Seperate Tracks Micing Drums question

[musicfan1234]

Hi,

I was curious about how to get each mic on a seperate track on what ever recording software. If you are using say four mics do you have to go into a mixer to produce the sound into the computer? you cant just run straight into the soundcard right? but i thought in a mixer you only have one sound output. i want to be able to tweak each mic. any help would be very appreciated.

Thanks,

Rich

 

[DJL]

You'd connect the mic's to mic preamps (or a mixer) and then connect the outputs of the mic preamps (or the mixer) to the multi line inputs on the soundcard.

 

[b0b]

First of all, you have enough inputs on your sound card. For four mics you need four inputs. Your basic soundcard will have two mono inputs ( the stereo signal separated to the left and right channel ). For multi track recording you should get a soundcard designed for it. There's soundcards with anywhere from 4 to 64 channels in and out. Check out the soundcard forum for more info.

There's a lot of different mixers out there. There are those that output only the master stereo signal. Then there's mixers that have inserts and directouts. This usually means you can output each channel separately, but usually preEQ. If you want to get postEQ signal out from the mixer you might use the aux sends for that...

What would work best for you would be a mixer with four groups that each has their own send. Then you would be able to tweak EQ etc. separately for the tracks.

Simple mic-preamps are more straight forward. Works about the same as directout on mixers. Each channel has an input and an output.

 

[simpleblue]

That's a question I asked myself at one point in time. You need a mixer, then you can do one of two things. On my first recordings the drums were mixed pre-recording and they were the only thing recorded. Then I overdubbed the guitars. I just hoped they sounded good in the mix with the guitars. I found that usually I could make everything sound good but the kick and snare. So I then moved up a step and started panning the kick and snare to their own track and all other mics were panned to another. This allowed me to adjust the level of the kick and snare seperately from the other drums. This produced pretty good results. I now have two Aardvark Direct Pro Q10's. They allow true multi-track recording right onto the computer. No need for a mixer or a pre-amp or anything.