If any of you have kept up with me, I'm working on an ameateur CD this summer and mostly recording at my church. We had our first serious session yesterday.
I happen to attend a large, friendly church. I realize most of you don't have the benefit of a huge, expensive sound system and a volunteer to run it,
but if you happen to have that and a good computer with a good gaming sound card, you might just get by. Here's what we discovered:
We ran sound from a headphone output on the mixer (a Mackie perhaps? Something with 30-something channels...) into my friend's computer. His sound card is some kind of gaming sound card, I don't know exactly what, but a high-end one. We couldn't get the mix in the room to sound like the one that was getting recorded on the computer (he used Sound Forge XP). We tried running the computer sound back into a mixer channel for playback, but the mixer was artificially tweaking it, so we didn't hear what was actually recorded.
So the sound guy plugged his headphones directly in where the computer speakers normally plugged to monitor, and mixed like that, ignoring the sound in the room. That helped a lot, especially with keeping us from getting a tinny sound. It took us a long time to figure the process out (none of us had ever done this before), but after that recording was pretty easy. My friend took the .wav files home to burn a CD for me.
This may not get you the results of a dedicated Darla card or something, but we don't have the time to lay tracks anyway. If you have a good mixer anyway, and you do this right, you could get some hiss-free recordings.
I happen to attend a large, friendly church. I realize most of you don't have the benefit of a huge, expensive sound system and a volunteer to run it,
We ran sound from a headphone output on the mixer (a Mackie perhaps? Something with 30-something channels...) into my friend's computer. His sound card is some kind of gaming sound card, I don't know exactly what, but a high-end one. We couldn't get the mix in the room to sound like the one that was getting recorded on the computer (he used Sound Forge XP). We tried running the computer sound back into a mixer channel for playback, but the mixer was artificially tweaking it, so we didn't hear what was actually recorded.
So the sound guy plugged his headphones directly in where the computer speakers normally plugged to monitor, and mixed like that, ignoring the sound in the room. That helped a lot, especially with keeping us from getting a tinny sound. It took us a long time to figure the process out (none of us had ever done this before), but after that recording was pretty easy. My friend took the .wav files home to burn a CD for me.
This may not get you the results of a dedicated Darla card or something, but we don't have the time to lay tracks anyway. If you have a good mixer anyway, and you do this right, you could get some hiss-free recordings.