Recording - which sound card?

Factual Questions
1

This is probably the wrong place to ask the question, but . . .

Our band need to record a drumkit onto a PC. It’ll need several inputs, but I’m not sure which sound card I need to acquire - I was thinking the Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum, but I’m not so sure.

Any advice?

2

For a good recording you will need a specialized card with good A/D converters and it can get expensive. M-Audio (http://www.M-audio.com) makes nice cards at various price points. There are other manufacurers to look at such as AArdvark and Echo. Http://www.Audio-midi.com is a good web retailer. Keep in mind that you may need a Mic Pramp for this project. There are also Microphones made for recording Drums. I guess it depends on how serious you are. Turtlebeach has (in the past) been regarded by some to be the best alternative to Creative Labs as far as “regular” computer sound cards go.

You may also want to look here: http://www.audioforums.com/home.html
for advice.

Good Luck

3

The Delta DiO 2496 sound card comes highly recommended for its sound output quality, but I’m not sure of its input capabilities.

4

I acquired a Delta MD1010 - 8 ins/outs + S/PDIF; virtually zero latency at ~ 8 minutes. Price tag comes in at about $400, though.

The only PIA about it is that you * must * have a mixer, because it has no way to attenuate input signals: you get -10dB or +4dB via a switch on each channel, but there’s no onboard means to control the input level.

Something you might consider is renting a porta-studio, particularly if you can find a pretty modern one that can dump .wav via, say, USB. Then you get everything you need in a sensible package, can use it to do what you gotta do, dump it, and spend less than the several hundred you’ll need to get into the multi-track ADC game.

5
      • ]MLC, your card has ~ 8 minutes latency?? -You got reamed, dude!
        …
        (-ahem-) Anyway, well, [opinions ahead]…
  • Drums are usually recorded with 4 mics, but you can mix them through a board down to 2 channels for a stereo-input soundcard. It may just take a few tries to get the mix how you want it, but it can stil sound good.
  • You want 24-bit recording, definitely. The only Creative soundcard that does true 24-bit recording is the $200 Audigy 2 External, and it only records in stereo. Will you need all those different connectors?..because you’ll pay for them if you use them or not. The M-Audio Audiophile 2496 has RCA stereo in+out, MIDI in+out and RCA SPDIF in/out with true 24-bit sampling, for 75% what the Audigy 2 Ex costs.
  • You normally need a preamp or mixer, as pro-audio soundcard inputs are line-in level. You can use the headphone-out of any mixer you have or that you can use–not the way the pros do it, but it works. The M-Audio Audio Buddy is the cheapest stereo preamp going: 1/4" + XLR w/phantom.
  • If you find you absolutely must do true multitrack recording, renting equipment isn’t a bad idea. You want 24-bit files as final output, not 16-bit files.
  • The two biggest problems with home-recording are poor acoustics and background noise, and better equipment doesn’t help either of them any–it just records them even better. If you want a real good recording, pay for some studio time. You’ll get much better results than you could by spending the same amount of money buying or renting home recording equipment.
    ~
6

I’ll agree with DougC here, drums will be tough to do well. I have a pretty good home studio, and the only thing I never mess with are live drums, due mostly to acoustics. I would recommend looking around for a inexpensive studio to lay the drum tracks, then finishing up the rest at home. I’m in NYC and I’ve recorded at a few decent places for $30 to $40 and hour. I would hope prices are consistent all over.

7

DougC -

virtually zero latency at about 8 minutes - meaning, recording 8 tacks simultaneously, I noticed no latency with reference to my computers MTC. . .

It’s an excellent little tool, provided that you only conceive of it as an ADC - you still need the mixers, preamps, outboard FX.

(oh, and it’s 24 bit, and all that, too)

But Eater is right: drums are evil nasty things to record - you need really good, tight mics with narrow response patterns, and good isolation between the kit and the monitoring area so you can really hear what the mics are getting; and you’d be amazed how much extra noise is coming off a kit - rattles, buzzes, sympathetic vibrations, dead heads, etc etc etc.

The MD1010 is really, really cool, expecially was a windfall for me, but I honestly don’t have high hopes of mixing drums until after I take my recording engineering/production courses.

