Will This Work!?, will this setup work? Options

[lucky13]

Hey everyone just a little ..actually a lot of help needed. I want to start recording my band at home, have been considering a number of options and ive come up with this, bearing in mind im a student earning pittance and cant afford high end equipment. First up the 1.42 ghz mac mini. I really, REALLY want this as im going to be travelling a lot and dont have much space at home, it suits my needs/budget perfectly. So what kinda configuration of software and mixers would be appropriate for this? The band is a 5 piece death metal band (vocals, guitars, Bass, Drums and Keys) and we'd ideally like to all go through mic'd up amps rather than going directly into the computer..if you get what i mean :S I looked at the ALESIS MultiMix8 USB and reckon that if we plugged that into the USB of the mini mac and then plugged mics into the alesis ..hopefully we could record using garageband which is included with the mini mac. All the tracks would be done separately but we need the number of inputs on the mixer for the drums, cos its a bigarse kit n needs a fair few mics to sound good. Does this all sound like its got a cat in hells chance of working? is there anything that i might have missed? or have i got the wrong end of this whole recording malarkey!? help would be very much appreciated! thanks in advance.

Rory

[dangt]

Your gonna need at least 14 mics and inputs for all the drums and guitars. Im not sure a mac mini would give you enough power and reliability, especially if you are editing and mixing these tracks as well.
Have you considered a multitrak harddisc recorder like a fostex or tascam. Or even spending your hard earned money to go to a studio were all the mics and recording gear is supplied.

If you must produce it yourself, I reccomend Protools LE and a Digi002. garage band is good, but not very pro

[flemming]

Given that the guy is on a budget, a digi 002 is a bit OTT. Has the Alesis even got 8 mic inputs? That's the bare minimum you'll need to track the setup you're describing: 1 for vox, 1 for bass, 1 for guitar, 4 for drums and a spare if the singer does any guitar playing. I take it you'll be recording the keys as midi? If not, use the spare for keys. Your drumsound wont be up close and personal, but you prolly don't need that neither. Try a slightly expanded Jon Bonham setup: One mic on the kick, one on the snare and then the Bonham-positioned overheads (look it up on the internet. He was the drummer of Led Zeppelin :-)). That'll give you a big and good sound. Obviously, the quality of your mics and pre's are major factors here too. Get the best you can. Large diaphragm condensers for OHs, Røde makes some OK mics at a reasonable price, SM 57 for guitar and snare, SM58 for vocal (you could go for a condenser for vocal, but if your guy is more used to doing live gigs, a 57 or 58 would be fine. If it's good enough for Bono ... hehe). Audix D6 for the kick. It's cheap and it's MASSIVE!

As for the mac, I think you can get by with the mini 1.42. Make sure you get it with as much RAM as possible though. You'll propably also need a fast FW harddrive for your audio. I'm not sure GarageBand will let you track that many tracks at the same time, and to be honest, it's a fun app but it's not really meant for stuff like that. Consider buying Logic Express. It's quite cheap and you get a LOT of really good plugins with it.

This is NOT gonna make your band sound like a million dollars. Then again it wont cost you a million dollars neither, so that makes sense. It WILL make you sound just fine, and it's a good starting point. You can always expand on a setup like this, and that's actually quite important. Nothing worse than getting stuck with something that's not really good enough ...

Have fun! :-)

[lucky13]

Thanks for the replies. I'll definately look into getting some version of logic, garageband was just a starting point but i can work up on that one. In terms of recording, the mixer is just a means to record the whole drumkit at once, it has 4 mic inputs and so if we recorded all the instruments one at a time, so like use all the mic inputs for the drums and do the drum track, when thats done unplug them and mic up the guitar, when thats done plug in the next guitar and do his part and so on... so like each instrument is done individually, therefore only using a maximum of four mics (for the drums) at any one time...? and then arrange that and mix it on logic.

In terms of mics, I have a PZM microphone, which has given me a decent sound before on guitar and bass drums, and i have a couple of sennheiser e835 which ive been assured are as good as the popular shures. so if i use the pzm for the bass drum, and the sennheisers (one for snare+hi hat, one for toms and one for cymbals) then use the sennheissers again for guitars and bass and vocals, possibly keyboard. wouldnt that work?

another question is about the audio interface ive heard about... does this set up have one? ..is it the mixer? or am i still new and thick? are there any which are decent yet relatively inexpensive, would the PRESONUS FIREPOD do waht i want to do?
cheers again!

Rory

[hahaworld]

Hi Lucky 13!

Yeah, I think Logic is going to be your best bet. Very efficient and reliable and professional. Although, I get great tracks out of GarageBand, too. But, I agree that it's not the greatest choice for that many tracks. There are still some speed issues, too, if you don't have a G5 with maxed-out RAM. I use the PreSonus Firebox for audio in, and it rocks. It's small, but groovy.

[lucky13]

well im gonna be boosting the RAM on the mini mac up to a GIG and its got the G4 1.42ghz processer, 80GB hard drive and ive got an extra 160GB external hard drive which ill hook up. So all in all its a capaple little thing which im sure will be able to run some kind of version of logic even if its not the latest ..which i cant afford anyway!
The firebox is the firepods little brother right? Well if it works for you then im sure big bro firepod can handle my band! at the moment im running a fairly old PC with windows and have been recording on ACID pro, which is good..but i cant take the whole damn pc to uni next year..hence the change. so let me get this right ...please correct me!
the mic is hooked up to the presonus firepod, the firepod is then hooked up to the minimac via firewire and then it records the sounds the mic is picking up with Logic!? does that sound alrite?

where does latency come in all of this? the firepod says it has zero latency monitoring... will that cancel out latency then? and one more query ... the soundcard, now i dont know really how macs work, but is this going to be a problem in anyway ie the soundcard is not powerful enough/nonexistant/prefers jazz to heavy metal?
i must sound really really sad!
Thanks tho

Rory

[gdoubleyou]

I don't think that Alesis USB mixer will cut it, when I took a look at it i remember a 4-16bit track limit.

No way USB can handle 8 tracks at a time. I would look at a firewire interface if you want to record a whole band.



This post has been edited by gdoubleyou: Tue 9 Aug 2005, 18:01

[lucky13]

Yep gdoubleyou thats what id moved on to lol cheers .. the presonus firepod. can anyone explain then how the alesis would work then, they make it with usb yet theres no way it can handle all its track inputs..? strikes me as being a tad styuppid.