Hi again,

Firstly Gary,
I have burned cd's and played them both in the car and on the hi-fi..the car is Sony and the home unit is technics. Both give off a muddy sound although it is slightly more bearable in the car. I assume this is something to do with the way car stereos are set up (soundwise) to compensate for the compact space?

If you want to hear what I am talking about regarding the 'muddyness' of the mixes you can download.....
http://members.sniffout.com/nsymon/WonderfulDay.mp3
or for comparison http://members.sniffout.com/nsymon/PrettyDresses2.mp3

Mike,
Like all good plans my Lexicon soundcard is going back for sale on ebay!! I should have researched it better (story of my life!) I did realise that there were no drivers for XP but seeing as I have a pc just for music since upgrading other pc's in the house I was happy to reformat the 'old' PC to win 98 to accomodate the Lexicon. However after doing this and setting everything up I also discovered that the Lexicon is incompatible with Athlon processors. SO until I find a replacement card I am using an EDIROL usb interface to connect to my music pc.

The PC is a 1 gig Athlon with 356mb ram 64mb agp graphics (only mention this to show that the graphics card is not interfering with other PCI slot cards such as soundcard) In fact the soundcard was the only pci card in the machine. I took everything out of this pc that was not needed in order to ensure there would be as few conflicts as possible. The only programs installed are music related. ...oh and it has a 40 gig hard drive so plenty of space.

The mixer is a Eurorack UB802... a little dinky thing with 4 stereo in's and two line in / xlr. I liked this because it was so compact and enabled me to utilise the sub outs on the Pro.

Terry,
I have a sneaking suspicion you may be getting near to the truth here! I do usually record the keyboard part/ parts straight to a single track. Just hit record and play. Then I do the vocals on another track and sometimes will do a single instrument on a third track. I have always done this to keep it as simple as possible.

I think it was Don Mason in a post once who said I just play and sing and record the lot straight from the keyboard. Now there is nothing at all wrong with Don's MP3's and on my pc they have always sounded crystal clear so I always assumed that there should be a way to just attach the leads and with the miniumum of fuss record the results.

I know that Scott Yee has recorded straight from his board and into the pc with remarkable sound quality.

I was hoping for a relatively 'easy' solution to this problem but if you are right it looks like I am in for a hard slog learning how to mix properly and may have to start recording track by track. Thanks for your link to the recording tutorial. I am going to print it out and take it to bed with me.

I am off to Brighton tommorow evening (Friday)for a few days holiday and to see Patti Smith perform. I am taking the Laptop with me so I will be able to read any responses in the hotel. However I will not be able to act on any of them until Tuesday when I return (Unless Patti lets me at the piano )

Best wishes to all and thanks for all the help.
Tony



[This message has been edited by Tony W (edited 05-15-2003).]