Band self recording, mixing and mastering

Hello,
It's been a long time since i've started diving into home recording of a band. Unfortunately bands didn't last time enough for me to acutally be able to produce any song.
I have been only able to record rehersals with up to 6ch.
After losing my head a couple of times regarding bands and their lameness. I decided to start my own band by just playing with people that respects and have a conection with music and not focused on their personality formation trough a band. From 9 people involved in two projects only one of them matched that criteria. And ofcourse it is the dummer. Who else.
We decided to be our own voices and just be a 2 piece band. Guitar / Drums with both of us singing.
The idea is to jam as free minded as we can and try to harnest that energy into something with a soul and punch. We are kinda noisy and i'm not very good jamming and leading with Cronos ruels. But we do have lot's of songs allready recorded out of jamming. And in cases i would overdub them with voice and lyrics or extra guitars or bass. This are all first takes, we have get together only 5 times, so we are still kinda unfolding the colective energy.
Feel free to take a peek at the audios in question in soundcloud here: Lonewolf And The Cosmic Lizard

Back to the recording stuff, i have a small room and the cymbals and guitar really bleed into everywhere. We are planning in tracking the drums isolated with 6ch. And from there i'll do the overdubs. This way we will be able to have a cleaner and better performance.
I'll post audios of that when i have them.
Also i have been strugling a lot with mastering. It seems that i can't make them to sound better than what i have achieved, but i know i'm doing something wrong.
If someone can spot any prominent issue i'm all ears... well .. eyes.

Cheers!
 
Hi Lonewolf and welcome. I tremble to offer advice in this expert company but someone did mention that you WILL have trouble recording a band with just 4 inputs on your interface. Naturally you could buy a bigger interface, but them's expensive.

I would therefore suggest that you look for a small mixer. 4 Mic inputs and 4 more line ins is not expensive and you could find even more inputs on Ebay but of course you need to watch for junk!

Even just 4 mics would allow far better results on the drums sending a 2 channel mix to the 404's line inputs. That still leaves you two mics in the front. If you have any pedals you could for instance put bass G through a line input on the mixer (pan it a bit left or right off centre?)
You will need some more mics of course and the Behringer XM8500 is really cheap but surprisingly decent sounding. A much better capacitor mic than the Neewer is the Mackie EM-91C but still around US$100.

I don't know if you can solder LW but making your own cables can save you a few dollars. Another plus point for the mixer is that if you ever play live it will come in handy for band PA to feed a speaker system.

Dave.
 
Nothing will ever be perfect and you can't please everyone, so don't try to please everyone. If it sounds good to you, that is what counts.
 

I have found the above with only a few minutes searching. OK yes, the mic pres will probably not be the quietest things on the planet but for miking up drums and guitar amps you don't need SSL pre amp speccs! Then, as a band PA mixer again, super audio performance is not required.
However, there are SO many similar such mixers on the market that I suspect they all use very similar circuitry and thus achieve a very tolerable performance. I have a cheap Behringer 1002 and it as quiet as my MOTU M4 pre amps, i.e. bloody good!

Dave.
 
Hello guys, thanks for replying.
This is my current gear.

mics:
* Jts type 57 x3
* Beringher C1 condenser x2
* Jts Nx2 for bass

audio interface is a 404 and the other guys has a 202. We put them working together with asio4all drivers. making a total of 6ch. Works great if properly setup (can't use DAW monitoring with out hearing sound artifacts and the memory is split in half) but the recording seems clean.

For the drums i'm using the glyn john mic technique with the C1 mics. and then the 57s on the snare and toms, and well the kick with the nx2.
All mics go directly to the interfaces.

I have used the method you are describing Dave, however i wasn't happy with having more than one source in the same channel from the mixing perspective.
Besides the drumer only uses one rack tom and one floor tom making a total of 4 parts plus the overheads. So the 6ch should suffice.
The overhead mics i record them on separately mono channels so i can then adjust the wave to match each other regardless if i nailed the setup or not. Same goes with all other tracks. I allways make sure that all the waves are in phase with the snare on the mix. so having each element in it own channel has helped the sound a huge deal.
Pre mixing drums allways had some phase issues.

Currently my worst enemy is the anoying frecuency that the hi-hat generate in the tracks. Not sure if it's a room or mic issue.

This is the tracking side of the room


Cheers!drum setup.png
 
Last edited:
Hello everyone.

I've published my first ever album both as artist and as producer trough Tunecore. You can check the posts in this topic to see that i have come to this point after a lot of the most comon issues/headakes that we encounter along the way as artist/proucers.
The solution to keep a healthy relationship with music was to hire a drumer to record my own songs. I would record a base guitar to follow and the drumer would record along it. I didn't even had to play the role of guitarrist during the season! Then i would make overdubs of guitar, bass and voice.
Sent my overobsesed mixes for mastering to a professional and published before i burned out. So here's the results

https://open.spotify.com/intl-es/album/67ND2QP40PHkTXtxPYq0H7?si=N6Y9czlSRBOqOttclLZhHg

I will continue to produce following this method unit i publish all my unpublished work, then time to start fresh!
 
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