anyone know any good cheap,recording equipment?

You could use a tape recorder with a built-in condenser mic and just put it somewhere in the same room you play in. It will sound like poo, but if you already have one, it's the cheapest way.

If you have some money to spend, check out a cheap 4-track such as the Tascam Porta 02 or similar - this, a pair of microphones (or just one, if you're on budget) and will to experiment can get you some pretty decent results.

With one of my bands, we record our improvisations onto tape simply by putting a cardoid microphone (it's a cheapo Peavey mic I think) in the room (we had to play around with positioning to get a decently balanced sound on tape), and run it into an old Fostex 4-track that we borrow from the guitarist in my other band.

We record onto regular cheapo cassettes, and get acceptable results. I wish that my stereo ($#¤%&* Panasonic) had a line out so I could demonstrate it, but it hasn't so I'd leave it to your imagination.

If you can make it sound good in the room when you rehearse, you can make it sound good on tape.

 

I use a portable Minidisk-recorder & very simple, cheap stereo microphone.. then i do the rest ( compressor, eq, etc ) with my PC.

 

frankencow, we have a Forum devoted to Recording Gear and Equipment. I'm going to move this there. A lot of the guys who frequent that forum have great advice.

 

You know what you might want to look into. You could look at the Nomad Jukebox. It costs about $300. It is the size of a cd player and has a 6 GB hard drive. It actually has an option for recording live. I think for your purposes, it might be worth checking out. Plus, it doubles as an mp3 player and portable hard drive.

 

That sounds really cool! How many inputs does it have, does it have a mixer, and how many tracks does it allow?

 

Well actually, the product is sold as an mp3 player. They recently changed the firmware on it to allow it to be a portable hard drive as well. They also talk about live recording. It has just one input and one channel. They said you could hold a couple hours of uncompressed audio on it from recording. Basically, the way i see it, plug it into your bands mixer, like through it's line out, and there you go. My old band used to do that to record to their computer. Then later on, you can extract the audio from the nomad as a .wav format. I just figured he wanted a normal item, as oppose to a real multitrack, but for those of you looking to do more pro-recordings, this probably isn't the item for you, unless you're in need of an mp3 player.

 

a while ago i was in a band who used to record their practices with an beat up old ghetto blaster..it was anciet, but if you got the position right you could get a good sound.

with minidiscs & a mic .....

..and some patience.

 

how many memebers are in the band? You could do the fallowing, if you're willing...

Buy a mixer, that way you'd have pre-amps for mic's, and guitars ect (if you chose to use those inputs, or you could mic the speakers)

Run the mixer into either 1)RCA in of your Tape deck. This will record your whole band at once, so if one makes a mistake, then you'd have to start over, or whatever, but it would be quite a good quality, since you're going though the mixer first, so you can balance out the volumes. or... 2)download protools free, or any other computerbased multi-track recording software, and plug the rca out of the mixer into the mini plug in via an adaptor from radio shack. The sound wouldnt be that great, unless you chose to buy a new sound card. You'd need a fairly good computer (at least pentium II) with plenty of memory, to get a good sound out of it. The pro's of this is that you can make teh choice of going one person at a time, or all at once. Then you mix it down, and burn it to cd, or copy it to an audio tape.

A mixer, depending how many inputs you want, but you can get one with 4 inputs for as low as $150.

 

RCA is a type of plug. If you look in the back of modern (by that i mean Mid 80's and up) TV's, there are 3 female plug incerts, generaly colored yellow red and White. Yellow is picture, Red is right channel, white is left channel. On sterios, there is just a red and white plug. Most mixers have these types of plugs as an output. This is an analoge cable, that with an adaptor will plug into your line in of the sound card. From there, with your recording software, you hit record. Your band either plays one at a time, or all at once though the mixer, into your computer, being saved on your hard drive.

As for mixers go to musicians friend, click recording, click mixers, and see what you find. the only mixer brand i know of, and thats quality is macki, and those might cost you a bit more.

 

Hey Allodox, which minidisc player do you use? How do you upload onto your PC, just with the headphone out jack?