rats
New member
What a nightmare.
It seems like it must be typical dilemma for a lot of home reccers that haven't yet made the leap to the higher quality sound cards. I mean even with four to eight inputs it seems like you would still run into snags. On the several occasions where I've recorded in the pro studios the process made sense; each musician gets his own room where you're individually mic'ed, D.I.'ed, etc, and you can hear everyone playing in your headphones. Then you just play the songs live as usual and the engineer captures you. Then you go back and do your punch ins, over dubs, etc. Seems pretty basic. 
But now you take away your 64 channel console and 8 ADATs and give you a 2496 Audiophile with one stereo input and you have to make some changes!
So here I am in a four piece core band that also recruits various other musicians to play parts; violins, sax, singers, other orchestral parts, etc. Now, we have a real drummer, I need to make that clear. There's no sequencing or looping going on here, at least for the most part. Getting a good quality drum sound recorded onto 2 tracks has been a challenge in itself where I'm only using a 4 channel mixer, but that's another issue altogether. The real problem is logistically getting the structure of the song recorded because is there a right way to do this? We have experimented with a couple of different processes and still haven't settled on "the right way". Right now we are in middle of recording a full length 12-13 song CD on this machine that we will take in to a professional studio to have mixed and mastered, and let me tell you, it's been an experience.
Our early attempts have produced the best sounding stuff yet, although technically insane. What we did was first we set up a couple of room mics and recorded the whole band playing the song as usual. We used this as a guide and prayed our timing was good. Then we proceeded to record each drum (for the most part) individually on it's own seperate track. First the kick drum - track 3 - record - boom boomboom, boom boomboom. OK stop. Punch in mistakes, edit, OK. Then we'd move on to the snare, etc. Sure it was tedious, but came out sounding pretty damn good, and it was nice being able to have the total control to EQ compress, limit each drum with no bleeding over of tracks!
After the drums were recorded it was pretty easy to record the rest of the instruments with the new drums track as the guide.
After doing three songs this way we decided to try something else. It just seemed stupid to do things this way, way too much time involved. So what we did for the next 5 or 6 songs was to first establish a click track, then record the guitars and a guide vocal track. Then we'd record the drums altogether live with an SM-57 on the snare, a rented kick mic on the kick, and two of the same model dynamic mics as overheads panned hard left and right. It actually didn't sound too bad, but it was very hard to get the whole spectrum nice and in your face, unlike what we got out of the previous 1-drum-at-a-time set up. Then we would follow up with all of the other instruments and vocals one at a time.
For some reason though, we had all kinds of trouble with the click track system, it was just weird. It may have been that our drummer was a little rusty by the time we got to those drum tracks, but it was a lot harder for him to play having to follow a click track than to just play normally where we always follow him anyway. Unnatural I guess would be the best way to describe it.
So now here we are looking at the near completion of the project and after all the work we've done it appears the drum tracks we have recorded are sub-par and we're thinking about re-recording them in the pro studio. Just the drums. But again, once we get in there he's going to be faced with having to play along with the click track and having to be dead on with his timing. I think he should be OK, but we don't want to find out that he's having trouble while we're on the clock in the drum room! And what about the early songs where there is no click track? What if the room track varied off time slightly, how to replicate that?
So that's my personal dilemma, but I'm guessing there must be others on the board that are currently or have at least had the experience of pulling off a full song with a stereo input. What methods have you used and been successful with, especially in the arena of live drums? I mean you can't record everything at once!
It seems like it must be typical dilemma for a lot of home reccers that haven't yet made the leap to the higher quality sound cards. I mean even with four to eight inputs it seems like you would still run into snags. On the several occasions where I've recorded in the pro studios the process made sense; each musician gets his own room where you're individually mic'ed, D.I.'ed, etc, and you can hear everyone playing in your headphones. Then you just play the songs live as usual and the engineer captures you. Then you go back and do your punch ins, over dubs, etc. Seems pretty basic. But now you take away your 64 channel console and 8 ADATs and give you a 2496 Audiophile with one stereo input and you have to make some changes! So here I am in a four piece core band that also recruits various other musicians to play parts; violins, sax, singers, other orchestral parts, etc. Now, we have a real drummer, I need to make that clear. There's no sequencing or looping going on here, at least for the most part. Getting a good quality drum sound recorded onto 2 tracks has been a challenge in itself where I'm only using a 4 channel mixer, but that's another issue altogether. The real problem is logistically getting the structure of the song recorded because is there a right way to do this? We have experimented with a couple of different processes and still haven't settled on "the right way". Right now we are in middle of recording a full length 12-13 song CD on this machine that we will take in to a professional studio to have mixed and mastered, and let me tell you, it's been an experience.
Our early attempts have produced the best sounding stuff yet, although technically insane. What we did was first we set up a couple of room mics and recorded the whole band playing the song as usual. We used this as a guide and prayed our timing was good. Then we proceeded to record each drum (for the most part) individually on it's own seperate track. First the kick drum - track 3 - record - boom boomboom, boom boomboom. OK stop. Punch in mistakes, edit, OK. Then we'd move on to the snare, etc. Sure it was tedious, but came out sounding pretty damn good, and it was nice being able to have the total control to EQ compress, limit each drum with no bleeding over of tracks!
After the drums were recorded it was pretty easy to record the rest of the instruments with the new drums track as the guide.After doing three songs this way we decided to try something else. It just seemed stupid to do things this way, way too much time involved. So what we did for the next 5 or 6 songs was to first establish a click track, then record the guitars and a guide vocal track. Then we'd record the drums altogether live with an SM-57 on the snare, a rented kick mic on the kick, and two of the same model dynamic mics as overheads panned hard left and right. It actually didn't sound too bad, but it was very hard to get the whole spectrum nice and in your face, unlike what we got out of the previous 1-drum-at-a-time set up. Then we would follow up with all of the other instruments and vocals one at a time.
For some reason though, we had all kinds of trouble with the click track system, it was just weird. It may have been that our drummer was a little rusty by the time we got to those drum tracks, but it was a lot harder for him to play having to follow a click track than to just play normally where we always follow him anyway. Unnatural I guess would be the best way to describe it.
So now here we are looking at the near completion of the project and after all the work we've done it appears the drum tracks we have recorded are sub-par and we're thinking about re-recording them in the pro studio. Just the drums. But again, once we get in there he's going to be faced with having to play along with the click track and having to be dead on with his timing. I think he should be OK, but we don't want to find out that he's having trouble while we're on the clock in the drum room!
And what about the early songs where there is no click track? What if the room track varied off time slightly, how to replicate that? So that's my personal dilemma, but I'm guessing there must be others on the board that are currently or have at least had the experience of pulling off a full song with a stereo input. What methods have you used and been successful with, especially in the arena of live drums? I mean you can't record everything at once!
