How I record 8 track demos live

Recording is extremely tedious when recording individual tracks one at a time. Recently I was recording a song that way with my band and we spent hours just trying to get one song with drums recorded on it. Everyone was feeling restless and bored after a while so I suggested trying to get a live demo take with the whole band playing. The energy in the room shifted and suddenly everyone was excited to play again. It no longer felt like a chore but an opportunity to perform for someone to hear. There was life in the room again.

Recording live demo takes does have it drawbacks, mainly the noise bleed from instruments creeping into microphones across the room. The recording will always sound a little noisy no matter how tight the performance. You will also need superb band performances to get good sounding recordings. Lastly, it is expensive to acquire the gear necessary to record a whole band live. On that note lets dive into what I used.

Setup

In my “Home recording essentials” article I take about the basic equipment you need to record music yourself. The biggest difference from the article is recording 8 track demos will require more mics and at least an 8 channel mixing board.

The computer I use is a “MacBook Pro 16”. I use “Logic Pro X” for my DAW. For my mixing board I have a “Tascam 24” which is a 24 channel mixing board that we plug the PA system into. The PA is actually just one speaker right now and its an “Electro Voice” 12” speaker.

From here I have 7 microphones that I run into the mixing board and one direct line in cable for the bass. I use a “Shure beta 52A” for the Kick drum place about 1” in front of the hole. A “Senheiser e 906” for the snare placed about 1” above the snare head at a slight angle. Two “Shure Sm 57”s for the overhead mics on the drum kit equally distanced from the center of the kit. So for drums we are only using four microphones to record on these demo tracks. This is beneficial in a couple ways.

First of all, it’s cheaper. You can get a cheaper 8 - 12 channel board as long as it has usb connection to a computer for recording functionality. Less channels dedicated to drums means more channels available for other instruments. It also means you will be spending less money on microphones which can really add up quickly.

Secondly, using only four tracks for drums makes mixing the demo much simpler. Mixing drums can be a serious headache when someone is using 8 or mics on their kits to record. Getting the levels just right on 5 different toms, multiple overheads mics, kick drum, snare, and various other percussion instruments is simply a nightmare for most. I personally can’t stand it. Mixing four tracks is relatively straight forward and will allow you to focus on the overall sound easier.

For the guitars I use a “Senheiser e 906” for each of the guitar amps hanging directly onto the amp mesh at the center of a speaker cone. We usually have two guitarists in the room. For the bass I use a XLR cable to direct line the bass into the board for a clean signal.

Amp placement is another important factor when setting up. To try and minimize noise bleed you have to take into consideration which direction your microphones are picking up signal and whose amp might be faced to directly at an unintended microphone. The fact is there will always be noise bleed unless you are in isolated, treated studio situations. We play in a small studio space, one room, not treated for noise, and lots of noise bleed. It makes mixing the song harder down the road and it’s pretty hard to reduce the overall noise in the mix but this set up isn’t intended for professional recording.

Performance

This part is more straight forward, you just need to get an awesome take of a song performed together. There are a couple ways to approach this though. You can either play everything together all at once like you would a live show or play as few instruments as possible and dub over the rest of the tracks after the base structure of the song is recorded.

Vocal tracks are usually the most important and the vocal mic will usually capture a lot of sound from the room while recording live. The best way to reduce noise in the vocals is to actually just dub them over once the song arrangement is recorded. The problem with that approach is sometimes the band relies on the vocals to know where they are at in the arrangement. Live vocals also bring that energy you need at times to capture the best performance from the band.

The way I do it with my band is just record everyone live together in a single take. Then we drop out the vocal take and record a new one isolated over the track. The old vocal track ends up being so low in the mix you don’t really hear it because we are playing loud rock n roll music. If we were recording softer more delicate tunes I wouldn’t recommend going over the vocal track and would instead just try to record without vocals during the bands performance. You don’t need that high octane energy for the vocals in the case of softer music. Instead, you want tight and clean performances with less noise involved.

My other recommendation is to leave out guitar solos or intricate lead parts that require precision until the base song is recorded. That way you can go over and have multiple tries at the perfect solo in isolation. It can be very frustrating to have to redo a take just because the guitarist didn’t come in the perfect bend on their solo.

Final thoughts

The most important thing is to make sure the mic setups and gain levels are adjusted to get the best possible signal for the recording. This will make mixing the song much easier afterwards. I’ll go over how I mix these demo tracks in another post.

Recording live is much more enjoyable than recording track by track and can end up sounding pretty good if done correctly. It takes out all the monotony of playing to a metronome over and over again trying to get the perfect performance. It allows the music to occur in its natural state, alive and full of energy.