Premier Rock Forum

My band has just started practicing in a proper sound-proof rehearsal room with a PA. At the moment we are taping new song ideas onto a dictaphone with an inbuilt mic and it sounds terrible. We don't use the PA in the room for anything because we don't have vocals, so would it be worth hooking up two or so mics and placing them in the room (I have no idea where), then running a small cheap cassette recorder out of the PA? I mean, we could adjust the levels in the PA right?

Does this even work? Most PA's would have a headphone line-out we could use? We wouldn't be releasing this (unless it somehow sounded amazing) and I don't really want to drop $$$ on a 4 track or a digital recorder if we really don't need one.

The little mic in the dictaphone just isn't designed to take the sound pressure level produced by most bands (I assume it's rock or some such). Vocal mics on the other hand are designed specifically to have some jerk yell into them. Most small PA's have a tape or line out or something. As long as you can find a cheap-o tape recorder (preferably with VU meters or something)... I suggest one mic in the middle of the room pointing no-where in particular. If you have loud drummer and amps that don't like him/her, record the drums with one mic hard panned (say left) and have the other mic pointing away from the drums picking up the other stuff as evenly as possible and hard panned again (say right). When playing back, adjust pan to suit. Alternatively, try to get a stereo image. Use XY. If there are a whole bunch of reflections that are destroying the image, try ORTF. Good luck!

We do 4 mics, snare, kick, guitar, and bass. ran into mixer into tascam 4-track. Sounds pretty decent for rehearsals. We have also added a room mic at times, if Ueker sees this he can elaborate. He's the techy.

trail and error

My band used a pair of Niant omni condensors. Really cheap, really effective.

Instead of a PA find a small mixer. This will give you a chance to develop some engineering skills that will payoff down the road, remember to find a model with enough inputs, if you use two buy 4 and so on. We record all of our sessions right to a computer from the mixer. If you can get your hands on a cheap CPU that has enough power to record one stereo track your good. No more rewinding or finding the right side of the tape, your recordings will be archived by date or your chosen save title.

We have been using the new zoom recorder that looks like a electric shaver cause it records 4 track 2 tracks forward and back and when positioned correctly seems to image things well. I mean it records accuately what we do in the room but it takes a little work placeing it, we put it on a mike stand we play in a circle so we place it so that the drums and bass are on 2 mikes on the front and the guitars are on the 2 others on the back. We moved the amps slighltly to help in the recording process. the sound is now clear and the mixing and imageing is nice.

field wrote:trail and error

i might go see this band.

Ive been recommended here to use pressure zone mics for rehearsal recordings. put it on the wall or on the ceiling near the drums. we are only drums and bass, no vox, works great for us. if you have a 2nd input available and the possibility to mix the signals you might add a mic for the kick drum. just search for pzm on ebay

flw wrote:Ive been recommended here to use pressure zone mics for rehearsal recordings. put it on the wall or on the ceiling near the drums. we are only drums and bass, no vox, works great for us. if you have a 2nd input available and the possibility to mix the signals you might add a mic for the kick drum. just search for pzm on ebay

I'll look into it, thanks.

We're the same thing, but two bass players and drums.

I used to record from the monitor send of my PA head to an old hand-me-down '70s TEAC cassette deck with Dolby C that sounded great. Two 57s on drums, 58 on vocals with a touch of onboard delay, DI'd guitar and bass, trial-and-error mix onto high-bias cassettes slammed pretty hard.

By the time we got the mix right, we ended up with some great raw, lo-fi mono mixes we actually considered releasing until a) the drummer quit and the new drummer wanted to re-record and b) the bassist broke the tape deck. But, I do want to get back to this approach, though. Much more rewarding than a laptop with way less ear fatigue.