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Thread I either have a good plan or absolutely no clue...

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1 I either have a good plan or absolutely no clue...
Hey, everybody. I have a 4-piece band (two guitarists/vocalists, one bassist, one drummer) with a small budget, and I think I finally have an idea about how we could record our music. I was thinking that we could buy a 7-channel PA system and plug all our amps and mics into it. Then we'd buy a microphone set for the drums, and a microphone mixer to take all six channels from the drum microphones and process them down to one channel. After plugging in the mixer to a channel on the PA system, we'd have the entire band plugged into the PA. We'd then use the RCA tape outputs on the PA system to either go into a tape recorder, or use an adaptor to plug the PA system into my computer's sound card. So my only question about the whole thing is this:

WILL IT WORK????
2
Yes and no.What the f#@! ,you say.Understandable.Been there done that.Your set-up will work.Its good to submix the drums.If you just want to hear how your music sounds,get good reference recordings,and use to write(remember) new music you are working on this is a good way to go .You"ll gain experience in hook-up, placement and use of P.A. Always good.It will also get you equipment essential to rehearsal, songwriting and of course the BIGGIE' playing your music in front of people.The only limitation will come in sound quality.As opposed to recording each instrument seperately.But hey you got to start somewhere.Do what you can $$$wise.Ask around for input locally.Go to clubs, bars, shows and concerts.See what the sound guy is using in his rack.The net has so much info on products.The biggest thing I've found is not to buy stuff you really don't need or worse you can't return.Research it and decide if this is the best buy for the product you need. Good luck BTW:when we got kicked out of the garage we went into the basement...spiders are COOL.
3
It'll work to a point. If all you want is to create rough demos, it'll work fine. I'd take the drum submix into 2 channels on the main board as stereo, though. It'll sound better. Use the pan on the drum mixer to set up a live sounding kit and then pan the 2 channels on the main board hard left/right to preserve the image you set up on the submixer.

Set your mix up on the main board using headphones and monitoring what you're sending to the soundcard- remember that you are mixing for what sounds good in the headphones and the computer- NOT what sounds good live in the room. Those are two different animals. You may need to experiment with gobos- small partitions between instruments to reduce bleed. You can do some of this with heavy blankets and chairs.

When you're done, you'll have a very rough stereo mix you can burn to CD to give folks an idea what you sound like. If it's a really GOOD rough mix, you might be able to use it to shop gigs in local small clubs. It probably won't be of a suitable quality mix wise to to sell to anybody.......
The Axeman (##(===> Cuts From My New Blues CD
4
Hey thanks for the quick reply. I think this would probably be the way our band will be set up... as soon as we're old enough to get jobs. It looks like that rig I described will cost us about $1000. Not bad, but not good for a bunch of 8th graders. Thanks again for the imput though.
5
Yeah- jobs are helpful that way!! Now that my kids are all older than you and out of the house, I have money to spend on toys, too!!!

Good luck to you and your crew! You're thinking big for a guy your age. Can I have an autographed copy of your first CD? 8)
The Axeman (##(===> Cuts From My New Blues CD
6
if you are serious about this...you can spend about 2000 and get PROFESSIONAL sounding recordings, assuming you have a decent computer and you learn the ropes.

aardvark q10-789
studio projects c4-369
studio projects c1-199
akg d112 kick mic-199
studio projects b4-79

all this amounts to about 1600 duckets, and you can get great sounding recordings of your band with just this and some accoustical work (dont spend alot on this, blankets and cardboard work wonders)