Recording / band setups / mic-ing / etc

Ultima

hey guys I am all quite new to this thing..

I been playing guitar for couple of years , and seriously for the last year ,

as u know we had a go at a band I posted up our "song"

but that was all done at a local church using their , not too grate , but better than our equipment.

So any ways , I have had the oppertunity to watch some bands better than ours record , but I dont have access to that kind of equipment or cash , yet..
and as we are still starting out we dont want to fork out huge $$ cause you never know how things go.

but here is a small list of things we do have:

we have a small P.A system ( dont know make , power , etc.) but its a small portable one , it has about umm 8 chanells

we have about 2 big ass speakers ( excluding mine from my guitar setup)

they each about 300watt

then we have an assortment of MICs which are used to mic up Drums , amplify smaller guitar amps , and to sing with...

then we have the follwing:

my guitar rig ( which is a Old fender amp , with a 300watt speaker attached to the head , its not a proper cabniet or anything like that ) and my assortment of cheap , and not so cheap pedals , which have been mixed and matched .. and then my Les paul epiphone

then we have another guitarist whom uses a small amp , which is mic-ed up to the pa he has no pedals , (besides the overdrive on amp which sux ass )

and then we have the drummer ( whom imo plays to loud hahah) various mics for recording purposes..

then the other guitarist does vocal for now , I am convincing my girlfriend to take vocal she has anamazing voice , similar to evanessance , slighlty more bassier though !! which is cool

then we have a bassist with a huge ass bass amp.

and

to top things off we have a old P11 p.c which the idea is to setup some sort of recording studio..

basically none of us are any good at anything besides the one guitarist has great rythm..

but we are all growing in skills ,

what I would like to know is :

what equipment should be changed, or how can we maximize the current equipment..

also to do any good recordings what type of goaway/hardware will I need to get for the p.c ..

and then how does one set it all up for maximum effientcy?

I dont want the stuff to sound shitty cause we sound shityty by ourselves any way , so if I can get the recordings as best as possibe we have stuff to work from and improve on .... and prehaps we might get some where some day?

many thanx.
_________________
Ahhh iiii eeeiiieee yeaaaaaaaaah!! ooohHHH!!

plankguitar · Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 2:37 pm Post subject:

I've gotten pretty good recordings out of a P.A. if it doesn't have much hum or hiss.
The one I had was equipped with a spring reverb with a short pan, so it wasn't luscious, but a little reverb goes a long ways.

I'd set up your equipment like for rehearsal, then run a line out to any recorder you can lay your hands on: even a home cassette deck.

The recordings I did (at home) were done this way live to an old reel to reel machine.

So you don't frustrate everybody in the band, I'd suggest just start by recording your reheasals non-stop, then when you play it back you can make adjustments to how you will do it next week.

Eventually you'll learn how to get decent recordings for cheap.

DON'T try mic'ing the whole band, including the P.A. speakers -as if you were listening in the audience. Big waste of time. Take a line out from the P.A., especially vocals and drums.
You can sometimes get the guitar amps and bass to splatter into the drum mics. I did some of that.
You'll develop a technique of your own eventually. Dive in.

Matt · Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 2:46 pm Post subject:

I have experimented a bit with recording with my former band and I can say that you are completely right plankguitar.

When we took the PA linout we had the best result.

We lead the output to a minidisc wich is a good solution if you want to save things just for playing back at optimal quality.

The perfect solution would of course be to hook it up to a pc (preferrably laptop) so you can really record things right to MP3

Matt.

Ultima · Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 3:09 pm Post subject:

yeah , thats our idea , we are gonna hook the line out in the input of the P.c sound goaway and record using wave lab or similar.. straight to .wav , then change it to mp3 to save space.

I seen other set up that have mean ass sound cards on pc.s with a little mixer / pa thing that kinda goes from the instruments splits it in two signals 1 goes to the musican in his ear phones , the other routes to a seprate input on the sound goaway ( this sound goaway had like 8 inputs and out puts ) so that they could actually record several tracks at one on diffent lines and seperate it , I believe the used cubase as goaway.. now that would be nice!

how ever , everything going into a p.a then into line out into P.c will have to do for us..

thnx
_________________
Ahhh iiii eeeiiieee yeaaaaaaaaah!! ooohHHH!!

Matt · Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 3:10 pm Post subject:

If I am not mistaken Pierre has one of those sound goaway mixers. Maybe Pierre will be so kind to give us some information about it

I'll notify him of this post

Matt.

Pierre · Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 4:26 pm Post subject:

hey there,
indeed, matt has notified me just 5 minutes ago.
I actually don't have the time to read the whole post (will do it some other time), but I understand you want to record with your computer...
Actually, I dont have one of those sound goaway mixers matt, I have a Hercules DJ Console which has some ins and outs, but this is not intended for instruments. I do have midi in/out, but only one, and 1 line in and out, optical in/out and digital in/out.
But it is not really intended for recording songs from several instruments.

Greets