How to record two (somewhat) isolated vocal tracks separately during band practice?

[Gomnana]

Every now and then, I like to make a live recording of a few songs. I usually just use a few portable mics (zoom h2n) placed around the room and to be honest I have had decent results. But the thing that bugs me is not being able to edit the vocals (pitch correction, EQing, panning etc).

So here's what I want to do...but have never tried it so have no idea if it'll work. I want to record the band as I always did before. But have the vocal mics go direct into a Zoom r16 multi track recorder. I know the vocal mics will still pick up noise from the rest of the band, but I'm ok with that. We're not trying to make a professional recording. However, the R16 is not my unit and I have never even laid my hands on it before (it belongs or our bass player who bought it about a decade ago and never once took it out the box lol).

So this is the question, does the R16 have direct monitoring? I've looked at pictures of it, and it seems to have 1 phones out, and 2 outputs. I assume they can be used for immediate direct monitoring? I.E when the singers sing, they can hear themselves like they would normally, but through phones?

Second question, there's only 1 phones out. So would I need to use a little splitter in order to plug two headphones into the phones out? Or could I simply plug two phones into the two outs? This kind of depends on the answer to the first question, I guess.

 

[TalismanRich]

The R16 would fulfill the duties of recording the whole band. It does have monitoring, so you could feed the headphone output to something like the Behringer HA400 (~$20) and 4 people have their headphones. Depending on your mic locker, you can record the whole band and mix it at the end. Put a few mics in the room to catch the band, and use 2 or 3 channels to record the vocals. The R16 is a full fledged multitrack recorder, with the ability to add tracks in sync with previously recorded tracks.

Using pitch correction might be a bit tricky with a live recording, as you will get bleed based on how loud your band is playing. But you can easily add new vocals to your recorded tracks.

I have used the basic files like that, and then rerecorded the vocals, even added extra tracks. It's basically how they recorded records many years ago when they had 4 or 8 tracks. The band would play together, laying down the basic tracks, and then things were fleshed out.

The one limitation of the R16 vs the R24 that I have is that the R16 only has two channels with phantom power, which means you need dynamic mics like the SM57 or Senn 835. If you want to use a Rode NT1 or an AT4040, you need to use channels 5 and 6.

You could probably also that the audio files from an H2n, and add them to the files from the R16 in a DAW.