acoustic home recording help

[mister fingers]

hello all. i am a jazz musician and wish to record some stuff with a trio of mine (piano, upright bass, drums). well actually, we allready gave recording a shot and were largely unsatisfied. so, i've come to you pros for help.

since i have the grand piano, my place would be the site for recording. it is a large space with all wooden floors and a raised 'cathedral' ceiling - very live acoustically. my friend had i believe a Alesis MultiMix 8USB (i will double check) hooked up to a computer. we had five mics at our disposable, nothing special (i will also try to find out exactly what). however, we were limited to the use of only four becuase only four xlr inputs were available. a great bass sound was recording using a mic and going direct input from the bass's pickup. the piano sounded decent (using two mics placed inside the open piano) but could be better. the drums seemed the worst, using only the one overhead mic.

my questions are these:
what mic placement can i use to achieve better piano results?
how can i get a better drum recording?
is there a way to use more mics using the alesis?
how can i record seperate tracks to the computer so it can be mixed rather than having just one track?

ANY help would be greatly appreciated. i do have the "final" product of our first "sesion" that ill hope to get up for you to hear. thanks!

[ssscientist]

Use one of these as a submixer for the drum kit. The recommended setup is one dynamic mic on the snare, one dynamic on the kick and two condensers - of the same type if possible - for overheads.

Plug the submixer into the stereo aux return of the Alesis.

You are hearing only one track because you are not using the pan functions on the Alesis board. The Alesis only allows you to record two tracks at a time so unless you want to start multi-tracking you will need to experiment until you get a nice, panned mix that suits all of you. On the bright side, once you get that mix once it will be massively easier the next time.

As far as the piano goes, put on headphones and move the mics around while the piano player is playing. If you are the piano player you play and get someone else to move the mics a small bit at a time while you listen in headphones. The bass notes are typically panned to the left while the higher notes are panned to the right, but do not crank the pans all the way or you may create a hole in the middle of the stereo field --- 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock are the recommended stop points. 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock sometimes sounds better.

Good luck and welcome to the board.

[mister fingers]

thanks a lot! ill let you all know how it goes.