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Recording Band sessions/multi track recording

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 11:23 pm
by Psyre
How do, those of you who do this, set up to record your whole band playing, or record 2-3 people at the same time?

Re: Recording Band sessions/multi track recording

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 8:43 pm
by captions87
I recorded a few songs of my band like this. It wasn't terribly difficult, but obviously comprimises have to be made. Before we recorded, my dad and I constructed some homemade "isolation boxes" that fit over the front of mine and the other guitarist's amps (we both use combos). There was a 12" speaker sized hole in the front of the box for putting the mic through, and then some blanket was thrown over it for good measure. It actually worked really well, and there was practically no drums heard on the guitar tracks. There was, however, faint guitar in the drum tracks ,and that comes from recording in the same room. Again, compromises must be made. I have an 8-channel interface (Presonus Firestudio Project), so the inputs were: 2 mics for guitars, one for bass cab, snare mic, kick mic, two overheads, and then one to mic our keyboardist's amp. We didn't have the money to invest in a headphone amp, so the bass was recorded directly through the direct/recording out of a buddy's amp whom we borrowed, and the keys were played through a roland amp which was miced, though we didn't have a box for this one so we simply had to construct a makeshift iso with a blanket and chair. Our bassist constructed two dividers, constructed of a wood frame with a center made of foam and insulation material, they were approximately 4' high by 6' long, and we arranged these in almost a V pattern around the drummer, with a small opening where the point of the V would be, and pointed all the amps away from the drums. We recorded in our guitarist's garage, not much room. But we were able to cut down on a little bit of the ringing out with some rugs, and we also pinned some moving blankets and draped them behind the drummer, as well as between the amps and the drums and bass. You can hear the result in my sig. Again, didn't turn out terrible, but we recorded in this fashion more out of necessity. We just recorded another batch of songs a couple months ago and these were all done track by track, to a click.

Re: Recording Band sessions/multi track recording

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 9:54 pm
by coldbrightsunlight
My band has recorded a couple of gigs and done a bit of DIY studio stuff. Once for a really small gig, we had guitar, bass and keyboard through their own amps and vocals/horns through a pa, drums acoustic, we did a simple stereo recording with 2 condenser mics set high up at 2 corners of the room facing us. Worked surprisingly well but there's very little you could do with the tracks afterwards to improve it.

The other gig we had everything running through a pa and we recorded direct from the mixer. Sounds levels were a little off because of doing things differently for a room than a recording, but it still sounded pretty good.

We've also done recording a couple of times with an old 4 track analogue cassette tape recorder (so cheap and they sound pretty good)- drums on 2 tracks (overheads and kick, maybe snare (or lots of drum tracks into a separate mixer if you're feeling fancy)), bass and guitar amps micd on 2 other tracks all at the same time for the rhythm, then bounce all that to one track and gradually add overdubs. We did this all in one room, just being as far away from each other as possible and not too loud to minimise bleed. Got to be careful with mixing if you're doing lots of stuff on a 4 track but you probably won't because it's so easy to record on computers these days. Doing things on COMPUTER, it would be the same process, using an outboard mixer into a computer interface if you don't have an interface with lots of channels, but that doesn't allow for editing individual tracks later. So if you have a recording device/mixer with enough tracks there's no real reason not to have everything at once, unless you want a really clean recording (but live with a little bit of bleed between tracks sounds better imo :idk: YMMV)