What can you suggest to improve....

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pearljammin'

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Ok I don't have the money to buy any interfaces or anything soon, but my band is recording a demo soon. I am just planning to record with a mic plugged into my laptop, I've done it before and it sounds ok for a demo, a bit of background noise and it dosn't sound great, but its all we can do for the moment.

So my question is - Is there anything I can do to improve the sounds, for the moment I am just planning on miking-up an amp for guitar and bass. Using a mixer to send out mics for the drums (one overhead, one for the hi-hat, one for the snare, and one for the bass drum). And just using the mic for the vocals.

Then I'm planning on mixing it all together on either SoundForge 7, Cakewalk Home studio, or Cakewalk Sonar, depending on which I find eaiser or sounds better.

This is the first time I'm attempting to record, so if there is anything anyone can recomend to make it sound slightly less amateurish, please tell me!
 
Sound Forge is just a stereo WAV editor, not a multitracker, and Home Studio is the "lite" version of SONAR...
 
So SONAR is definatly the best choice?
I have used SoundForge before and used the mix cut and paste option to get ok effects.
 
So you have a mixer and 4 mics but no cool sound card? First grab some multitracking software off the net. Buy it, kazaa it.. whatever... Don't need anything special since all you can record is 2 track. Maybe some built in reverb, eq and dynamics plugins would be cool though.
Hook the stereo out of the mixer to the stereo line in on the sound card. Might need a $10 Radio Shack cable to do this. Then mix the drums up and record them in stereo while you play along so the drummer doesn't get confused. Once you have the drums down, go back with some headphoones and redo all the bass, guitar, and vocals as overdubs in the recording software. That way you can at least mix and edit stuff even if it doesn't sound all that great.
With only 4 mics I'd probably try 2 overheads panned left/right and one on the snare one on the kick in the middle. Figure the mic on the snare is gonna hear the hi-hat and you can at least have the drums in stereo...
 
What mics would you recomend for the amps and for the overheads? I currently own a Shure SM58, and a Pro-Sound dynamic YU-37 (the other two mics are Pro-Sound dymamics (Uni-Directional) belong to my guitarist)
I could afford to get a new mic before I record, but nothing with Phantom Power as I cannot use it at the moment.
 
Probably go with the guitarist's mics on the "overheads since they are a matched set, although with 4 mics you probably wanna aim them back several feet so they point at the space between the the crashes and toms. Might have to pan the snare just a tad right so it sounds up the middle in the recording, especially since you won't be able to fix that later. Then point the kick drum and the snare the same general direction as the overheads as much as you can to avoid phase cancelation.
Probably go with the Sure 58 on the snare, although I don't really know what a YU-37 is. Guess it's easy enough to swap them around to see how they sound. You're probably gonna wanna play with the mic placement and mixer settings anyway to try to get a decent sound before recording...
 
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