Recording Your Band Practice: How and Why

hey everybody my name is Mike I'm a sales engineer here at Sweetwater sound and today we're gonna be talking about how and why you should record your practices like most of the sales team I am a musician and actually have my own band we're always looking for ways to create a unique live experience for our fans as well as improve on our general live performance and one of the ways that we do that is by recording our practices so that we can listen back and hear what we're trying to accomplish there's a number of ways to record your practice but before I get into how you do it I want to talk a little bit about why you should be recording your practice first off it gives you instant feedback on your performance what worked what didn't were you together as a band and what do you need to work on moving forward secondly it helps you flesh out new ideas and if you're anything like me you've been in the middle of the practice you're going through a song and suddenly your guitarist plays a sweet riff or your drummer plays a sick fill and once the moments gone you've lost that you have no idea what happened or how you can do it again so recording your practice gives you a way to go back listen to what happened and try and recreate it from there and one more bonus reason you should be recording your practices is to create content for your fans in the world of social media content is king and so being able to interact with your fans give them new content regularly and even be able to get their feedback is invaluable as a musician so now that you know the why behind recording your practice there are a number of reasons to go about recording it and I've got several of them right here in front of me first and foremost we have mixers that are also multitrack recorders on my left is the QSC touchmix 16 and I love this because first of all you're gonna need a mixer anyway as a full band why not have one that can actually do both mixing and recording all in one so with the touchmix 16 you don't even need a computer to be able to multitrack record you can actually plug a hard drive directly into it record on to that and then play it back through the mixer in multitrack on each individual channel there are a lot of other digital mixers that do this same exact thing so if you have one you may talk with your sales engineer to see if yours can do that now right here I have the tascam model 60 this is one of the newer entries into the tascam line that actually allows you to do much the same way the touchmix does record directly to an SD card or use it as an audio interface for your computer you have direct controls on the board it's all analog you have compressors and each use and effects right here so you don't ever have to leave this environment to be able to record mix even master your music down in front here I have the focusrite scarlett 18 iead and this is great if you want to get into the da W production environment where you want to start creating demos or even fully fledged master tracks with the recordings you've created now for practice you're still going to need a mixer to get into this so you can get all the band members recorded but what this allows you to do is over dubbing and mixing and mastering all inside that doll environment that way you can upload this to the cloud SoundCloud or YouTube whatever environment you want your music to live on you can do it right from the da WS that connect up to this interface so maybe you don't need multitrack recording you just have a couple of instruments and a vocal or something really simple that you want to be able to capture quickly without the need of a multitrack recorder or a da W for that we have smaller solutions such as the spire studio or this tascam dr-40 now both of these recorders have microphones onboard as well as additional inputs on the front here and on the back of the spire studio so you can connect up directly in and get a cleaner sound or you can capture the room as it is that's great for people doing bluegrass especially when you want to be able to capture the mix of the entire group in one quick recording now both of these devices actually have the ability to overdub as well the dr-40 has two extra channels of recording so you can add on to what you've already created and the spire studio actually connects up to your phone or tablet to record up to eight channels it's very intuitive very easy to use it even has a soundcheck mode to automatically set levels for your recording and last but certainly not least is the MV 88 plus from sure now this one's really cool because you can actually record audio or video they have apps for both and you can record it directly in your phone or stream live if you want to this way you can get visual feedback on your performance as well as creating content for your fans much like the spire studio the MV 88 plus is really intuitive and easy to use and it's a great way to step up your audio game anytime you're using the camera and we talked about being tight as a band in your practice and one of the ways that you can do that is to use a metronome we've got a couple of great examples on how to use that right here the first of which is the boss DB 90 this one is going to send audio directly to your mixer or straight into headphones if you like so you have a direct reference point in your ears the second one over here is the soundbrenner pulse and this is really cool for bands who don't have access to any errs or maybe you don't like using any ears in your performance this way everybody can wear one on their wrist it syncs back to a single app so you're all in time together and it just pulses right to the beat if you have questions about any of these recorders or anything else regarding recording your practice make sure you get in contact with your Sweetwater sales engineer [Music] you

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 65,598

Keywords: record my band, basement recording, mike defraties, band practice, how to record a band, recording live band, how to record live music, band recording, band rehearsal, live recording, how to record live band audio, recording, recording a band, online band rehearsal, zoom h1n music recording, how to record live music from mixer, live band recording, live recording setup, multitrack recording mixer, zoom band practice, record live, using zoom for band practice

Id: jcu3sMtp44Y

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019