What to buy, what to buy...

Special Interest Groups Recording Equipment
1

Complete noob. I’m bacon, hi, hello, etc. I have a multitude of questions. I lurked a little bit and found some answers to a few of them, but here are the ones I didn’t find.

I’ve been using Audacity and a VERY cheap, low quality USB mic for about a year now with my band, and it’s met our needs until now. We recorded everything using this one mic, and it wasn’t terrible, but we just want to move up.

Now, I know I can buy a USB interface and record stuff through there, but most of them only seem to have 2 inputs. Are there interfaces out there with 4 or 6 inputs, maybe even 8?
I know little of interfaces, but i know that some mics and interfaces need power. How would I power them? I’m confused on that as well.
Could I just purchase some sort of 8 track powered mixer, and run instruments/mics through that, so I could record everything live (except vocals), while at the same time being able to control all of my levels?

I’m also confused as to what sort of mics I need to be looking at. I’m definitely going to be recording vocals and guitar and drums, bass isn’t as big of a deal since our bass doesn’t have a super thick tone, we use alot of mids, so it would likely be picked up like a guitar would, yes?

All in all, I’m just lost as to where to start and what to get.
We play punkier music, so sound quality isn’t a HUGE issue, but I want it to sound pretty good none the less. As good as possible with our budget (about 800 bucks).

Also, limpwizurdz.bandcamp.com
Don’t ask, we’re odd, much of it is off of inside jokes and whatnot. But we pulled that whole album off with one mic, a Rock Band usb mic.

Please help?

2

Multichannel recording on standard “out-of-the-box” Audacity is only possible with some devices …

Recording With Audacity
As distributed, Audacity comes with support for Windows MME and WDM drivers. MME drivers work fine for simple stereo recording and playback, and are available on all versions of Windows where Audacity will run. However, neither these nor most WDM drivers will provide multi-channel recording; if you try to send multiple inputs to Audacity with these, you will only be presented with a series of separate two-channel “recording devices” from which one can be chosen, instead of the number of input channels there actually are.

Suggested devices
Occasionally, sound card or device manufacturers provides full EWDM support in their drivers, and then multi-channel recording in Audacity should work. The following cards/devices are reported to provide multi-channel recording in “out-of-the box” Audacity: …

3

The million dollar question here is… do you really need to record more than two mics into more than 2 separate tracks/channels simultaneously?

If the answer to that question is yes, then things will get a bit more tricky…

Otherwise you have many possible solutions…

Solution 1: you have only one (or two) mic(s) and you record only one (two) instrument(s) at a time. You can record several instruments, into different tracks, but you can only record one (two) at a time (this is called overdubbing). You can either use an usb mic (like you already do, but usb mics usually don’t have the greatest quality…) or you can get a mic preamp with usb interface, such as the ART USB Dual Pre, which lets you connect two mics and can provide phantom power to the mics.

Solution 2: you want to record from, lets say, 4 mics, simultaneously, but you don’t really need to record each one into a separate track. You can get a mixer board such as the Peavey PV6 or PV8 that will allow you to connect 6 (or 8) mics simultaneously and record from them all. All the inputs will be mixed into one stereo track. You won’t be able to edit/process separately the audio from each mic, since it will be already mixed down.

4

My most favorite tiny mixer is the Peavey PV6. It will provide 48 volt Phantom Power to run microphones that need it from a switch on the front. It will mix four XLR/Professional microphones down to stereo (or mono), and it will handle mixed high level and low level connections. You can plug your guitar directly into one of the high - level inputs and mix that with your voice if you want.

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PV6/

It comes in a USB version.

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PV6USB/

I think we have four of these around the company and I own one – all analog.

Koz