sound puffy if a vocalist sings into it. I responded by rigging up a puff filter for it, by taking a wire coat-hanger and making a frame that sits about an inch in front of the microphone (simple wire tension keeps the extension arm firmly attached to the microphone), I used wire ties to tie the frame together, and then I paper-clipped a square of foam room air conditioner filter to this. The result sounds great, better than the commercial "puff filters" you can buy, and in my opinion better than the panty-hose contraptions that others use with this microphone. No boominess, no puff, and the foam seems to smooth things out quite nicely. The bummer is an Audix OM-2. This is a vocalist mike similar to the Shure SM-58, meaning it has the foam/wire thingy built into it. But this does not appear to work as well as the wire coat-hanger thingy that I built for the Oktava, it's harder to figure out a good position that lets me expel air to get a smooth sound while still being close enough to the mike to be within its "sweet spot". At the moment all I'm using it is for recording the guitar, it does well enough at that while its good rejection profile means that not much of my vocals gets into the guitar track if I'm both singing and playing and recording.

Finally, I have a Shure 58. I'm experimenting with it rather than the Oktava for The Two Towers. It isn't as "warm" as the Oktava, but it's also not as persnickety as the Oktava (which is very fussy about its setup).

The audio gear costed me a little over $500, with taxes. The sound card was, I believe, somewhere around $250 or so at Fry's, complete with the Voyetera software. Expensive hobby, sigh. But given that I've been doing this for over five years, it was time to buy some real equipment to do it with... after my disasterous VW experience I'm always wary of expensive hobbies, they have a bad tendency for me to lose interest in them and have lots of expensive stuff hanging around that I end up selling at fire sale prices, but a hobby that continues for more than five years is probably not something that I'll lose interest in.