Save Inputs? Running scratch tracks thru PA?

[thesilencekit]

Hey everyone,
This is probably a dumb question, and its obviously not an Ideal Solution of any sort, but I don't recall hearing of anyone doing this so I thought I'd bring it up and see if anyone here has done this or could tell me if its possible...

Long story short: I have 10 inputs and would like to use them all on drums. I would like to have scratch vocal and bass/guitar tracks that don't even need to be recorded, just played live for the benefit of the drummer. Can I use equipment I already have (a PA) to accomplish this modest task?

The details: I currently have 10 inputs in my system and I'd like to use all 10 on my drummer. Which is fine, but I'd like to have the bass player be able to play along for the drummer's sake, as a scratch track. And maybe even a scratch vocal to help guide them along. Rather than dropping the money for upgrading now to get 16 inputs, I've been thinking I could just have the vocal mic and the bass go directly into a PA and output that to a pair of headphones for the drummer. Of course, I'd like the singer and bass player to be able to hear it too, so I don't know if I could use a splitter of some sort (or use the presonus hp4 headphone amp i have?) to split the headphones across 3 pairs of phones? Does this make any sense? It would certainly be cheaper than spending the $500+ on a second MOTU 8pre now...

Thanks,
Pat

 

[suprstar]

Every song I've had recorded or recorded myself was done by starting with a scratch track of the entire song, then everyone played along with it and did the 'real' tracking afterwards. Last time I was in a studio the guy just mic'ed the entire room while we more/less had a band practice in the tracking room. He got a scratch track for every song as fast as we could play them. Good/bad, idk, that's how he did it tho..

Maybe you could use a few scratch tracks, ie drums rough-mixed down to one track, and one track ea. for bass, guitars, and vox. Then when you could do the real drum tracking, you could make the drum scratch track quieter, etc. Not sure if that's a practical option, I can only record 2 tracks at once, so I could never try it myself...

 

[TerraMortim]

get a splitter. It doesn't have to be perfect, just so everyone can hear what's going on. It would be a bitch to deal with it any other way, I think.

 

[Sheehan-j]

Using your HP4 would be fine. I have the same thing and I have my Control room output from my mixer routed to the HP4 then to my monitors via the monitor out. I mute the monitors so I'm not getting any room playback and have the bass, guitar, vocal or whatever just routed to the headphones worn by each player.

DONE!

I know you know that you must DI the bass to prevent it from being picked up in the drum mics. No big deal on the vox though they're pretty quiet.