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Record the whole band...HOW ?

#4
You simply need a recording medium (presumably a computer and an interface) with enough inputs and outputs to handle all of your needs coupled with sufficient mics, DIs, cables, and a space large enough to get it done. If you need separation of instrumentation you'll either need a lot of gobos, or separate rooms for each instrument. Most of the time in these situations the vocals are added later.

The reality is that your question is to vague to merit more of a specific answer than that. How about filling in the details a bit more?
Experience?
Inputs?
Outputs?
Mics?
DIs?
Room size?
Separation?
Desired end product?
 
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#7
the Zoom handheld recorders are actually pretty good for this. Since you don't have drums, you should be able to find a space in your practice room that is essentially a sweet spot.

I did this with a Zoom H4 with success. We had guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard in a 20x20 room. We can hear all instruments well enough to hear what works and what doesn't. They are also pretty darn good for live gigs, if you can find the sweet spot in the room. These also have MP3 or .WAV options too. Much easier to dial this in versus a full DAW with multiple inputs....that is if price is of concern.

You can get them used for cheap in the US.

Good Luck.
 
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#8
Yep. Can't go wrong with the Zoom H4. Super easy to run. Here is a sample of me and the guys jamming recorded with the H4. Guitar, Bass, and Drums.

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If you want to get into multi track recording I am loving the zoom R16. The r16 can give you cd quality recording. But for simple recording with decent quality the h4 is hard to beat. All the samples on this sound cloud account are done with the h4. Not bad considering I am no sound engineer:)
 
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#9
This video was shot with a Canon Vixia HF R400 the audio was fed to the camera with a Tascam DR-22WL - it was my first try with this setup and I need to make a few adjustments to get rid of the hiss that you can hear at the beginning, but this is the live room sound and the only thing that was going through their PA was vocals.

 
#12
for demos/pre production we just throw up a couple room mics in opposite corners of the rehearsal studio. It's not great but good enough for us to remember parts and for the singers to work on lyrics. But for really good quality you'll need to spend a good amount of money in my opinion. We prefer to have an unbiased ear and opinion when we record so we tend to use the best studio we can afford at the moment we want to record so we have a producer that's not in the band. It also forces us to prepare better and makes the process faster because when you record yourself you'll nit pick every little thing. People will be like I want to try this and I want to try that. And it just feels like a never ending process.
 
#13
Here's my practice recording/demo rig.

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If you look at the upper rack, you'll see 2x 8 channel/preamp interfaces (16 channels) up top. We use this 'live in the room' for band recording regularly. It has surprisingly decent sound. You'll also see in the bottom of the top rack, a 8 channel headphone amp...so when we're getting picky, we can isolate guitar amps in another room (or hallway) run keys and bass DI then only have 'live' drums in the room though we can still hear everything.

The bottom rack is all compressors. Either 4 stereo or 8 mono. I also have a few more in a different rack as well as a 4-unit analog gate. Depending upon what I'm doing I'm compressing drums, guitars or vocals to 'tape' as well to even out huge hits or if I have a drummer with a bad case of pussyfoot or whatever.

Right now we're doing pre-production for our upcoming album. I'm doing about 12 tracks plus a click track. we're not using the headphone amp, except for our drummer so he can get MORE click than the rest of us need. We rehearse the prospective songs for the album, I then go home and rough mix and upload MP3's to a Google Drive account where everyone downloads and can review within 24 hours (with click included). If anyone wants, I'll provide a mix for them with their parts removed for home rehearsal.


*Don't laugh at the Behringer pieces. The mixer has survived 2 years of gigs, rehearsals and recording without much problem at less than $200 and the two compressors actually sound better than a couple DBX units I have and cost me 25$ each. Perfect for 'regular use' band stuff.
 
#16
IF you are wanting to capture it all as one track, not individual tracks you can mix together later, then a simple rig like mine will do the job.

Start with you want a recording / data storage device like, well a computer. I like using my laptop. Quad Core 2.8Ghz, 8GB RAM system. Not super fancy but it does the trick.

Next, you need an audio interface. I am using a Behringer UCA222, although some mixers come with them integrated. I should have gone that way, my bad...

Follow that with a mixer, Going to depend on your amps outs, but figure your guitar amps use balanced TRS cable outputs, and your bass amp uses an XLR, each of you need a mic, Again my setup is good to copy. 12 input mixer with at least 4 XLR ins. And the remainders being stereo 1/4" ins.

Appropriate cabling, amps, mics, mic stands blah blah blah.

Headphone amp with at least 4 outputs, and phones. (you don't want feedback from monitors to your mics do you?)

What is going to vary if you want to do multi track, yet play at the same time, is the mixer and audio interface. For that you would use a multitrack recording device, several good ones have already been mentioned.

If you go the mixer route, the thing you change to go with live performance is that you take the headphone amp and its cabling away, and add a power amp and passive cabs, or just run straight to active powered cabs. I personally like this approach better than multitrack as you tend to record what an audience is likely to hear live, and for my purposes, practice and honing live performance skills it does the trick perfectly. It does however rob you of opportunities to fine tune your sound for final album production. Then again, that might be more of the "Garage Rock" sound you are going for anyway...
 
#18
I use an Alesis MultiMix 12 (with firewire). With it I can record 12 tracks simultaneously for mixing in Reaper, Cubase, whatever.
For what it's worth I traded about $100 of gear for it in a craigslist deal.
The firewire seems to eliminate the latency I have seen in USB connections.

Plenty of quality for me.
 
#19
Where are you planning to record them? That has much to say about what type of recording you can do, how to do it and how it will sound. Of course the purpose of the recording might have something to say about whether a particular space will work.

Otto
 
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