setup help

[DiesTheFire]

I've been doing a fair amount of research about home recording in preparation to build my own pseudo-studio, but have found little that pertains to my needs. I'm in a mellodic-metal band that switches tempos, sounds, beats, and everything inbetween quite frequently, and therefore would like to set up a multitrack recording setup. So far I'm drawn between computer recording, which I would prefer to do, over multitrack workstations. The gear I'm thinking about using:

Behringer Eurorack refurb mixer

Nady DMK 7 piece drum mic set

Echo-MIA PCI interface with 1/4 line ins and RCA ins

Cakewalk SONAR Home Studio 4

and finally an AMD Athlon 64 3500 2.2 ghz 2 gig ram running Windows MCE



Now comes the confusion. I know I can hook the mixer up to the computer with the card I might get, but since it would be through the main outs, I wouldn't be able to multitrack the drums. Instead I would get a track with drums and then another track for each instrument I added over that. This would be fine if I could get everything to sound good on the mixer before it hits the computer for recording, but I get the feeling that it won't work out that way. Will the drums sound alright if they're on one track with multiple mics? Will EQ'ing do the same over all of them as it would per mic? Is there any way I can multitrack the drum mics and any other instrument plugged in through a mixer?

If money wasn't an issue I would just buy one or two Presonus Firepods, but I'm on a fairly constricted budget, with less than $1500 to spend on a computer and equipment, with the best bang for my buck in computers grabbing $400 of that budget. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance,

Rob

 

[Carter]

You can get the firepod and the rest of the equipment except the other soundcard for $1110.00 you said you needed $400.00 for your comp, the firepod will be your best bet and you only need to save a few more pennys up!

 

[DrJones]

There are many inexpensive soundcards out there that will give you 8 inputs. check out a delta 10/10. You may find somthing like that on Ebay for around $150. They are about $100 more new. The more inputs you have the easier to "multitrack".