Blue Yeti vs. Snowball for beginner set-up for voice and piano recording

I'm not really a professional musician, but I'd like to record myself, maybe play around a bit, see how I sound.

My portable mac is a unibody 13" (sans firewire), and as I quickly realized, the built-in microphone sucks.

I'm very particular about sound, and I'm willing to spend up to about 150ish (it also helps that I have a $50 gift card to the apple store).

So far I've looked into the blue snowball and yeti- I thought the snowball was cool but I was really impressed by the quality of the yeti and if it is that much of a difference i'd be willing to shell out the extra 50 bucks or so.

The other thing is that I'd like my set-up to be relatively painless- and I'm not quite sure how that'd work with a microphone that big (like the yeti or snowball). I could deal with propping my macbook up on the piano (it seemed to work fine for video) but could I just leave the big microphone standing there too? Do I need any adapters/clips/stands anything in particular for recording the sound of a grand piano with/without voice or trumpet soloing.

Thanks for all your help in advance.

Well, it's kinda both- I guess I've been playing the piano longer than I've been singing (as odd as that sounds) and I'd like to play and sing together if I were playing the chords to a beatles song or just playing around like that. I doubt I'd actually play the part and then record my voice.

I also like the idea of being able to do both at the same time because I'd like to video record myself, even if it was with photobooth or whatever, cause it's interestign to actually watch myself play. I see your point about the snowball mic, but the fact that the Yeti is newer and is more advertised draws me towards it... but I could be wrong.

ChrisA said:

I think you dropped a decimal point. If you were "very particular about sound" you'd be using several mics, mic stands, mic cables a USB or Firewire audio interface with multiple mic inputs.

Maybe you should have asked is "How to record vocals and piano for a $150 budget?"

That would have been an interesting question. It's easy with a bigger budget but with $150 some creativity and compromise has to occur.

Maybe you should think ahead to the system you'd like to have and buy it in stages. Make some kind of upgrade plan so in the end you have multiple mics, stands and so on. But first buy just the minimum. The Snowball type USB mic is a dead end. There is no upgrade path. But if you bought one of these "fake SM58 clones" and some kind of interface to plug it into. the laster buy a second cheap mic then later upgrade one of them. Work it out so over time you get what you need

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Re-reading what I wrote, you're absolutely right. But I wasn't really descriptive on my situation. I'm a student- not a professional/performing musician, just looking to develop my interests and have some fun. I mean I can't say I'm that particular because I haven't really tried anything out there- other than the built-in mic which was a nightmare. So for a student/musician that should be practicing more (maybe recording myself will inspire me to), would you recommend this route of such a simple set up? Or would you still recommend I get something that I can build on?