428+built in soundcard?

[wesley tanner]

now this may seem ignorant, and perhaps it is...

I currently run a tascam 428, giving me 4 tracks at once... when recording drums, I'd looove to have seperate toms and OH, or be able to have a snare under and over mic'ed... anyways, I just discovered the soundcard in my dell can run simultaniously, giving me 2 more ins... are my tracks going to sync? is the quality difference going to be so drastic that it's not worth it? I'm asking because the only time I have to actually record--if I mess up, I loose a lot of tracks for people who reaaally wouldn't be happy about it. anyways, thanks in advance.

wes

 

[mattamatta]

Ah, been there, done that pretty much exactly (I use the 428 as well).

While it seemed like a good idea in theory, I didn't have much success. The inferior drivers of my sound card sucked so bad that it just bogged down everything to the point where I could barely get things to work at all.

I've had ok luck with kick, snare, mono overhead, and toms mixed down to one track with a PA mixer, but if I had to do it again right now with 4 inputs, I'd suggest just eliminating close mics on the toms altogether and going with a simple kick, snare, and two overheads.

Of course it's important to have decent mics, but that's nothing new in recording.

Let the overheads be your main tools - position them so that you get the right balance of kit elements, and make sure to keep the kick and snare centered in the stereo image (unless you want to differ on that for artistic reason), and then use the kick and snare mics to supplement this sound.

I always used to lust over the ability to mic up each tom individually, but I'm not too interested in that anymore. It's just not very important to the sound, and I find that a big roomy non-close mic'd drum sound has a lot more rocking power, and really sounds a lot cooler.

I've actually just bought a motu 828 off ebay, and even though I could close mic toms, I dont think I'm really going to next time I do recording of drums. My extra channels are going to go more to things like the under snare mic, a condenser a few feet back on kick, etc.

I know you mentioned an under snare mic, and I do find I like what's at the bottom of a snare, but unless you can mix it down with the top mic (dont forget to flip the polarity on one), I'd just go with the simple approach and rely on the overheads.

After fussing over close mics, it's amazing how much the overheads can do that is often taken for granted.

I've found before that I had to compress the hell out of tom mi cs to make them audible above what's in the overheads, and in situations like that it becomes clear that the question is "Do I actually even need this?"

Just some thoughts.

 

[wesley tanner]

I've experimented with all those methods... I worked a bit about it today, but it didn't work out as well as in my head... I get some bands here that like really modern sounding drums, I have to close mic EQ and compress the hell out of them... I usually wind up with a mono OH and toms that I have to edit out when they're not playing so you don't hear the sympathic vibrations when a kick is hit nice and hard....

come to think of it, though, the best rocking sound on the drums I've had was just with two overheads kick and snare.... hmmmmmmmmmmm I think i'll go back to that... it'll really help that I've got 2 nice preamps now too. ahhh yes, I can't wait to record more... it's just so addicting...

 

[bigwillz24]

I use a 428 with a emu 1212 connected via lightpipe to a behringer ada8000.
It works out pretty well.

Of course I only use the tascam now for midi and headphone monitoring.