Recording basic tracks "Live"

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mrsaturday

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Our drummer doesn't like headphones because they cause him to play too light. How can we record the basic tracks live, without getting too much mic bleed from the other instruments?
 
sorry to be a little nooby...have u tried turning the headphone volume down lol
 
You're going to have a hard time - if you play live you can only isolate so much. Line outs on the amps will allow for isolating the amps but the sound will be meh... You're going to get the everything in the mics if you play live, the amount depends on which mic is placed wherever.
My advice is to get it really tight and make no mistakes, then mix what you have as best as you can.
 
It's really not that hard to record takes live, just keep your volumes down, try to face instrument amps away from other mic's and use the right mic's. Uni-directional so they only capture what's in front of them. SM57's are great uni-directional mic's.

Just run the tape/burner and do about 3 or 4 takes of each tune, you'll end up with a good one and if you don't as long as you keep the timing the same it shouldn't be too hard to punch in or splice the entire take into another one.
 
A few easy options I can think of:


Record the drums first with no other instruments so the drummer can hit the drums as hard as he wants.

Turn up the drummer's headphones - whenever I play drums to songs on my iPod, I just use some big studio (over the head) headphones and crank up the volume. It works just fine for me.

Record on an electric drum kit if it really is that big of a problem.

Have everybody in the same room as if they were in a practice space, but do some heavy noise removal and compression, use directional mics on all the drums, and don't use overhead mics; find a different way to mic the cymbals.
 
Don't put the drums in the headphones, only put the other instruments in. Get him to try ear bud type phones that let in the outside world to some degree.

If he is ever going to make it as a drummer that wants to record he will need to work this out.

Alan.
 

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