Suggestions for recording 3 to 4 people

[DigitalMan]

I love threads that go like this:

What should I get?

Buy product A
Buy product B
Buy product C

Ok, thanks. Hey, I just bought product B and it is great. Thanks for the advice

Buy product D - it's the best!

 

[TyCobb]

I've recently, after 10 years playing, started recording while I practice and it has seriously strengthened my timing(like overnight). It surprised me just how bad my timing was and how many mistakes I made during playing. I am not objective while my fingers are touching the strings. My 'good enough' bar got raised considerably.

Ha! That's what I just noticed over the weekend. Recording and putting on headphones I realized A) my timing sucks and B) my finger habits are the death of the recordings. The amp has hid so much over the years. Lots of stuff I now know I need to work on.

On the bright side even with my horrible playing, it actually made me dust off the ol' guitar to play extremely simple progressions to try and play against.

 

[beans-on-toast]

There is so much to learn, it helps to have some coaching. The more you learn, the more you appreciate how little you know.

There are some helpful tips here: Produce Like A Pro. Perhaps start with the how to record series of videos.

As you said, listening to yourself really exposes your work helps you to improve both your playing and technique. But it doesn't have to be perfect. Mixing the bass with the other instruments helps bury a host of sins. Listen to bass soloed tracks of some of the great songs that you can find on youtube, you'll hear all kinds of rough playing. It all has a way of meshing together in the mix.

 

[Rawkmonkey]

Reaper is a pretty nice program for what it is, I liked working with it.
Electric keys are line level out, so if you have line level ins, there you go. If you have inst inputs on your unit, those are fine as a lot of people run bass direct for clean sounds and work it "in the box". Guitar can be direct if acoustic or if you are using amp modelling in box. Some guitarists tone is their amp, so you may want to mic it.

 

[Ulf_Hansson]

I played around with the gain to get it to where it didn't go red since I assumed it meant it was clipping. The instructions linked above didn't really mention a proper level. Is there a rule-of-thumb I should be following? I figured it was just get the instruments in at a decent non-clip level and then adjust in the software afterwards. This will be probably be those many hours of torment I envisioned

If recording in 24 bits (which you should), then recording levels should be a non-issue. In the old days (analog and 16 bit) you really had to push the gain as close to 0 as you dared (or, for analog, slightly above). Today you have plenty of headroom, so keep it safe -- no reason to let a few clips destroy a great take.