Mulitracking

[SoundRookie]

I am going to be recording some songs for a church worship cd, and I am stumped as far as recording in a muli track format. I have a decent amount of equipment available, but most of it is for live sound, not recording, but here goes:

Peavy XR 800F 9 ch mixer
Denon 770R Dual tape deck
6 SM58's
Other misc. equip.
Highend computer, soundblaster sound card.


With this setup, should we just run through the songs, until we get the mix right, and then record to the computer? I think this would be a pain, and I don't see how I can record in multiple tracks with this setup, does anyone have any ideas on equipment that I could obtain to let us do this? Perhaps a multi track sound card?

Thanks for your help everyone, I have been doing live sound for quite a while, but haven't done much recording, but I am excited to get started.

-Evan

 

[Seanmorse79]

Welcome to the board, Evan.

I'll try to sum it up for you quickly (and generally). You've got some options - here's a couple:

- If you want to record separated tracks into your computer, you'll need a multi-input sound card, but there's a catch... most multi-input cards record a line level signal - a microphone is too weak and needs to be pre-amplified to a line level signal. This is usually done with a mixer when recording multiple tracks. The mixer either needs to have as many busses as tracks you're recording, or channel inserts that can send the signal to your card. An exception to this is a multi-input sound card that has pre-amps built in (like the Aardvark Q-10 - about $750-ish). I'm not familiar with your mixer, so I'm not sure if you can use it as a preamp (for more than 2 tracks). If you can (or if you can borrow one), you can get a good 8 input sound card within the $500 range (a bit less for 4 inputs).

- You could spend the money on a standalone multi-track recorder. The learning curve would be less, but you won't have the same flexibility as you would with the computer.

- You could use what you've got now and "pre-mix", but that's next to impossible to get good results - you've really got to know what you're doing and make sure nobody makes any mistakes.

In either case, I wish the best of luck to ya. I've recorded some worship stuff myself, and it's good to see others getting involved with it. Click the search button at the top of the page, and you can find gobs more information.

Sean

 

[SPINSTERWUN]

.... The learning curve would be less, but you won't have the same flexibility as you would with the computer.......

The learning curve would be higher with a stand-alone....