Topic: Help with recording my band's demo

[willyjbrown]

My band is recording our demo next week, so we're thinking about our options. Basically we don't want to spend any money yet, and we don't have time to multi-track and do fancy studio stuff. Here's what we have come up with:

1) Setting up on stage with the house PA at a club I have access to and setting my equipment up in the middle of the floor (AT831's > SP-SPSB-8 > iRiver h120).
2) Putting a mic on almost everything and hooking the h120 up to the board for a soundboard patch.
3) A matrix of the first two, and just doing the soundboard patch on to my laptop and Adobe Audition 2.0.

If anybody has any other better ideas, please let me know. If you can give advice/tips on anything with this, please let me know. My big question is do I need a special soundcard to pull off the soundboard patch on to my laptop?

Thanks in advance!

[branas]

All of the following is purely my opinion, so keep that in mind, others may disagree, etc, etc.

I would exercise option 3, keeping in mind that you don't have to mic every drum if you don't have enough mics. Actually, you can do pretty good with an overhead or two and one near or in the kick drum, then one for the rest of the instruments, though I would if possible run the bass (guitar) direct, through a good preamp and probably a little bit of compression/limiting. Mic'ing all the drums usually produces more phase issues, etc., so for your situation this is probably easier anyway because it sounds like you are mixing directly to a stereo output from the board, true?. I would definitely setup your normal 2 channel rig out in the club, or possibly onstage. I always run at least one room mic, I find "live" style recordings lack some ambience when you don't run a room mic or stereo pair is even better, it really rounds out the sound, but I'd keep the volume on the room mic's down in the mix somewhere near 50% (at least, that's what works for me, YMMV). Also, I have no idea what the club is like but usually when there are no people there (it sounded like you are recording while no crowd is there) there will be alot more echo from the floors etc, so make sure and keep that in mind while placing the room mic's and adjusting levels in the mix.

As for a soundcard, I would definitely NOT run it all in through your 1/8" input on the laptop. If you are going to spend any money, I would get a decent external soundcard that at least takes 1/4" or XLR balanced inputs, something similar to the M-Audio MobilePre USB, $149 at Samash.com (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MobilePreUSB-main.html). Others here may be able to point out a better card for the money. You won't regret this later. I have never come across an integrated laptop soundcard that didn't have noise issues. Good luck! 

[Kevin Straker]

Do you have vocals? If so, set your rig up FOB in the sweet spot. I assume the club will be closed while you're doing this and that you'll have the run of the place. Run matrix as planned.

[willyjbrown]

- We have drums (me), bass, 1 guitar, and 1 vocal.
- The club will be closed, so we can do whatever we need.
- We do a soundboard patch occasionally at practices, and when we do that we run the bass directly to the pa, mic the guitar w/ an sm57, singer gets an sm58, then i get a kick drum mic, sm57 on the snare, and sm57 overhead. that simple set up picks everything up well.
- I have no experience with matrix recordings. Any advice on mixing (Adobe Audition 2.0) afterwards and settling levels during the recording on the sbd patch and my rig?

Thanks again everybody.