Advice on a vocal studio needed.. please

[MacGenerate]

Okay, here is the deal. I am an admitted novice but I need to design a vocal recording studio for church choir recordings. I have a basic design for the actual studio itself, but I don’t exactly know where to start when it comes to the equipment I will need.

This needs to be as simple as possible and I want to do the whole process digitally using Pro Tools.

Basically I need to be able to record the church choir.
Save the Recorded session.
Do some basic mastering process at a later time.
Export the final recording for duplication.

What do I need? How does it all work? And who wants to help me lol

Additional Question :
What is the best way to record a choir, 60+ people? Should I record the entire ensemble in the same room or should I design the studio to have 8 isolation type booths for each “part” singing and give each part its own track?

[atlasproaudio]

Taking for granted that the choir is very well practiced and has their performance down 100% the best thing to do in my opinion is capture the performance with two microphones. There are many variations on stereo technique, the most basic and simple to accomplish (both on a technical and gear accessibility level) with pretty decent mono compatibility is X-Y pattern, that being two cardiod microphone capsules at a 90 degree angle from each other. Depending on your budget you could spend anywhere from $500 on this setup with a pair of cheap condensers and a Mackie console, to a very elaborate top shelf setup like a Brauner VMS-1 stereo microphone and a Millennia Media M2b tube microphone preamp which could cost well over $10,000. If you are starting out though and you have a bit of a decent budget do try and get the best channel path you can afford because you will be able to keep it for various future uses (i.e. spot micing, etc) rather than outgrowing the cheap stuff, and even if you expand your career into a full time job (or even an expensive hobby) with a very elaborate expensive setup. Good Luck with your search, here is some reading:

http://www.josephson.com/mictech.html

http://www.tape.com/Bartlett_Article...echniques.html

http://www.dpamicrophones.com/eng_pub/