temporary beginner's setup

[SnoboarderX27]

For a long time I've had a little Mackie DFX6 mixer, some good headphones, two JBL powered speakers, and a Dell with a 30 gig harddrive, 1500 MHz Pentium, 384 Megs of RAM and a c-media CMI8738 soundcard. I recently became interested in trying to record my band at home. since the drummer already has a good set of mics, I figured after some research that I would just need some rca cables and some software like N-track and I'd be ready to go. But before I go buy these, I want to make sure this will work. I've never heard anything about the CMI8738 soundcard and whether it will record well, if at all, and I don't know if i'll be able to make due with a mixer that really only has four tracks. But if I just record the drums alone, then the two guitars and bass, and then the vocals, won't it work? If the computer is too cruddy to handle it that's okay because one of the guitar players is getting a new computer soon and he can upgrade it all he wants for cheap. I'm not excpecting this to be good quality, I just need a place to start. When my band gets a little richer we'll be able to buy some real equipment, but for the moment will this work?

 

[ssscientist]

I think you'd be on solid ground --- especially if you don't try to overreach on the first few recordings.

The Mackie board you've got has four input channels, so I strongly recommend using only four microphones on the drum kit: kick, snare and two (matched if possible) overheads placed to catch the remaining kit but far enough away from the hihat so as not to get blasted by it. The rest of the band should turn down low enough to keep mic spill to a minimum but not so low as to cripple the drummers performance. Once you've got good drum tracks in the computer, the rest should be easy...

 

[SnoboarderX27]

ok thanks. I'll give that a try.