Recording in my House!?

[JustaBassist]

Ok here is the deal, I have a 3 season building that my band preforms and practices in and soon I'll be getting a Roland VS-2400 CD with all the poop and TP so we can start recording in that building, but the cold is slowly coming! By the time I get my recording unit it will be too cold to record in that building so that leaves it up to my house, upstairs. I'm just woundering how we can do a live instrumental recording with out mic bleeding issues. We have a 16 channel snake we could use for the drums and set that up in whatever rooms sounds best and then theres guitar and bass left also. It would be nice to be able to have eye contact with at least one of the members(3), but how would I make it so there will be limited mic bleeding? I was thinking of recording in a room 25x12x4x11 (LxWxH1xPeak) which also has another smaller room 10x7x8 (LxWxH) that we will probably put the drums in. What material could be used to isolate the drum set from the larger room, I'm on a bit of a budget so this requires D.I.Y. thinkings skills. Would layered plexy glass work? The door way is not that big. I just need something in the door way to isolate room sounds AMAP but still be able to see the drummer.

Then the guitar and bass, probably do both in the larger room. How would I set that up? I would like to DI and mic the bass and use a Cond. and Dyna. mics, maybe DI on the guitar. Again DIY thinking

And for headphones, what the least expensive way to go? Probably get a 4 channel HP amp with some cheap AKG HP?

JustaBassist.

 

[Farview]

If you set up in the large room with the drums on one side and the guitars on the other, you won't have too many problems. Put the bass in the other room and you should be good.

Bleed is ambiance that you don't want, ambiance is bleed that you do.

 

[Chill]

Bleed is ambiance that you don't want, ambiance is bleed that you do.

In my current project, we practice in a smallish basement space, guitar amps on shelves about 2-4' in the air on either side of the drumset, bass amp opposite the drums. Close micing the guitar/bass amps with SM57's/58's, a 58 copy in the bass drum, two hypercardioid overheads on the drums, cheapie vocal mics, all into a mixer and out to the computer as a stereo mixdown. There is some bleed but it's not that noticeable. Each mic picks up what it's supposed to and a little of what it's not supposed to, but it makes decent recordings. When we had cardioids for the drum overheads the bleed was too much.

www.cthlaw.com/SOB_sounds.htm

Now if only we could play!

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

I hope you don't have a wife or girlfriend... re-arranging the house for recording usually makes their blood boil.

 

[manning1]

heres some ideas. drums make a big racket. what i did once was put made drum trigger pads out of flat shack 50c piezo triggers.
i removed the kik. and instead used a trigger on a board i custom made. then i put triggers on toms and snare. then i fed the trigger signals to a sampler which let me set up a million and one different drum kits.
the advantage of this is two fold. less drum sound and flexibility in choosing the best drum sound using triggered samples. then i put one mic (or you can use two) ohd the cymbals. i ran the bass direct thru a bass rockman - or you can use a similar device. (thus no mic needed on bass cab).
you could even run the guitars direct through some sort of device
(eg jstation). set everyone up with phone mixes while recording.
if you do all this mic bleed will be not an issue.
this way you could bring the roland into the house and run the sampler outs, bas direct out, and guitar direct outs into it. and the mics from the drum ohds into it. if you do it right it can really sound good.
also this way you dont have to worry as much about drum tuning of individual drums as you have the sampler with drum sounds in you can
manipulate. you can get also excellent CD's of drums recorded in pro studios that sound great and which you can load into the sampler.
just an idea.