Recording the band: best quality for not much money.

4string

Need some advice. The band is in final rehearsals before gigging. We need to capture the best audio we can of a couple of songs to give to promoters who ask, "so what do you sound like?'. Between us we have a couple of Tascam/Zoom portable digital recorders, which we have used to capture rehearsals - the quality and mix have been OK for home practise, but that's all. 

How do people get to a better recorded representation of their music? Seems premature (and expensive - we are on a tight budget) to go into the studio. Can the stereo digital recorders be used in a better way? Take sound from the rehearsal PA into the recorders - the PA is vocals only at the moment? All suggestions welcome.

John_A

Quite a few rehearsal studios will record and mix a rehearsal for not a lot of money.  Other than that a portable recorder should get decent results, just position in font of the band at a decent distance, record a bit, have a listen and adjust individual levels as necessary, you may need to get the drummer to play a bit quieter than normal to get a decent mix

p90fool

Use a dead room too, you'll never get anything decent out of an empty village hall and a couple of ambient mics. 

4string

Thanks for your responses, @John_A and @p90fool. We have used Pirate Studios in South West London, which can do the recording for us. Bit awkward to get to, but we might need to rebook. The rehearsal space we currently use is pretty dead, so we manage to avoid the 'sonic cathedral' effect... I will play with one or both of the recorders next time we are rehearsing. Might try recording on both then flying them into GarageBand for a 'mix'.

PolarityMan

The cheapest way to get the best sounding result is to program the drums then track guitar / bass into an ampsim, then find a decent room to track the vocals in. You can maximise your results by then getting a pro to mix for you.

WiresDreamDisasters

Hey Tim,

It really depends on what sort of recordings you want. If you want something that sounds lively and like a band playing as a cohesive whole, then a "village hall" and a bunch of ambient microphones could absolutely work.

If you want something that sounds closer to an album experience, with all the overdubbing and multi-tracking and studio wizardry, to eventually give you something that sounds like a releasable product, then that is also achievable in a "village hall" but takes much more expertise to get there. I know, coz I've done it.

With our 2nd album we rented a furniture warehouse for £50 a day. Spent 3 days in there doing drums, and the sound was really great.

It really depends on what the sound you're going for is, how proficient the players are, and how much of an expert your engineer is. A guitarist in a band rarely makes a good engine I'd say!!

Now... a small "tight" sounding room makes it reasonably easy to get clean recordings. Provided everything is in tune - particularly the drums - but it really limits your options when it comes to the mix. You'll also be fighting room modes like crazy, because smaller rooms tend to resonate at much higher frequencies. A nightmare to mix, but certainly possible.

Genre is quite important too. Because certain genres lend themselves to working completely in the box more than others, in my opinion anyway.

Funkfingers

On one level, the sound quality itself may not be critical. All that some promoters need to know is your general music style. Then, they can target their efforts to get your band into venues where audiences like the sort of music that you make.

4string

@WiresDreamDisasters thanks for your response. I think we are looking for a recording that gets over our essence, rather than anything that is even close to hi-fi. The songs have a lot of growing to do through being performed live before we try and pin them down in a studio. I am going to try the two digital recorders - one set up to catch the vocals well and the other to pick up the rest. Might have to ask the guitarist to turn down though...

4string

@Funkfingers A good point. The two tracks we have sent out have had a positive response based on the feel the promoter got from them. It certainly was not the quality of the recording...

Vibetronic

I've just been in exactly the same situation with my covers band; wanted something decent quality to stick online to help getting gigs. We have a permanent practice room with full PA etc and did some rough stuff hooking up a laptop to the PA, but really needed someone with a bit more expertise to engineer and mix it all. We found a local recording studio which was £20/hour - the recording took 3 hours for 4 songs, then c.£180 for the mixing/mastering, so about £240 all-in. Sounds very decent for what it is and more than good enough to get a decent representation of what we sound like. We did make sure we were well-rehearsed beforehand, so everything was very quick and vocal harmonies/solos on top of the basic tracks were 1-2 takes at most.

There's bound to be a few places near you so I'd just check out stuff they've done and go from there. I chose somewhere where the chap was a working musician himself too. Unless you have a Drew in the band who is really competent with Logic or similar DAWs I'd say it's the simplest thing to do; I know how to use that stuff, but only from the context of my own solo guitar instrumental stuff - recording & mixing a band and making it sound good is not something any of us knew how to do and would just have led to some very basic recordings and lots of frustration!

4string

Cheers @Vibetronic looks as though that is what we are going to do. I quite liked the idea of getting live drums 'properly' recorded, and then doing bass and guitar via DAW and vocals via a condenser mike and vocal booth. You have however, pointed out the fatal lack of experience that we have - mixing and general production skills. Also, we will loose the live vibe, which is our selling point at the moment. 

PolarityMan

4string said:

Cheers @Vibetronic looks as though that is what we are going to do. I quite liked the idea of getting live drums 'properly' recorded, and then doing bass and guitar via DAW and vocals via a condenser mike and vocal booth. You have however, pointed out the fatal lack of experience that we have - mixing and general production skills. Also, we will loose the live vibe, which is our selling point at the moment. 

This is essentially what we did with our last EP, was then mixed by Drew (although since we are inept at completing things we havent released it yet).

Album before I recorded everythign myself.

Vibetronic

4string said:

Cheers @Vibetronic looks as though that is what we are going to do. I quite liked the idea of getting live drums 'properly' recorded, and then doing bass and guitar via DAW and vocals via a condenser mike and vocal booth. You have however, pointed out the fatal lack of experience that we have - mixing and general production skills. Also, we will loose the live vibe, which is our selling point at the moment. 

that's pretty much what we did in the studio. Guitars were Axe-Fx/Helix straight into Logic and vocals done more or less as you suggested above. It was recording the drums well and then the mixing etc we needed help with. I've given it a go before but it always sounds like a home-made effort despite spending ages on it (our vocalist had a quick go, basically sticking on delay and reverb, and it sounded loads better than what I'd spent ages on!). I'm actually considering asking if I can give him a few quid to sit in with him when he produces another project just to try and start learning how to do it properly.

4string

@Vibetronic you echo some of my thoughts - I need to learn about production and sound engineering. 

Musicwolf

You need to be very clear, in your own mind, as to why you are doing this and what sort of product is required.  Is this original material or covers?  If you are a covers band then you should be aiming for something that gives a good indication as to how you will sound live.  Whether you record the band all together or re-do parts individually the point is that you shouldn't be adding additional parts which you can't recreate live.

This may also be true for original, but the lines are more blurred.

Once you are clear as to what you need then you can look at the best way to achieve it.   If you can't achieve the result using the equipment that you already own / skills that you possess then booking into a studio will probably be the best option.

I'm in the process of recording my own covers band.  I'm doing this in the rehearsal room using a Zoom Livetrak mixer / recorder to capture the drums then transferring into Cusbase and rerecording the other instruments in my home studio.  I've just ordered a new pair of overhead mics because my old ones weren't up to the job.  I could honestly get better results for less money by booking a few hours in a pro studio to record the drums.  The reason I don't is because, to me, the end product is of less importance than the process.  I enjoy recording, it's my hobby and, because I understand this, I can justify the expense.

4string

@Musicwolf thanks for sharing. We are an originals band who are just starting out playing live. In this initial phase, energy and enthusiasm are selling points. You are right, the quality from the digital recorder is not great, but it should get across what we want to.  

 I am hoping that we will be able to record the front of house mix from a desk in one of our first few gigs - this should offer us a step up in 'demo' quality. Going into a studio at this point seems premature to me, but the rest of the band may not agree with this.