Making Best use of Our Equipment

[coxeymcqueen]

Hello,

My band is going to be recording some demos soon and I would appreciate some advice on how to get the most of out of the equipment we've got. We do have about £100 to spend on additional equipment if necessary but I'm hoping we won't need to.

Here's what I've got

Yamaha Mg12 Mixing Desk
M-Audio 44 PCI Sound Card with breakout box
Sennheiser 835s mic
Shure Pg48 mic
Behringer XM1800 mics x3
One of those Chrome 50s Style mics - brand unknown

Borrowed PC with Cubase and Ableton live

I use a Musicman Bongo through an Ashdown ABM Evo II Amp and a Ampeg b115e cab.

Our guitarist uses a 100w Marshall VSR100 combo with his Hwy1 Tele and a Jazzmaster...

Our drummer has a Pearl Export kit.

I'm going to lay down the bass tracks against the click track first - it's easier this way because the equipment is at my house. I was going to DI from the amp into the desk but someone suggested I'd get better sound micing up the cab. Which of my mics would be best for this? Would it make sense to use both DI and a miced up cab and blending the signals?

Which mics would you suggest I use for the guitar cab?

It has been recommended to me that I mic the snare and bass drums separately and then use 2 or 3 mics suspended above the kit to pick up the toms and cymbals. Would this be the best way to go?

Finally, what would be the best way to improve monitoring seeing as we're currently using the 'headphone out' from the crappy pc speakers? Is a dedicated headphone amp the best way to go for few £££s or could I rig up to my hifi seperates?

Thanks in advance!

Jamie

[hunta]

Hmm. Ok your mics are your biggest problem. All the mics you have are basically vocal stage mics. So they are all roughly in the SM57/SM58 category of dynamic. You could probably get decent results on snare with the 835 or the XM1800s, and one or the other will probably sound ok on a guitar cab too. You can of course do vocals with any of them, but none of these is really a studio quality vocal mic (not to mention you don't have a studio quality vocal pre). The preamps on the Mg12 are also not amazing, but they may be "good enough" to get things done.

If you want to get a decent sound on the drums, you're going to need a pair of condensers for the overheads like MK012, NT5, ATM450, AT2020, etc. And, preferably a kick mic like the D112, RE-20, beta52, D6, etc. You can try using a pair of the XM1800's for overheads if it's really going to break your budget to get some decent condensers. I wouldn't spend less than $400 for a pair of overheads, and the more you can spend the better. You will want 2 mics in either XY or ORTF position for the overheads, or do a search on gearslutz.com or youtube for the recorderman drum technique.

You want to record the drums first if you have any option about it. It's much harder to record drums on top after you've already recorded other tracks. If your drummer is really really good playing to a click you might be able to pull it off but as a rule it's not a good idea.

Hopefully that's helpful. I would check out gearslutz.com as a lot of questions can be answered with the search engine there.

[gdthomas]

I have a Yamaha MG similar to what you would be using, The mic preamps on it are really weak compared to running a DI into it. For vocals I would try to get some kinda preamp to go with it.
This is what I picked up and I have been pretty happy with it.
http://www.samash.com/catalog/showit...subsearch=true

[coxeymcqueen]

Hello,

Thanks for the advice from both of you. I am going to see if I can find a reasonably priced pair of condensing mics so I can get a better instrument sound and make the most of the recorderman drum technique. I’ll also see if I can get a mic for the kick drum that could also be used for micing the bass cab.

I think I can get my hands on a mic preamp so I’ll make sure to use when recording the vocals.

As for doing the actual recording, do you think we should try and record the whole band playing the tracks together as a guide and then record each instrument individually over the top, or would it be better for the drummer to put down the drum parts for the whole song and then build up from there?

The reason I ask is because I don’t think our drummer would be able to get it all in one take without a guide track or with us all playing along. It’s not that she’s a bad drummer, it’s just that she takes her cues to change from the rest of the band…

On the other hand I could play the whole song to a click track without any problem. What kind of issues do you encounter when starting with bass before drums?

Thanks again!

Jamie

[hunta]

You really want to do one or the other: either record live and leave it at that, or record part by part. Pre-recording guide tracks is only going to lead to a mess.

What you can do is have the drummer and you wear headphones, try to get your bass in another room if possible, and record the drums to a click while you play along in his headphones. You won't record the bass at this point (don't plug into your amp so there's no bleed in the drum mics). Your drummer will have your bass playing to guide him through the structure of the song, the click to keep things in time, and you can do a clean recording piece by piece. You can do something similar with the guitar as a guide if that's what your drummer needs.

I've done a few recordings with the bass first and then adding drums, and it's really hard to lock in properly. Especially if the bass line isn't a constant rhythmic presence (ie steady eighths), your drummer is going to have to guess to get the feel right. Most drum parts have something going on the whole time so it's easy to record on top of it later.

[coxeymcqueen]

Hunta, you're a diamond.

Now I just need to work out how to get guitars and bass into the drummer's headphones along with the click track...

I'll draw it all out and have a play with it tonight. I'm sure I'll get it cracked.

Thanks again for your advice!

Jamie

[Sean Baumann]

Originally Posted by coxeymcqueen

Hello,

Thanks for the advice from both of you. I am going to see if I can find a reasonably priced pair of condensing mics so I can get a better instrument sound and make the most of the recorderman drum technique. I’ll also see if I can get a mic for the kick drum that could also be used for micing the bass cab.

I think I can get my hands on a mic preamp so I’ll make sure to use when recording the vocals.

As for doing the actual recording, do you think we should try and record the whole band playing the tracks together as a guide and then record each instrument individually over the top, or would it be better for the drummer to put down the drum parts for the whole song and then build up from there?

The reason I ask is because I don’t think our drummer would be able to get it all in one take without a guide track or with us all playing along. It’s not that she’s a bad drummer, it’s just that she takes her cues to change from the rest of the band…

On the other hand I could play the whole song to a click track without any problem. What kind of issues do you encounter when starting with bass before drums?

Thanks again!

Jamie

Every time that I have recorded a song from the ground-up, we always do scratch tracks along with the drums. To do this, you obviously need the drums in another room for fear of picking up noises from other band members (vocals, guitars). The scratch tracks were basically throw-aways for the most part, but it helps establish the groove for the rhythm players to play together when recording the drum track.

Going back and fixing a drum track is difficult as you get bleed through all the mics.

To get everyone in the drummer's phones, you're going to need some type of monitoring going on. I don't know anything about the yamaha unit you have, but the way my band was planning out our home recording project was to use a Presonus Firepod and a Presonus headphone amp. Basically, I think we could get 8 inputs into the Firepod, and it has a mixer so that we can mix it how ever we want. Each musician gets the same mix, however. We could record them all if we wanted, or just the drums.

For my own home project, I use a Presonus Firebox, Cakewalk Sonar 7 PE, and ToonTrack DKFH Superior. I'm still learning Superior, I wish I had bought EZDrummer instead -- though I will probably upgrade to Superior 2 which includes EZDrummer Pro. Sonar 7 also includes Session drummer which I have only started to mess with. One cool thing about Superior is that it can work with electronic drums, which is what I eventually plan to do.