- Oct 22, 2004
- 2
- 0
- 1
Well hello all. A friend of mine pointed me to these forums as one of the best places on the net to talk recording. So here I am 
I'm new so please forgive me if I'm stepping out of line with any of this... but here I go.
My band Pariah have been working on an independant recording (doing everything ourselves). We're learning a lot about our abilities and our gear, and are of course interested in improving.
We have a 4 song demo that we just finished. I know it is really quite crappy but was a good place to start. Songs can be heard on our website at http://www.pariah.ca
Here's some info on what we did/used (all prices are in Canadian):
Drums
------
- decent quality kit
- Apex 126 on toms (these are crap mics, $65 ea)
- Apex 165 mini condensor on snare, $165 mic)
- Apex 170 pencil condensors for overheads
- kick triggered through a midiKat controller into an Emu Procussion module
Guitars
-------
- good quality gear (high end mesa/marshall amps and high end guitars)
- SM57 on one speaker
Bass
----
- high quality bass gear
- direct from bass head (can't recall what brand)
Vocals
------
- vocal mic not worth mentioning... but not from Radio Shack
Everything runs into an Alto L16 mixer (cheap, $600 new) then out to a computer via an input device.
Everything but the drums were run through an MAudio Transit USB device at 16bit, 44hz (sucks!) and recorded one track at a time.
The drums were done the same way originally (but this limited it to a 2 track stereo recording which turned to crap immediately... i.e no separation)
I picked up a MAudio Delta 44 so we then recorded the drums at 24bit/44hz and had 4 full tracks.
Mixed the 2 overheads to one track, all the toms to another,and separate kick and snare tracks.
We experimented with a lot of mic placement on the drums and never did get a good tom sound (too much bleed from those crappy apex mics).
It was all tracked using Sonar XL 2.0 onto a windows p3, 512MB RAM. Had a few audio dropout issues but eventually sorted them out.
Then, all tracks exported as 24 bit wav files and imported to a Roland VS2480 for mixing. Some good plugins used mainly for compression and minimal reverb on some vocals. Most of what we did during mixing was just some eq'ing. We have not begun any type of mastering phase yet and since the recording isn't of the greatest quality, not sure we'll bother...
So I guess my first and most curious question is... what is the weakest link int the recording setup above?
Please remember we are currently limited to 4 input tracks.
Any other advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We are (or at least I am) dedicated to trying to keep improving our recording gear and abilities to end up making the best sounding independant recordings we can. I do not expect to replace a professional engineer or never step foot in a studio again, I just want to make good sounding demos of our band in between studio full length releases.
Many thanks in advance!
I'm new so please forgive me if I'm stepping out of line with any of this... but here I go.
My band Pariah have been working on an independant recording (doing everything ourselves). We're learning a lot about our abilities and our gear, and are of course interested in improving.
We have a 4 song demo that we just finished. I know it is really quite crappy but was a good place to start. Songs can be heard on our website at http://www.pariah.ca
Here's some info on what we did/used (all prices are in Canadian):
Drums
------
- decent quality kit
- Apex 126 on toms (these are crap mics, $65 ea)
- Apex 165 mini condensor on snare, $165 mic)
- Apex 170 pencil condensors for overheads
- kick triggered through a midiKat controller into an Emu Procussion module
Guitars
-------
- good quality gear (high end mesa/marshall amps and high end guitars)
- SM57 on one speaker
Bass
----
- high quality bass gear
- direct from bass head (can't recall what brand)
Vocals
------
- vocal mic not worth mentioning... but not from Radio Shack
Everything runs into an Alto L16 mixer (cheap, $600 new) then out to a computer via an input device.
Everything but the drums were run through an MAudio Transit USB device at 16bit, 44hz (sucks!) and recorded one track at a time.
The drums were done the same way originally (but this limited it to a 2 track stereo recording which turned to crap immediately... i.e no separation)
I picked up a MAudio Delta 44 so we then recorded the drums at 24bit/44hz and had 4 full tracks.
Mixed the 2 overheads to one track, all the toms to another,and separate kick and snare tracks.
We experimented with a lot of mic placement on the drums and never did get a good tom sound (too much bleed from those crappy apex mics).
It was all tracked using Sonar XL 2.0 onto a windows p3, 512MB RAM. Had a few audio dropout issues but eventually sorted them out.
Then, all tracks exported as 24 bit wav files and imported to a Roland VS2480 for mixing. Some good plugins used mainly for compression and minimal reverb on some vocals. Most of what we did during mixing was just some eq'ing. We have not begun any type of mastering phase yet and since the recording isn't of the greatest quality, not sure we'll bother...
So I guess my first and most curious question is... what is the weakest link int the recording setup above?
Please remember we are currently limited to 4 input tracks.
Any other advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We are (or at least I am) dedicated to trying to keep improving our recording gear and abilities to end up making the best sounding independant recordings we can. I do not expect to replace a professional engineer or never step foot in a studio again, I just want to make good sounding demos of our band in between studio full length releases.
Many thanks in advance!
