Recording a band, with limited equipments.

G

gema

New member
Hey guys! Its been a long time since I posted something.

I am going to record my own band simultaneously but I don't have the luxury of having alot of inputs on my mixer.

I'm just going to record bass, guitar and drums.

My mixer have 4 XLR inputs, 2 Stereo 1/4 inputs so that is 8 inputs over all.

For the drums I'm thinking of using recorderman method.

And all of this are going to be recorded stereo in my laptop, so not much fidelity.

How can I make this work but still sounds nice ?

Thanks alot guys!
 
you could track separately. do the guitar and bass to a click. add the drums. or reverse that. which ever you prefer. if needed retrack guitar and/or bass to really lock in with the drums. reverse that if preferred. 1 or 2 condensors for the drum overhead(s) would be a plus. dynamic mics for the snare, kick, bass, and guitar would be fine. what mikes do you have available? i have heard decent recordings made with stock stereo input sound cards. if you want to track everyone at the same time, use one overhead for the drums, one mike for the kick, one for guitar, one for bass. you won't have many options come mix time.

use the biggest room you have available for tracking. try a couch or mattress in front of the drums as a broadband absorber to kill some room reflections. spend plenty of time tuning the drums and placing mikes. don't count on fixing something after it's been recorded. try to record what you want to hear in the final mix. kill any noisy appliances. make sure the guitar and bass are in tune and eliminate any hums or noises. if you can, get fresh strings on the guitars and fresh heads on the drums if they're old. make sure everyone knows their parts very well and can play them very well as a band. do any punch ins before moving any mikes. clear the recording space for the day (kids, dogs, nagging women, friends). plan out your recording session and calculate how you'll use your available time.
 
gema, how many mics do you have?
I suggest you to record drums with a stereo-pair and guitar and bass - with a sm57, for example. Total - 4 channels. Also, you could try to record bass directly, if you are limited with mics. But in this case you'll need a DI-box
 
First off do you also have 4 analog to digital converters? If not I would do what was mention before about tracking the guitars first.p

If you do have 4 converters, i would drum overhead with one or two mics and guitar and bass to record live all at once. (Multitracking via inserts) Then add any overdubs.

I wouldn't do any pre mixing through your board and record the stereo buss. You could have the perfect take and have a mute switch or something stupid on and ruine it.

Allways check the signal levels comming in your daw before you start.
 
I have 5 mics at the moment and I'm recording at a jamming studio. I planned to use recorderman method for the drums.

I'm recording straight to my laptop, running Sonar 2.0

I can record everything at once but not much fidelity since I can only record stereo track.

Thanks for the replies !
 
If you are recording live and to stereo, the best way to get best quality is to do your best to mix it, listen to it, try to fix the mix, listen to it, try to fix the mix, listen to it..........until you get a workable mix. The problems are that any pops and clicks that you absolutely hate will be all over the track, and you cannot fix the mix anymore once the rest of the band leaves.

Very time consuming also. Good luck to you!
 
My band always demos out our songs live. I use two small condenser mics for stereo, one about 4 feet away from the rhythm guitar, and same with lead, and pan those hard. then I do the bass drum, and the snare in seperate tracks. Or you could just do them into the same and then use one for bass guitar, if you guys are bass driven. I only use 4 inputs to do this and it sounds pretty good.
 
I'm suing Alesis 8USB mixer and my laptop mic input.

After much thinking, I am using my laptop input for the drum kick, two mic for drums, one for snare one for overhead, both panned left.

For guitar I hard pan one channel to the right.

So I can record simultaneously 3 tracks at a time. For the bass, I will overdub later on.

How do this plan sounds ?
 
not to mean but this plan do sounds better than your english. but in all honesty this is close to the dilemma i had when i first started. i had my PC mic in and the line in. so i ran the overhead into the mic input. my line input was stereo so i'd run kick and snare in that. then i'd do guitars, bass, and vocals seperately.
 
TravisinFlorida said:
you could track separately. do the guitar and bass to a click. add the drums. or reverse that. which ever you prefer. if needed retrack guitar and/or bass to really lock in with the drums. reverse that if preferred. 1 or 2 condensors for the drum overhead(s) would be a plus. dynamic mics for the snare, kick, bass, and guitar would be fine. what mikes do you have available? i have heard decent recordings made with stock stereo input sound cards. if you want to track everyone at the same time, use one overhead for the drums, one mike for the kick, one for guitar, one for bass. you won't have many options come mix time.

use the biggest room you have available for tracking. try a couch or mattress in front of the drums as a broadband absorber to kill some room reflections. spend plenty of time tuning the drums and placing mikes. don't count on fixing something after it's been recorded. try to record what you want to hear in the final mix. kill any noisy appliances. make sure the guitar and bass are in tune and eliminate any hums or noises. if you can, get fresh strings on the guitars and fresh heads on the drums if they're old. make sure everyone knows their parts very well and can play them very well as a band. do any punch ins before moving any mikes. clear the recording space for the day (kids, dogs, nagging women, friends). plan out your recording session and calculate how you'll use your available time.
Click to expand...


That is very good advice!
 
Same Situation here... Here's what I did...

I did the same sort of thing you are trying to do. Without going into insane detail, what I did was record the band playing all together. Then used that as a scratch track and had each player lay down their individual parts while listening to that track.

That way I got clean, separate instrument tracks that were recorded against a live version of ourselves - so the "feel" remained very organic - not robotic. Hell, we were all playing with the band, so to speak...

I have a "system" for getting the drum kit recorded to a single track (since again, you don't have the benefit of being able to mic each drum and individually send them directly to their own tracks in Sonar). Standard drum-kit miking techniques into a mixer, into Sonar as a single track... I can elaborate if you like.

So ultimately, we played the song together once - then recorded our parts individually using the same scratch track.
 
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