Upgrading mics, interfaces, and DAW's can be tricky starting out as an engineer.

Russ lays out where he would put his money as a young engineer.

Well, I mean there's probably some exceptions, but in general I would say it's... you really should have a good path, a good stereo path to where, I mean if you're wanting to be an engineer and make money as an engineer, if you've got a couple of great pres and a couple of great compressors to where you can record something that sounds… and i don't mean crazy expensive, but something to where… because what happens is if... say there's a producer and he is doing vocals in some terrible studio. And he brings one engineer in one day he's got two days to do it. One engineer's in one day and then you're in the second day. And the first engineer guy is using what the studio has and it's not very good, and then you bring in your great pres and it sounds great. 

Well then it goes to somebody else to mix. The producer's not going to remember that you brought in gear or didn't bring in gear or whatever, but he's going to remember that when the mixer guy says, “man I don't know what you got going here, but this thing sounds way better than this one. Who did this one?” And he’s gonna say you did that one. And then you cut the tracks that sound great, so you're always, and you if you have a couple of great paths then you can always assure that regardless of the situation, regardless of how good the studio is, your stuff's always gonna sound good and that's what you want to make sure.  

If you're engineering is that every time you record something it sounds great, do you feel the same even if you're primarily, you know cutting like instruments on people's music and or doing more producing type stuff you feel the same way, well I think I mean I don't know if anybody needs... you can get carried away because I don't know. I mean it's great to have 20 pres and have a bunch of different colors and a bunch of options and all that kind of thing, but I don't think you need that. But i think I think it's great to... I think you always want to record great, and maybe you don't need the compressors. Maybe you just need two great pres because you can do great compression and great everything else in the box, but there's the pres happened before and I think that's a big factor is making sure you go through great pres. I mean if I was just getting started I would buy an okay vocal mic that would also work well on acoustic guitars and all that kind of stuff because some studios don't have that and I'd have two great pres.