Recorded my band with Tascam Hand Held Recorder on lowest recording level and still have distortion in recording but, when loaded in Audacity have no red lines. Do I have any hope of reducing the distortion? And if so can anyone give me a recommendation on how to reduce it? Thanks in advance for any help provided!
You are probably overloading the built-in Tascam microphone. Rock Bands are very difficult to record. The bass guitar will destroy most microphones at Club Volume. You can measure the bass performance on earthquake meters.
The grownups do this by using a separate, very robust microphone and putting attenuators between the mic and the recorder. Some microphones have attenuators built-in. I think the Blue Snowball has a switch position for -10 volume and this is why it’s there.
No, once you overload the sound electronics, that’s the end of the story.
In order to make a microphone sound without question as good as it can possibly sound, they have to put a very tiny, delicate MicPre between the microphone and the first place you can control the volume. It doesn’t matter how much you turn the volume down, that little MicPre is already lying bleeding on the floor.
Somebody in the band may have a spare SM58.
http://www.shure.com/americas/products/microphones/sm/sm58-vocal-microphone
Plug that into a Shure or somebody else’s attenuator stack.
http://www.shure.com/americas/products/accessories/microphones/microphone-problem-solvers/a15as-inline-switchable-attenuator
Switch in the maximum attenuation (25dB??) and try recording with that. If you have trouble making level, drop down to 15dB attenuation. Do not go into the club without trying that out first.
Koz
Which Tascam have you got? They don’t all accept outside microphones. Koz
DR-03 and it has mic in
As Koz wrote, if you play in a loud band, you are probably overloading the microphone.
A low sensitivity dynamic microphone plugged into it will probably do the trick.