hey, my buds and I are trying to put together reasonable recordings of our practice sessions. These will only be used by us to keep record of what we're doing (we improv alot). We have a fourtrack (cassette) and would like to couple that to a mixer (8 channel?). what I imagine doing is a combination of sending multiple mix channels to one record channel as well as single mix channels to record channels. This flexibility will hopefully allow us to correct any major level issues after recording. We want to spend a minimum of $ and will probably look to ebay- used and older is fine for our purposes. Any suggestions? We also need to be able to do minimal monitoring but don't really need anything too fancy. Am I missing/overlooking anything?
mixer for live recording w/4-track
- Thread starter monster
- Start date
what instruments are you recording? honestly; i would go from the mixer into the 4-track -- that is, if you really need that many inputs.
if it's just for you guys to hear and be like "oh shit that was sweet, let's work on that some more next week" then honestly, you don't need anything crazy. grab a few mics, hook up the 4-track and get a mic near the guitar, one in the center at about chestline, and one near the drums, overhead. you're not going for ridiculous quality here. that's how i've done it with all of my bands and it works perfect. now for a "pro" recording i'll bring over the computer and all the equipment, but for this, keep it simple. nothing i hate more than to tear down mic after mic at the end of practice
if it's just for you guys to hear and be like "oh shit that was sweet, let's work on that some more next week" then honestly, you don't need anything crazy. grab a few mics, hook up the 4-track and get a mic near the guitar, one in the center at about chestline, and one near the drums, overhead. you're not going for ridiculous quality here. that's how i've done it with all of my bands and it works perfect. now for a "pro" recording i'll bring over the computer and all the equipment, but for this, keep it simple. nothing i hate more than to tear down mic after mic at the end of practice
thanks lysis, you're pretty much spot on-we just want it for the oh shit factor. we've tried the "mics pointed a few directions" thing and gotten mixed results (just passable to terrible). we've got 2 guitars, bass, drums, and ideally would like 2 or 3 vocal mics. We have a reaaally crappy old 4 in mixer right now that we've been plugging 4 mics into and going monitor out into a single track of the 4-track. hasn't worked so well. I've been thinking about buying a slightly better mixer (anything is better) and submixing bass/drums through that (2-3 mics?) and then using the open 3 tracks of the 4 track for 2 guitars/vocal. Oh shit I don't know if they all can handle mics. I don't know what the hell we're doing- guess we'll just have to deal with shitty recordings. Bottom line was I just wanted to be able to hear what everyone was doing- clearly. Don't care about much beyond that.