PRESONUS Student Producer Bundles

We aim with these bundles to give you a chance of getting the best results in often noisy and certainly less than optimum acoustic conditions, such as student halls, whilst still leaving you some loan money to go out with.

This is more about capturing great ideas when they come to you, the digital parts of which can be commercial quality in the digital realm, but possibly putting down guide vocals and acoustic instrument parts that you can re-record in your college or Uni studios with their high-end mics, preamps and setups.

PreSonus Eris Monitors

It’s unlikely that you will ace commercial grade mixdowns using just monitors in a room without extensive treatment, but most of us prefer to write and produce that way, so we’ve based these bundles around the Eris monitors, which have fantastic value for the performance. You can of course choose bundles containing the ‘BT’ versions if you want the convenience of being able to stream audio from your mobile device through your speakers when not working on projects.

Roughly speaking, the bigger the speaker, the louder it will be and the deeper the bass it will reproduce, but even the smaller speakers will reproduce everything above the sub-bass region well. We see a lot of the smaller models used in video editing suites because the mid-range reproduction on them is very well balanced. As being overly loud won’t win you many friends in a shared house or halls (especially with the same 8 bar loop for 8 hours), these compact models are ideal. Bass frequency volumes are also most affected by room acoustics, bass response in the room will never be accurate for mixing and you will get more accurate results with smaller cone models.

AKG K361 Headphones

Headphones are not just for tracking with, the right pair will be a lot more accurate for mixdowns than any set of monitors in a room with no acoustic treatment, and you’d be surprised how much your tracking can also be improved if the tonal balance in your headphones is even.

Here at Scan we’re really headphone nerds, but you don’t need to spend upwards of £1000 like our most popular models to get great results, just take advantage of us testing and measuring almost every model to understand what’s got good translation for mix work.

The K361 is incredibly well tonally balanced as it comes out of the box, with a cheeky boost for the sub region under 60Hz, which will be welcomed by electronic producers to reproduce the frequencies that you normally feel from a speaker, but anything with acoustic drums and bass won’t really go that low, leaving you with incredibly accurate monitoring to mix with, whatever the material.

Plugins such as Sonarworks Sound ID offer to change the tone slightly to make headphones even more accurate, but costs £99. However Tom has analysed these on our £10,000 GRAS measurement system and produced an EQ profile that can do the same thing for free, that you can replicate with any multi band EQ plugin. Watch this video to find out how, you can find the settings in the video description.

PreSonus AudioBox USB 96 - 25th Anniversary Edition

This has got to be one of the best price for performance interfaces on the market. Perfect for recording down guide parts, with two channels so you can record with a couple of mics, or a mic & guitar at the same time, or run a stereo hardware synth in. Most importantly, it also comes with Studio One Artist software, not the entry level ‘prime’ version.

Studio One Artist Software

We knew we wanted to give you some fully functioning software, not a limited version. Think of this as the ‘middle’ version of Studio One, It’s certainly not lacking in features, with an unlimited number of tracks & busses, plus support for VST plugins (and AU on Mac). It also includes some great effects plugins and Synths such as Mojito & Mai Tai plus the SampleOne XT, Impact XT & Presence XT Samplers.

There is absolutely no reason you can’t make commercial grade recordings and mixes with this, if this was from another manufacturer, they’d be wanting a couple of hundred pounds for this spec.

Tascam TM-82 Dynamic Microphone

Unlike single manufacturer ‘starter’ bundles, we’ve NOT chosen an entry level condenser mic, as they do tend to pick up a lot of background noise (which becomes more evident once you put compressors on) and should really be used with at least a vocal filter to reduce the effect of the room, as well as a shock mount and pop filter. The cost of the accessories all mount up and if the mic isn’t that great to start with, you’d still want to re-record vocals for a final (commercial grade) mix anyway. So, we’ve gone with a dynamic mic.

The Tascam has great off axis rejection, so you won’t pick up much of the sound of the room when you use it up close, which is exactly what you should do to get clear and powerful low mid from the mic, about 3-5cm from your mouth. Having the mic further away than this will make it start to sound thin as the is a built in hi-pass filter, but that will also be useful in noisier environments.

This mic is a superstar for plosives and pops very little with p and b sounds if the mic is straight in front of you, which can be eliminated if you angle it about 30-45 degrees to the side of your mouth, pointed to the centre.

It does also have great treble definition without being overly sibilant, slightly more than something like an SM58, so actually a bit closer to the tone of a lower end condenser.

Arturia MiniLab Mk II

We know that space is often at a premium. This compact keyboard is perfect not only for playing a ‘riff in’ (even with our Tom‘s massive fingers), It’s also fully integrated with the included Analog lab lite software, with 500 presets included. Sound parameters are also automatically mapped to the controller dials, which of course output midi data, so can be recorded in your DAW.

Half price software upgrades

Students shopping at Scan can qualify for half price selected Arturia software upgrades! Choose from V Collection 9 (usually £519), FX Collection 3 (usually £259), and Pigments 3.5 (usually £89). Simply email [email protected] with the subject title “bundle upgrade” after you have ordered a bundle, and tell us which software you would like for a secret upgrade link!