Recording a band...

Hello

Basicly due to the cost's of studio's and not really having much freedom to get your own sound since the producer want's his sound all over it, i have come to the conclusion of deciding to record the band myself, with a copy of cubase a lot of mic's and many hour's

But basicly i want to know what type of mixer i would need to record a band since i want to split each imput on my computer screen so i have control over each drum when editing and mixing in cubase so what type of gear would i need?

Any help or adivce would be much apriciated

All the best

Lewi

What kind of computer?
mac/pc
memory
hard drive

What kind of interface?
usb 1 or 2/firewire

PC Windows 7
2.6 Single Core Processer
2GB DDR2 Ram

But all that is upgradable

And i'm thinking of using Firewire since it look's and seems alot more professional and faster to use

You can find a number of 8 input Firewire interfaces out there for somewhere in the range of $300-500. I've got an Alesis IO24, which had been discontinued, but has done a good job for me with my band once we figured the quirks out. People also rave about the Presonus Firepod. Line 6 makes an 8 input interface and you'd also get the AmpFarm plugin as a bonus.

One thing to consider is that you probably won't get control over every drum without spending a lot of money for a lot of inputs. If you have an 8 input board, you still have to have some way of hearing the other band members (bass, guitar, vox) even if you're not recording them.

We've used between 4-5 mics on our drum kit and the results have been pretty good. 2 overheads, 1 on the kick and 1-2 on the snare. Then the bass player and I plug directly in, we hand a mic to the singer and make her go stand in the corner and sing quietly, so she doesn't bleed onto the drum track.

a Firewire interface and an external Firewire hard drive to record on would get you into the game ... but miking your drums separately (i.e. not submixed) plus your other instruments will take a heap of channels.

Purchase a copy of "Guerrilla Home Recording" right now. It's got everything you need to know.

I bought a DAW for $800 a few years ago, 12 channel, did the job nicley.

my two cents:

record the whole band including a scratch vocal at the same time, not one at a time or in pairs. the almighty vibe of playing together is essential.

a great performance with average sounds is better than an average performance with amazing sounds. would you rather have the listener say 'killer guitar sound' or 'killer band'?

Listen to classic era stones, zep, allmans, etc..acoustic guitars are sometimes thin, kick drum is too heavy or too light, guitars are slightly out of tune, yet that music won't die.

If it makes you feel it, no matter of there are mistakes, keep it!

All good advice here, I would make sure that whatever you're using for recording works well on Win 7-it's still kinda new, so there may be some bugs that need to worked out there.

You can record GREAT drum tracks using only 4 mics (meaning 4 channels on your recorder) but you need a) good mics b) good placement c) good sounding drums and d) a good drummer!!! Here's the Glyn Johns micing technique, which he used on a TON of stuff through the 60's and 70's...

http://danalexanderaudio.com/glynjohns.htm

I also have used office cubicle dividers as gobos-they work amazingly well for that purpose,. and usually are not too hard to find. In fact, we took 5 of them and built a cage around the drums-cut the bleed almost to nothing!!!

Good luck, and be patient with it-it can take a little bit of time to dial it all the way in...

Franc Robert