Our band is going to be recording its first demo next week, and it going to be a homemade effort. I'll be the recording engineer as well as the bassist. I've come up with a recording plan so that our demo will sound as good as we can make it. A little background first: our band is a three-piece contemporary Christian band playing original music, with songs written and performed by our bandleader/vocalist/guitarist. We'll be using equipment we already own, so our expenses will be minimal at best. We have five dynamic mics - three Sennheisers (forgot the model), a Shure SM-57 and SM-58. We have a Mackie mixing board with sixteen inputs and eight outputs, a Tascam US-144 recording interface, a Dell laptop (2006 model) and I'll be using Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 - yeah, it's old software, but it's not complicated, and I understand how to use it.
So, here's the plan. Our bandleader also happens to be the pastor of our local Baptist Church, where we rehearse. What I plan on doing is setting up the drums in a side room and I'll be using the
Glyn Johns drum recording method. All four mics will be run into the mixing board where I'll be able to set volume, EQ, reverb, ect. Meanwhile, our vocalist/guitarist and myself on bass will be out in the hall, with one mic picking up all sounds produced by us. This will be our guide track for future use. Our drummer wiil be isolated in his room, with headphones on, listening to us playing, and he'll be able to do his thing. When we're done, I'll have two tracks recorded - a drum track, and a guide track.
Next thing will be the bass track. Using my recording interface and laptop, I can do this at home. I'll either track directly into the interface, or I'll use my small practice amp and plug in the headphone out to the interface and see what works best. So now we'll have a drum track, bass track, and a guide track.
At this point we'll return to the church hall to record the guitar and vocals. I'll get rid of the guide track, use one mic for the vocals, one mic for the amp, and plug them directly into the interface - probably won't be needing the mixing board for this, since I can set parameters with the software. Now I'll have a drum track, a bass track, a guitar track, and a vocal track.
Now I can add on whatever I think the song needs - a keyboard track, a second guitar track, lead guitar line, backing vocals, whatever. I should have at least four good, usable tracks, with possibly more tracks as required.
Now comes the hard part - mixing down everything to one track and mastering that track. I have a strong suspicion that this will be the hardest thing to accomplish. I'm thinking of several hours of constant listening and tweaking. Maybe I'll nail it early, which would be nice! Burn it on a CD, and then we should be good to go.
We're looking at doing four songs from our songlist. One uptempo song, two medium tempo songs, and one ballad. I've never tried to do anything of this magnitude before, but I have played around with the software, and I have recorded a couple of our rehearsals in the past. I've also done my homework on the Internet; there's plenty of good websites explaining the recording process. I've told my band mates that since this is a demo, it's not going to sound as good as Abbey Road, but it'll sound "good enough" for our purposes, which is to shop ourselves around and put some of our music on our upcoming website.
Any comments or advice would be most welcome.
