What would you recommend for recording 16 simultaneous channels to DAW?

Dave Matthews

Dave Matthews

Dave's not here
I have a 4 piece band that I want to record in our practice space. It would be a combination of live off the floor, and on other occasions we'd be recording one piece at a time.

Two electric guitars (one with additional piezo out)
Bass guitar
5 piece drumset
3 vocals

I have permanently wired up the drums, and can deal with the mics and amps as well.
The question is about all these inputs to a DAW either PC laptop or a Mac. I have the PC laptop and my bass player has the Mac.
I'd like to be able to walk into our practice space, plug in my laptop (USB), start up the DAW and go.

Question is, what would you recommend as an audio interface or USB mixer type of interface to DAW?
I'd use:
7 inputs for drums
2 inputs for my piezo equipped guitar
1 input for lead guitar
1 input for bass
3 inputs for vocals

Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts!

Dave
 
This will depend on your budget. You can get a Tascam 16X08 or a used US 1641 or US 1800 for $300 and under, but they only have 8 built in preamps. You would need separate preamps to run the other 8 line inputs. One of those stereo preamps would have to have a Spdif/digital out in order to get to the 16 separate 'mic' inputs to computer. Likely pushing $1000 at this point already at the low end of quality.

I used to run things this way before I upgraded to a Steinberg UR824 ($600.00). It has 8 built in preamps as well as two 8 channel ADAT inputs. This means you can purchase something like a Behringer ADA8000 (there is a newer model out now) for $150 and have a total of 16 tracks for under $1000. I now have two UR824's (the second running as an ADAT slave, but the preamps are really good) and one of the Behringers for total of 24 separate input tracks to DAW. I rarely have need for tracks 17-24, but they are there if I do need them.

There are other interfaces that have ADAT inputs but I have no experience with them myself.

Hope any of this helps. :)

Keep in mind, you could just record the drums with just a 8 input interface, and track the others later. Use the 8th track as a scratch track for the other instruments. Many do that. Hell, I kind of do that myself even with all the input tracks. I just like having everything separate. Rarely has anyone band recorded scratch tracks that were used in a final product. I can record a full band live. But have not been hired yet to do so.

Also know that the amount of 'bleed' between mics in one room will severely limit your ability to isolate each instrument. That is usually the main reason to record in stages. Drums at one time. Guitars and bass. Vocals...
 
Thanks Jimmy,
That actually helps a lot!
Turns out my bass player has a Presonus Audiobox 1818VSL and an ADAT expansion, so there's a good chance we're all set!
Like you I want everything seperate as well. Swapping cables does not appeal to me.
Looking forward to some messy off the floor and also some better ones done in stages (which is our original desire).
We went to a studio a couple of months ago and decided we wanted to give this a go...

Cheers,
 
So you're doing live scratch takes with the full band and then overdubbing final versions of each instrument later?

If that's the case, and your 1818VSL doesn't have sufficient channels, you might as well consolidate down to fewer tracks for the scratch.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
So you're doing live scratch takes with the full band and then overdubbing final versions of each instrument later?

If that's the case, and your 1818VSL doesn't have sufficient channels, you might as well consolidate down to fewer tracks for the scratch.
Click to expand...
Hi Steve,
We'll probably do a bunch of live/scratch recordings just for our own use, but really the idea is to wear headphones and track the drums along with bass DI, then add guitars and vocals after.
I'll get a DI/loadbox to play along with them but use a mic maybe in combo with my guitar DI/impulse responses for the recording.
Anybody try a Radial Headload?
 
I had the same question about a year ago. Went and got an Allen and Heath ice16. 16 in 16 out. Simple. You need a mixer cause it has no pre amps, but it does its job well.
Works as an interface with usb or firewire. For mac you could get a thunderbolt connector.

Mainly i got it for transferring tape to daw.

But you can also use it as a stand alone recorder. On the front there's a usb jack.
With a thumbdrive you can record 16 tracks @ 16 bit. With a ssd harddrive you can do 16 @ 24 bit. As an interface you can go uo to 96 bit but it cuts your tracks down to 8.

All I can say is I love mine. Im extremely happy with my purchase.
Surely there's better stuff out there but for a grand, I couldn't be more pleased
 
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