Help - Band & Recording

[michigan~]

Hi all (first post)

I am a sophomore in highschool and pretty new to recording. Two friends and I are in a band (I play drums, one guitar and one bass player. Guitar player sings lead and I sing backup.) We have been playing our own material (influenced by Queen, Pink Floyd, and The Beatles mainly) together for a year now and plan to start recording our material at home (my house). When we have some stuff on a CD and our set is refined and polished, we hope to gig with a couple older more expierenced bands that we have friends in. We play good music together and have been told we have great potential.

Right now we have been recording/mixing(?) with a Tascam cassette four track which has two mic inputs, channel volume/left right adjuster, something like gain adjuster. Basically we have used both microphones that I own (Model: Realistic omnidirectional 33-985F 600 ohms) as overheads, and recording vocals on the other two tracks (we don't have enough mics/inputs to do vocals at the same time though we are capable.) I'm not sure how good these mics are but I'm pretty sure they are bad for overhead use.

In a few months I will be purchasing a 16 or 24 track recording device with a CD burner and hard-drive for home use unless I get other advice here. I will also purchase 2-4 more microphones. My question is: Is this the best way to go? Do I really need to bring my computer into the picture? Can I mix vocal / instrumental tracks with just a 16 or 24 track, mics, and good musicians? I'm not looking to record an album, but I would like high quality well mixed recordings of songs to play for other people. We are happy with the Tascam, but it just can't do enough and I've been putting our music on the computer/cds through the headphone to microphone ports =(. Burning it to CD right off the recording device seems much much better.

Am i on the right track? No pun intended

Hope you guys can help. Thanks in advance.

 

[seryozha]

Well....whats your budget?

how good of a computer do you have?

The four track is a great place to start, and now that you've realized that it cant do a whole lot, you need more.

If you want to go the computer route, you need to think of things you will need to get your music into the computer...like preamps, or a mixer, an audio interface to get the actual signals into the computer, and the software to record everything. There are of course other important things but those are the main items.

If you buy one of those all in one worksations all of the above is usually built in...which means it is less confussing but it also means you cant change anything (preamps/software wise) because it is intergrated (there are some exceptions). So it really depends o your budget and comfort level with audio recording. If you just getting used to tape, the Computer may be a bit of a leap--or not.

Also...remember that it might say 24 tracks but will prob. only record 8 at once.

 

[michigan~]

Thanks for the reply.

My budget is probably about $1400 bucks. I'm thinking I can get an all in one workstation and some mics for that(?).

I'm not looking to do a lot of sound editing, digital effects, or computer instrumentation (not sure the proper terms for these), I just want to do high quality recordings.

My computer is pretty fast but not well set up for alot of music things at the moment (not alot of ram and a bad sound card etc.) I would really like to avoid that route.

Recording 8 tracks at once should be plenty. If I'm just doing straight forward quality recording in tracks, what else should I buy other than an all-in-one device? Any other opinions out there?

 

[michigan~]

And does anyone know if those mics are any good at all?

 

[ssscientist]

If they work in your application they've got to be at least fairly good, but you can do much better with a relatively modest investment.

With a $1400 projected budget, I would suggest you start with this and add these to mic the drums, three of these (one for guitar and two for vocals) and this for the bass. Use some 'More Me' headphones to monitor, and you'll be well on your way to making a hit CD.

 

[michigan~]

Thanks ssscientist.

With this setup is there any way we can record all of our parts at the same time?

With 8 tracks how would this work? I'm guessing the two overheads and two more mics on the drums, one mic on the guitar amp, one on the bass, two for vocals?

Do we even go through the amps with guitar / bass?
And then where do we plug the headphones in?
Where does that active direct box come in?

I appreciate everyones help so far

 

[ssscientist]

With this setup is there any way we can record all of our parts at the same time?

Put six mics on the kit - Kick, snare, tom, floor and 2 x overheads, then a mic each for the guitar and bass. You'll probably want to do the vocals later when you have all the music down.

