Cyberdragon,
I believe most everyone on this system is recording their own stuff, myself included.
To date I've been in three bands of a variety of genres all of which starved to death and disappeared. Currently, I'm involved in two projects from a producing/engineering perspective, hopefully with some success. While I enjoy playing/recording, I enjoy producing/mixing even more. Its a pleasure to work with talent significantly greater than my own (which is easy to achieve BTW, I'm a musically inclined dabbler, nothing more!).
Aside from that, we also record individuals who are seemingly into Karaoke, using MIDI gear to provide the instrumentals. The advantage of Midi (for us) is we can record all of the music in a stereo mix, on tracks 1/2 including guitar/bass/drums etc, then the remaining tracks are available for vocals, real horn/guitar players as necessary.
As far as "the right way" to record, there is none. There are rules of thumb of course, and for live musicians (versus virtual MIDI musicians) I generally record the drums first using two overheads, a kick mic and a snare mike, to allow for individual effects path for the kick/snare as well as more control. Mix this down to stereo on the recorder, or mono if you do not have a lot of tracks. From there, I'd add the bass, then guitar(s), then vocals and build upwards. I've found the closer the music is to "what it should be" the better the vocalist will perform. Of course there are exceptions, but this is the rule of thumb we've had success with to date.
CyberDragon said:
I record all the tracks on my Tascam 488 MKII and was wondering if anyone else does the same? I usually record a guitar and generic drum track first, then add a bass track , then lead guitar track, then track over the drum track with real drums, then keyboards (if any), then last vocals. Does anyone have a better way? I'm not profession in any way shape or form, I do this for the kicks I get out of it , but I'm always looking for short cuts or ways to get a better sound….
