Cheap 'n Easy Traveling Recording Studio

I do voice over work, so no matter where I am, I need to be able to easily record commercials, corporate training, text books or other audio segments, and then email them to my clients. When I first started this kind of work, I did quite a bit of research, looking for all the "right" components for my home studio. Meanwhile, my boyfriend kept telling me that a Blue Snowball USB Microphone was all that I needed. I blew him off of course. I'm the geek in the family. What does he know? ahem. (He's just been involved in hundreds of recording sessions for musicians, but who cares about that?)

Besides, I wanted to torture myself by creating price and functionality comparison charts, and then bore myself with late night research for technical recording equipment recommendations until I was bleary-eyed. It's a way to justify large expenditures. If I suffered enough, I deserved to spend lots of money.

So off I went to Guitar Center to see what I could see. This was also against my boyfriend's recommendations. He told me that the sales people (mostly guys) were either horribly lacking in practical knowledge, or they knew quite a bit, but in either case, they all worked on commission and it was guaranteed that they would try and sell me much more than I ever needed. The only thing I agreed to with my boyfriend, as I was on my way out the door, was to not buy anything until I talked to him first. I said, "OK," with my fingers crossed behind my back. I had that technology spending fever, you know.

Well...before the boy at Guitar Center was done, he had a stack piled up near the cash register with a microphone that was evidently "Howard Stern's favorite," a pre-amp, a compressor, a pop filter and a big box of software. The total was in the high hundreds, just nipping at the heels of $1000. I pretended to be unconcerned when they totaled it up and then suddenly, as if I had just remembered something, I said, "Oh, by the way, you don't happen to have a Blue Snowball, do you?" The pimply guy in the red uniform shirt and name tag looked at me and said slowly, "Well, um, yes." "Oh cool, can I just see it?"