Recording on a ridiculously small budget

[ellieken]

I posted this in the drums + percussion forum too but thought that it was kind of valid in recording as well...

I'm broke, and am in a band - great combination, huh?

I want to record but my computer's sound card is really bad, and if you do track-by-track recording there is a slight delay on the playback, so when you listen to the tracks you're recording on top of, you hear them about 0.5 seconds later than they actually are. This could be because we feed it through an old 12-track mixer which feeds into the computer, as direct input is basically noise and overdrive! So obviously it also plays your voice back to you about half a second later which is really distracting.

So because of this, it's easier to do live recording but only have 3 mics - behringer xm8500s. We have one singer and two backing singers, so we can record the backing on top, which means we have two mics spare, but at the absolute minimum you need 3 mics for drums. The mics are an OK quality, and all we want is just a basic recording.

I guess I have two options: can't afford to buy a set of drum mics, so--buy a cheap mic (under $60) for the bass drum--or try to resolve the playback problem on my computer to record track-by-track, using the three behringers, no matter how shit the . I use Cubase 3 on Windows XP. What would you suggest?

Oh, and also - as I keep mentioning, the band is on a really tight budget and bought some cheap drums. The problem is that it doesn't have a hole in the bass drum skin. Should I cut a hole in the skin? Whereabouts and how big should it be?

Thanks a lot for reading, sorry about the length and complete lack of knowlege, it would be really helpful if you could give me some advice.

 

[jamking]

The length of the cables your using can also create a delay though I don't think it would be that long.

Many drummer will cut a hole in the center of the back head to change the tone. Padding inside will also help to deaden the echo a bit.

 

[My Name]

Cut a hole in the front kik skin and you will probably tear the skin and it will flap and you will get a very annoying noise.

You can record a kit with 2, even 1 mic. It's all about placement. Maybe one in front of the kitpicking up the overall sound and one near the snare picking up hat, snare and a little kick. You may surprise yourself with the quality of the recording if you experiment with positioning. Have a google for drum recording techniques.

If you want to record the kick on a seperate track, take the front skin off altogether and take some time tuning it. A rip in the front skin will do you no favours.

There is no excuse for not getting a useable recording with the gear you have. It just needs a little time and effort. You did say you are after a basic recording.

try playing with the latency setting for your soundcard, you may be able to reduce it to more manageable levels, especially if you are recording one track at a time.

Good luck

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

Oh, and also - as I keep mentioning, the band is on a really tight budget and bought some cheap drums. The problem is that it doesn't have a hole in the bass drum skin. Should I cut a hole in the skin? Whereabouts and how big should it be?

Don't. Personally the best kick sounds come from kicks with front heads on and no air holes. That's just my opinion though.

Also--instead of getting a substandard recording setup why not go to a studio to record?

 

[guitar junkie]

it sounds like you have a fancy recording software for what your soundcarnd is able to handle i would say that you might track one track at a time with a less power hungry software and then mix it in cubase also you might just be able to check the mic forum for tricks on micing the whole room up and then doing drums but any way why not google up a free pogram called Audacity where you should be able to track on top of each other then export to cubase...

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

hope something helps you out

 

[boomtap]

No matter what keep at it, and you will find a combonation with your equipment that will yeild you some resluts. I have made some great recordings with a small board, a delta 1010, 300mhz comp, and some 58's which was all I had access to at the time. They even got radio play and one of the songs was the top requested song on a station here locally.

So keep at it, you can definitly work with nothing and get results. Just don't use too much compression and know that if the insterment sounds bad you can't expect the recording to sound good.

 

[ellieken]

Wow, thanks so much everyone! Loads of suggestions, thanks for all the encouragement! I'll be trying it all out tonight and over the weekend and see what works best.
Thanks a million again,
Ellie

www.theidols.org.uk

 

[dgatwood]

The length of the cables your using can also create a delay though I don't think it would be that long.

Practically speaking... zero.

According to Google:
(30 feet) / the speed of light = 30.5011009 nanoseconds

For a 2 GHz computer, that's 60 clock cycles, or about the amount of time it takes it to read a byte from memory.

The minimum delay that you can perceive is generally considered to be somewhere in the tens of milliseconds. To get a delay that's long enough for you to notice it, you would need a cable almost 200 miles long (slightly over 300 km for the metrically challenged ).

Many drummer will cut a hole in the center of the back head to change the tone. Padding inside will also help to deaden the echo a bit.

I don't know about anybody else, but the reason I have a hole in my head isn't for tone. It's for recording. Sticking a mic in that hole really cuts down on the bleed of other drums in the kick mic.... (No jokes about holes in my head, please. )

 

[JazzMang]

this is electricity, not light.
Electron travel through a solid medium is much slower than light.

 

[dgatwood]

this is electricity, not light.
Electron travel through a solid medium is much slower than light.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The difference is small enough that I didn't think it was worth looking up just to be pedantic. Since you asked, though, I did. Signal propagation through copper is about 230 million meters per second, compared to 299 million meters per second for light in a vacuum. While this propagation speed difference matters a lot to folks who design CPUs, for the purpose of this discussion, it is rather moot.

