What to keep, change or sell in my home studio help please

[Hemmick Reef]

I have built up a small home studio over the past five years and have enjoyed the process although I think that I have probably spent more time thinking and tweaking rather than writing..hence my post.
I have decided that as I am in a small room (a little over 2x3 metres) I am never going to have a good monitoring room or easy/practical recording area ( I need to use this room as my home office each day). I feel that I am not making recording as easy or as much fun as I could, for my level.
Apart from my old bass guitar & combo I have bought the folowing equipment to record general rock songs:

PC - Cubase SX2
Edirol DA2496 sound card
Groove tubes 'The Brick' Preamp.
Lexicon LXP-1 reverb/effects
Alesis M1 active MK2 monitors
SM57 Mic
Groove Tubes GT67 Valve Mic
Rickenbacker bass + 100w Marshall combo amp (20 years old now)
Yamaha Electric + 15w Laney Amp
Korg AX100G guitar floor effects processor
Evolution Midi keyboard
UAD-1 DSP card
Korg Legacy Collection soft synth
FM7 soft synth

I want to sell some of this gear and buy some new to simplify to make recording more efficient.

1. I am tired of looking at soft synths on screen so I am selling these to replace with one VA synth by korg or Alesis so that I can get the hands-on-synth rather than hands-on-mouse experience.
2. Sell my GT67 mic because I don't think I will ever get the best out of it and just use my SM57 for vocals and amp duties.
3. Sell my Groove TUbes 'The Brick' preamp which I am not getting the most out of and replace it with the more versitile TwinTrak pro (and I am sure the preamps will be good enough for my perposes).

I thought I would run my idea past some experienced recordists to get some views.
Thanks

 

[Matt Hepworth]

I'd go with option 1.

The GT67 is a good mic - you'll be glad you have it, I'd venture.

Any particular reason you'd want to drop the Brick in favor of the TwinTrack?

Do you need stereo micing?

 

[Hemmick Reef]

I don't need stereo mic'ing but I feel that the twintrak with it's stereo compressor/eq and monitoring capabilities may be more useful?

 

[Eric Dahlberg]

1. Did you see Waldorf's Nano expansion for the CME controllers? It seems like a great way to work to me, offering a nice controller for your DAW while at the same time giving you hands on control to a Q sound engine at a much lower price than a Q keyboard. The Q is much better sounding than the majority of Korg & Alesis VA's.

2. A 57 through the right mic pre can be a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, neither the Brick nor the TwinTrak make for that magical combo, you really have to get something Neve-ish for that.

 

[saemskin]

the eq on the twintrack is simply a \"scoup\" eq, which I take to mean a notching filter. 1 knob for frequency, and 1 button for a deeper \"scoup\". Nothing special by any means.

The compressor has no attack control, just a 2 position button, and I'm remembering that it was less than stellar sounding. Nothing that I couldnt achieve better results with UAD plugs.

IMO you're not going to see any step up in quality with this thing. Get a solo 110 and you'll be better off.

I owned one and was pretty unimpressed with it. After I sold it I bought a used TL Audio C1 preamp/compressor for about 700$ and the difference was night and day. That thing provided massive amounts of gain, and sounded great. Not having another hardware comparison, the compressor was pretty fast and transparent. Considering I would normally use it to run my Nord Lead 2 through and I would full on slam the meter as hard as I could to get that distortion. It was creamy good, and as long as the makeup gain wasnt too loud on the compressor stage, it was very quiet considering...