8

Why is 24-bit audio so essential? And I assume there’s a good reason why you can’t just record the entire drum set to a single stereo track with two omni/cardioid mics, yes? This topic interests me since I plan to get into home recording soon and I’ve love some advice from people with experience.

9

You can record the drums any which way you like, some methods and equipment as you may guess, will yield better results.

I first recorded drums by telling my bandmates to shut up for 5 minutes, while I played the drums and hummed the song in my head. I would later take the tape (we always recorded our practices), through it in the fourtrack, and voila, stereo drums. Of course the sound quality was horrendous, but you could at least make out the drums, and hell it was free.

I later figured out that I could bring my fourtrack with me, bring a few mics, and place them around the drumkit. I would submix the 4 tracks down to another tape deck, and then dump them back into the fourtrack. More effort, but better sound.

I eventually got an internship at a small studio, and began to mic the kits for the engineers. Mics would go on the snare, kick, 2 for the toms, and 2 overhead to catch all the cymbals. A much better system, and better equipment at my disposal, resulted in a pretty good sounding kit.

Finally when I got behind the board, I went totally nuts. In addition to the setup above, I used the ‘good’ mikes :D, and had the time to sit around and adjust the mike placement. I found that crisscrossing the cymbal mikes (the base is on the left side of the kit, but the boom would stretch over and record the right side, same for other mike but reversed) gave an even better sound because mikes don’t pick up what’s behind them very well. Then the true gods of recording come in, compression and noisegating. Compression is nice for fattening up the sound, and keeping a cap on your levels. Noise gating will clean up the raw tracks immensely. I would throw a gate on the bass kick, which would give me a track of pure silence or the crystal clear millisecond thump of the drum, followed again by pure silence. No cymbals, no toms, no snare, nothing. I would do the same for the snare, so again, perfect silence, until the snare is hit, and then back to perfect silence. No bass, cymbals, etc, on my snare track. No doubt you’ve figured out that this will give you an exceptional recording. Over the years I’ve become so obsessed with doing this, that on any song I produce, I replace inaction on any track with pure nothing, in hope of getting rid of any minor imperfection. I recently spent 2 days erasing the breaths on a vocal track that the singer was doing between words.

Any way the point of all of this, (aside of me babbling about music, which I’ll do at the drop of a hat), was about recording a single drum track with 2 mics.

I’m sure with some time, and a decent acoustical environment, you could do that no problem. I’ve heard some good lo-fi stuff, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did it with 2 mics.

There is not really a right or wrong way to do things, it’s only the end result that matters.

10

Please excuse the numerous grammar mistakes above. :slight_smile:

11
      • It’s just an opinion, but it’s pretty widely held: every time you manipulate an audio [digital] file with a filter or effect, you lose “audible detail” in the audio file. You do notice this, particularly with high-frequency sounds–such as cymbals. Lower-frequency sounds can be recorded in 16-bits with much less noticeable quality loss. Except that…
  • The other reason 16-bit cards are “bad” is that 16-bit cards are cheaper, and cheaper cards tend to have more recording distortion and background noise. So it’s not that 16-bits is so bad, but that cheap soundcards are bad. If you get a 24-bit card, you’re getting a better soundcard overall.
  • The reason that many people use at least four mics for drums is that they feel that there aren’t any mics that can capture high-frequencies well without overloading from the low frequencies. So it’s typical to set up two overhead mics for the cymbals, and two floor mics for the drums. If you use two stereo mics, you have to set them far back from the drum kit and generally either the cymbals record well or the drums record well, but not both… depending on who you ask… (much of all this comes down to personal opinions)
  • And so nothing anyone says matters: “Ordinary people” listening on “ordinary stereos” won’t notice such differences. Most people have a hard time hearing the difference between a minidisc and a CD, but many musicians feel that their efforts are priceless and must be recorded perfectly, so they go chasing “little round faeries”–those numbers like “.01% THD”, “.005%THD”, “.0001%THD”… You can record however you want; if you like how it ends up sounding, then go with it. But you’re not going to get that “Phil Collins” or “Neal Peart” sound out of two inexpensive mics, so don’t even bother with worrying that your recording doesn’t sound like what you hear on the radio–because it won’t. Professional recordings require professional studios.
    ~