need some help recording drums

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tonyton

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hello, i m new here, i play the drums but i dont know much about recording. i want to get some gear and start recording the drums and maybe guitar and bass too, i have an intel pentium 3.2Mhz and 2.5G Ram. i was told that i need a sound card with 8 inputs then i was told that i need a converter too, so that got me a bit confused. do i need both a sound card and a converter? or can i just stick the mics on an 8 chanel mixer and from there straight into the sound card? can you guys help me figure out what i need to buy?:confused:
 
You need an audio interface with 8 line ins (there's loads to choose from, I use an m-audio 1814), you need preamp or mixer to feed the mics to the 8 line ins. Or else get an interface which has 8 built in preamps.
 
aidan_m said:
You need an audio interface with 8 line ins (there's loads to choose from, I use an m-audio 1814), you need preamp or mixer to feed the mics to the 8 line ins. Or else get an interface which has 8 built in preamps.
Click to expand...

i see thanks aidan, so does this interface connect to the pc through usb? or wound i need another pci card to connect this interface to?
 
I use a Firepod. It has 8 pres, and connects through Firewire. Works good for me. Just one option.
 
Your choices are: PCI, USB, FW.
Since USB does not have the throughput of FW, I would go with either the FW or PCI. If your running Vista you may have a hard time finding a PCI card that will work with it but things are improving. Your current sound card has converters on board. The problem is there not that good. For where you are right now you can consider Interface, sound card, and convertors all the same piece of equipment.

So when your buying your audio interface consider the quality of the converters
If your running Vista I would go with something from Motu or RME.
 
tonyton said:
hello, i m new here, i play the drums but i dont know much about recording. i want to get some gear and start recording the drums and maybe guitar and bass too, i have an intel pentium 3.2Mhz and 2.5G Ram. i was told that i need a sound card with 8 inputs then i was told that i need a converter too, so that got me a bit confused. do i need both a sound card and a converter? or can i just stick the mics on an 8 chanel mixer and from there straight into the sound card? can you guys help me figure out what i need to buy?:confused:
Click to expand...

Hi, I don't mean to just throw out what everyone says but I have to disagree. You will probably want something with 8 channels but it is not a must. I'm assuming you mean GHZ not MHZ? Your computer specs should be great for recording. Now they have some great equipment that saves you money and time if you want to jump into recording. Check out the Tascam US1641 /Line6 Toneport UX8 they have out now with USB 2. These are the two new ones I've been checking out that use USB which until recently has been neglected to firewire for some odd reason. I've never actually used any of the two but they can't be all that bad for starters maybe ask around the forum. The great thing is that they are USB which makes them more portable than buying some PCI card and hooking up a seperate firewire/adat interface. Having these means you can record 8 channels at the same time but a big misconception people have from all of these music catalogs is that if you buy the right stuff you can be a pro audio engineer over night. The bad side is that if you stick with recording you will most likely out grow these. If you decide not to use one of these two you will need a Mic Preamp an Interface to convert the signal and something else to hook up to your recording system. The good part about these USB devices is that they are pretty much an all-in-one deal. Another thing that might be a good idea is to look into acoustics and get a good understanding of EQs/Compression. I would suggest looking into a few things that a lot of beginners over look like the proximity effect and phase. You most likely don't want to buy a mixer not yet anyways mixers mix the inputs together which is probably not what you want with drums because that doesn't let you edit each track after it is recorded. I have a mixer but I just use it as a fancy headphone amp I like having it there because it makes me look smart.:D As for microphones the most common setup that I know of is two condenser microphones as overheads a large diaphram dynamic mic on the bass drum and a dynamic mic on each tom/snare. It really depends on what other instruments you are mixing in and a lots of other things as well. My current setup, since my mic collection was recently stolen is an AKG Perception as an overhead a PG56 on the snare two pg56s on the toms a MXL990 on the floor tom and a PG52 on the kick . As much as I miss my mics <sob> a good thing came out and thats that I've learned a lot from this and my results aren't really suffering too much. If you have anymore questions be free to ask I'll try to help I've made A LOT of bad purchases and I'd hate to see someone else make the same mistakes. This is a great forum for learning stuff but one thing I learned is not to ask people "what should I buy...?"

I hope this helps.
 
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