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

[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! :-)