We're talking about a cable nearly the distance from Boston to New York. It's such an unbelievably long distance that you probably won't have any appreciable audio signal at the other end of the cable.

This isn't physics class. So it's more like 140 miles of cable instead of 200. Big freaking deal. Complain when I'm off by two decimal places. Then it might be enough to matter in a real-world environment.

 

[JazzMang]

just keeping everyone's head on straight.

 

[Dani Pace]

The biggest problem with removing the front head of the bass drum or bottom heads from toms for me has been, the kick gets sort of boomy and the toms ring and resonate other sounds. With the propper mic placement even cheap drums can sound good, especially if they are tuned propperly and you have a good drummer. Check the drum forum for tips on micing and tuning drums. The best advice I can give at this point is to keep things as simple as possible, as you gain experience you will be able to add more and do more. Good luck, and don't forget to have fun with it, sometimes the silly stuff sounds good when you play it back.

 

[jamking]

Practically speaking... zero.

According to Google:
(30 feet) / the speed of light = 30.5011009 nanoseconds

For a 2 GHz computer, that's 60 clock cycles, or about the amount of time it takes it to read a byte from memory.

The minimum delay that you can perceive is generally considered to be somewhere in the tens of milliseconds. To get a delay that's long enough for you to notice it, you would need a cable almost 200 miles long (slightly over 300 km for the metrically challenged ).



I don't know about anybody else, but the reason I have a hole in my head isn't for tone. It's for recording. Sticking a mic in that hole really cuts down on the bleed of other drums in the kick mic.... (No jokes about holes in my head, please. )

It's not the speed of light that you need to consider but the speed of sound; 600 miles per hour. If using a 20 footcable, it won't be as tight as using a 6 foot cable. It's a signal, not current.

I have found that cutting a hole in the backside of a bass drum head will change the tonal effect considerably. It not only allows the sound to escape better but deadens the "marching band type echo" .

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

It's not the speed of light that you need to consider but the speed of sound; 600 miles per hour. If using a 20 footcable, it won't be as tight as using a 6 foot cable. It's a signal, not current.

Umm, just what do you think the "signal" in a cable is, if not "current"? It's a copper cable carrying electrical current at close to the speed of light, not a hollow tube of air carrying sound at 600MPH. You are way off base here, I'm afraid.

G.

 

[robin watson]

It's not the speed of light that you need to consider but the speed of sound; 600 miles per hour. If using a 20 footcable, it won't be as tight as using a 6 foot cable. It's a signal, not current.

Oh dear.

Ever considered going into politics?

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Oh dear.

Ever considered going into politics?

I don't think politics is quite right. Maybe something more like UFOlogy, astrology. Only there can electricity move at the speed of sound, pushing waveforms into phase create hiss and shifting wavforms out of phase have nothing to do with phase shift (see another thread for those last two.)

King, I don't know if you're just honestly under- or mis-informed, or whether you're here to purposely muck things up, but either way, you are rapidly increasing the noise level on this forum in a very negative way.

G.

 

[chessrock]

Why don't you just stick a mic in the middle of the room and record to your jam box or something?

You'll probably get comparable results to your current setup, and it will save you a lot of headache.

 

[seismetr0n]

to avoid the latency(echo) on recording another track, i'd turn off monitoring so you dont hear yourself coming back through, you only hear whats been pre-recorded,

or if you've got three mics and 3 inputs, put 1 on snare 1 on guitar, and 1 for vocals, you can run the bass directly in, and hopefully the snare mic will pick up the bass drum as well, the cymbals will most likely bleed through to all the mics ... over dub other guitars and backup vocals later ..

gl

 

[jamking]

How about checking page 188 in the sound reinforcement handbook.

Cable length not only kills db, but it creates a delay. ALWAYS KEEP YOUR CABLES AS SHORT AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN!!! It makes things tighter.

I'm not here to "muck" anything up. For the lost sheep out there, stop following what others say just to gang up. If you don't know, don't comment.

If you want to believe I'm wrong fine but you could always learn about the subject first.

Man, all I did was give someone in need some advice and the whole place get's pissed.

As I said before, if a signal were electrictiy, it would shock us everytime we touched the tip of a cable. Voltage is the only thing that can move at 186,000 miles per second.

 

[dgatwood]

How about checking page 188 in the sound reinforcement handbook.

Cable length not only kills db, but it creates a delay. ALWAYS KEEP YOUR CABLES AS SHORT AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN!!! It makes things tighter.

I'm not here to "muck" anything up. For the lost sheep out there, stop following what others say just to gang up. If you don't know, don't comment.

If you want to believe I'm wrong fine but you could always learn about the subject first.

Man, all I did was give someone in need some advice and the whole place get's pissed.

As I said before, if a signal were electrictiy, it would shock us everytime we touched the tip of a cable. Voltage is the only thing that can move at 186,000 miles per second.

My gosh, you're absolutely right. And all these years, I never realized that when those guys from New York Audio Labs ran a power drill on the output of an amplifier, it was magic, not electricity.

(No, I'm not kidding. They actually did that as a gag.)

http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/409/

Now repeat after me: "A microphone converts sound into electrical impulses, which travel along a wire a the rate of signal propagation in copper, which is approximately 130,000 miles per second."