Need help recording HS Band

[BGBand]

Hello

I am from the Bishop Guertin band.. recently we have started to dust off some of our recording equiptment and buy some new equiptment. We home to make cds of our band jazz band and chorus. We have an 8 channel mixer, a tascam 4 track, a professional CD Writer (I cnat remember the make) and a graphic EQ. that is about the extent of our equiptment at this time.. give or take a piece or two. (yah.. we have a bunch of really good mics too and all that stuff). WHat i wanted to know is if anybody could offer a bit of instruction on the best way to record a large group with like this. We do have in our budget to buy more equiptment, but we dont know what to get. Also we need some serious help on mixing down. the recoding goe pretty wel, but we have no idea when it comes to mixing down.. how, specificly, do you do this? And what is the best way to dupe our CDs?

Thanks!

 

[DALtune]

Wow! Believe it or not, I've actually been in your position. Depending on how much money you have (and if you already have really good mics) I would upgrade from that 4-track tape machine. Go with something digital and easy to use (plenty of hard disc or even mini-disc recorders out there). Since you are recording a large group of people, microphone placement is essential. Individual mics for high brass, low brass, sax, flutes, clarinets, percussion, etc. is the best way. This of course leads to multiple tracks or a good engineer. Because it is an ensemble, when you mix down what you recorded to your final medium, apparently CD, you want to keep the original sound in mind. When mixing the parts together, you need to mix the sounds as you would hear them if you were sitting in the center of the auditorium, panning left, center, right as needed. As far as duplication, if you're planning on a lot of copies, farm the work out. There are many mastering/duplication studios out there. Check your yellow pages. I hate to ramble (but have managed to do so anyway) so if you have any other questions, try and make it as specific as possible.

 

[sonusman]

Get yourself a matched pair of Nuemann U-87's and a pair of some good PZM mics,and two 2 channel Millenium Media mic preamps, set up the band in a nice sounding room, let em rip. Move the mics around untill what you hear on tape is what you hear on tape. Also, the idea of using a digital recorder is good. Since you already have a CD-R recorder (unless I misunderstood that part) you could record directly to that.

Take all the recordings to a reputable mastering house and have it mastered. Done!!!

A big band like that depends more on the quality of the mics and mic pre amps, and the placement of the mics more than anything. The advantage of using the CD-R recorder is that CD-R's are cheap so you can burn a lot of recordings (74 minutes each disk) and listen to them through any CD player immediately.

Good luck.

Ed Rei
Echo Star Studio www.echostarstudio.com