absolute beginner needs home recording advice

[syndrin]

I am just beginning to explore the world of home recording and am finding it very overwhelming.....seems the more I learn the more I discover how little I know!
I am interested in recording an acoustic duo with myself and another acoustic guitarist (each of us singing as well) in a live practice environment...we'd like to lay some material down on CD that we can take to the club owners in the area to secure some bookings.
We're hoping to record to my laptop ( a Dell Inspiron 8200...P4 1.8ghz....512 ram....yamaha factory installed sound card) and to do it as cheaply as possible, at least for now, but still come out with something that sounds half decent....we're in the process of writing a lot of material and when we start to record that, then we'll probably want to upgrade our setup or look at a professional studio.
For now, though, we'd like to lay down some material that we can use in a promo package that is of good quality but need not be spectacular..does anyone have any ideas or advice?...all comments are greatly appreciated.
By the way, I have access to a Mackie PPM 808S mixer (with my other band) and I use a Yamaha AG stomp effects unit and a Shure Beta 87A mic if that helps at all....Thanks in advance!!

 

[sile2001]

Well, if you're shooting for as cheap as possible, then just use that Mackie board to mix everything down to stereo. Run both guitars and both mics into the inputs and get them mixed so that it sounds ok on headphones. Make sure you do not have speakers on as you do this, because they will make it sound bass-heavy.

Once you have it sounding more-or-less right, run a cable from the line output of the mixer to the line input of your computer. Make sure you are using the mixer's line output and NOT NOT NOT its speaker output. If you hook up a 1200 watt amplifier's output to a computer's line input, you can kiss your soundcard goodbye.

At that point, just do some recording with it and see how it sounds when you play it back. You'll just have to make some adjustments by trial and error.

 

[syndrin]

By the line output, do you mean the pre-amp output before the signal gets routed to the power amp?
Also, do I need to get some type of software mixing package to record it with once it's in the PC?.....if so, do you have any recommendations?
Thanks again for the help!

 

[manning1]

read the arch_jedi thread on what i recommend for recording software .
frankly on board laptop sound cards are not the best.
but you can get away with it maybe.
when you have the budget consider a firewire solution.
but stay away from usb sound solutions. a lot of people seem to have probs with them.
search under my name. lots of info.

 

[Ronan]

You will need 4 microphones and a 4 track cassette. record to the 4 track cassette and mix down with that. send the output of the 4 track cassette to your sound card and record the final mix to the laptop. There are several free programs that can easily record two tracks or more and you will probably want to use that program to compress or limit that mixes to make the louder when you burn to CD.