Specific question and general advice?

[Depth_Charge]

I finally set my jam room up and my guitarist is coming next week to work on some original material with me.

I'd like to record us both, with a view to recording the whole band once we're ready. I have a PC in the jam room and a budget of roughly $1000AUD.

I'm not 100% sure what I need and whats overkill so was reasing a few resources when I came across the line "track can function as a track or a bus"

Could someone tell me what that means...and any info on home recording a full band appreciated as well

 

[Cats On Fire]

Heya I run Acid Music Studio on my laptop, it's very, very good... very entry-level and you can produce incredibly professional results with a little practice. I got my copy of Acid from the Sony website for about forty GBP, which is astonishingly cheap for the quality of the software. Unfortunately, most computers only record mono in, at least I've found, but for jam sessions all you need is Acid to record the whole thing into, and a little four-track mixer you can pick up for about fifteen GBP. I've found I can get a really good, clean mix, even if it is mono, but once we've got a song structure worked out from the quicky jams, we record every element seperately into Acid so we can get a good stereo mix.
A trick I use... I've found a way to cheat the mono when we do the final recordings - if you record the electric guitar parts twice, then put them in seperate channels in Acid, pan seperately and EQ them a little, you have a really clean stereo sound). I personally record all my bass guitar parts for final mixes straight off the bass, and EQ them in Acid, as I've found going off the amp dulls the sound once it's recorded.
With drums, same as the guitar... we have a knackered mono mincrophone which is painfully directional, but once we get the position of it pretty good, we record the drum track twice and pan the two mono tracks seperately.
Don't know if this helps, but if you've got a grand to burn then DON'T be suckered in by things like MPCs and 48 track digital mixers with so many bells and whistles you'll never figure how to use them all. Keep it so childishly simple that a monkey could do it. Then, if anything breaks, gets beer spilled on it or shorts out, you aren't left with a grand's worth of kit sitting in your garage gathering dust.

Hope this helps

 

[Depth_Charge]

Yeah mate that helps a bit.

I've had store recommendations from buy a mini-disc player, plug in a mike and record straight to that in one take right up to buy a unit such as a Yamaha AW-1600 which IIRC is an 8 channel mixer and recording unit in one, and all the options in between of course. Very confusing.

Our last band used the first option and you had to crank the volume on the recording so loud to play it back that there was always a loud "wind" type noise going on in the background.

I don't suppose you happen to know what it means when "a track can be a track or a bus?"

PS - If I got a mixer with say 8 channels, is it possible to record the drum track on 2 mikes and create the 2 channels simultaneously? Just a thought...

 

[MattD]

A bus is basically a pathway, which allows you to route one or more audio signals to a chosen destination, for example: routing multiple audio signals to an outboard unit or master fader. Sometimes tracks are put on a bus for ease of use, especially in live sound. Often the drums might be bussed to one channel, thus, limiting the number of faders the sound engineer has to concentrate on.

I'm not to sure what you meant by 'create the two drum tracks simultaneously', but if you record the drum track with 2 good overhead mics you could see sufficient results the only problems being the balance might not be great as you cant edit and process each drum seperately. Otherwise you could record your drums tracks and bus them to one path.

 

[Cats On Fire]

Stereo recording properly all depends on what you're recording into... in my case it's always been my laptop, so regardless of micing for stereo, the final recording was always mono, and the stereo on our final mixes has always been faked by layering up and panning mono tracks. I've never used anything beyond the software and the hardware has always been what I can buy for a tenner in a car boot sale, but if you can get a piece of gear that records a stereo signal then more power to you.

As for the bus thing, I have no clue what that means.

 

[Depth_Charge]

Thanks again Cats.

The PC I have in the jam room is my newest PC, running at 3.2Ghz with 1Gb RAM and 160Gb HDD.

I'll probably go for an 8-track USB mixer into the PC with software route, adding another Hard Drive and maybe some more RAM to the system...that seems like a decent option since I'm a little bit more PC/software savvy than recording hardware savvy. The room has drums, MIDI keyboard, bass, 2 guitars and 2 vocal mikes so an 8 track should cover a full band situation...or record the kids running amok in there at least.

The hard part will be actually deciding on a system setup once exhausting the research options - I'm a terrible procrastinator but thanks to GAS and TB I'm getting better at riskier (to me) spending