The active direct box is for the bass - bass frequecies tend to go wherever they want to with no real rhyme or reason.

There is a headphone jack on the AW16g which you should be able to split using a splitter cable, or Furman makes a nice powered multi-headphone unit for $80 to $100.

And when I think about it, you could substitute the Furman unit above for one of the SM57's. You're going to be overdubbing the vocals anyway...

 

[michigan~]

That should work out fine, thanks again.

Now... what happens if we want to record the vocals at the same time? Does it get alot more complicated?

We will probably want to record our practices where we sing at the same time.

 

[treymonfauntre]

i hope this post isn't too long winded and newbiesh

heres what i'm doing with almost the same budget buying almost all used gear:
i got a soundcraft 8 channel mixer off ebay for $200. i use this for drum preamps until i can get more of a preamp collection going. i use the effect sends on each channel as the output to my.....
fostex vf16 ($300 ebay, they are now called a vf160ex or something, which really just added some crappy effects and a cd burner). records 8 tracks at once onto a hard drive. i then transfer that from the adat digital output to my....
echo gina 24/96 sound card ($180 ebay). has adat lightpipe inputs and even has some trs inputs of itself if i want to record some guitar in my room without hassling with the fostex.

as for mics..

(2) mxl 603s - for overheads ($200 new but i had a $50 off at sam ash coupon for purchases over 200, so $150)

shure sm57 ($90 new) - just because nothing is complete without one. these can go for about $60 or $70 on ebay used but shipping ends up making it so much that buying it brand new is usually easier. use this for snare, guitar and sometimes vocals.

gls es57s - these are sm57 clones that i'm waiting for in the mail to see if they live up to it. as far as i've read they do.. and if you put them on drums and they get demolished by a drum stick.. who cares? you can get 3 of these for $70 on ebay. i'll be putting these on the 3 toms.

i need a new bass drum mic so i can't help with that. i'm using one of those cad that are in that mic package that was linked above but its the weakest link in my drums

shure sm58 - vocals. i don't really like it but i got it for free from a ska band when they were all drunk.

for bass i use the amp head's line out or my favorite standlone preamp

i also have other mics but they aren't necessary and are application specific. you're also gonna have to end up spending a big deal of money on stands and cables but right now at sam ash they have a coupon on their booklet giving you $25 off a $50 purchase of stands or cables or strings. it expires june 30th though so you gotta act quick if you want to get that.

for practices you could put the 603s as stereo overheads, a kick drum mic, a snare mic, a 57 on the guitar, direct input the bass, and then whatever you choose for vocals (there are tons of condensor mics that are budget priced that lots of people are raving about on here, you really just need to see what fits your voices. or you could use those es57s!). theres your 8 channels.
if you mix on the computer you should go around and try out demos of recording programs until you find one you like. you'll definitely want to play with compressors a lot since you'll be moving around when singing into the mics and that will be the biggest downfall

personally i'd suggest spending about 2 or 3 months on this website just browsing through and searching for everything you read about. its really addictive and fun.

 

[ssscientist]

Now... what happens if we want to record the vocals at the same time? Does it get alot more complicated?

Not at all. Just plug in two vocal mics instead of the tom mics --- the overheads will pick up enough toms so you won't need them mic'd individually.

 

[guitarboi89]

an idea....
-1mic for guitar
-di the bass
-the two overheads mix into one track.. if your pc/standalone can do it split these later if its neccesary
-bass drum
-snare drum
-mic each tom into a little mixer so it goes into one track (making sure all the levels are good)
-vocal one
-vocal two

that adds up to eight inputs

 

[michigan~]

WOW thanks guys.

Can I mix two or more mics into one track with the Yamaha AW16g? That would be real nice.

BTW, whats the best place to get mic stands? How many am I gonna need? I've tried searching but haven't had much luck finding good looking budget type ones..

I didn't expect this much help thank you