In the last few months my church, Life Connection Church, has successfully setup a recording strategy that allows us to capture and track each channel before it gets to the board. This has many advantages over capturing board mixes. I wanted to share with you what we’ve done on truly a shoe-string budget.

What’s wrong with just recording the board mix?

The problems with a board mix are typically quality and flexibility. Starting with quality, your house mix is for just that, your house. This isn’t usually ideal for what sounds good in isolation(headphones) because you’re not mixing for isolation. You’ll find this especially true when mixing for small venues and have to deal with unruly stage volume.

Flexibility is lost when you just have a stereo recording and no tracks available to work with in post-production. There’s not many places to go with a stereo recording, you can do some EQ’ing perhaps but it’s all global, not individual instruments or vocals. So you can see how this impacts quality level.

How to capture tracks before the board

There are plenty of ways to do this but I’m going to show how we did it. For just over $400 we purchased the PreSonus FireStudio Project firewire recording interface. This has 8 XLR inputs and can be daisy chained with more units to satisfy however many channels you need to capture. So right from the snake we take the channels we want to capture and insert into the PreSonus and then use a 1/4″ patch cables out of the PreSonus unit into the board. Effectively using the PreSonus as an intercept unit, it does no processing (outside of the pre-amp) just passes the signal on to the board. So as far as the FOH is concerned there’s no change besides gain level with the PreSonus preamps.

One hurdle we had to clear was we didn’t have the funds to purchase more than one unit, yet we have about 15 channels in use that we needed to capture for live recording. Here’s where we had to get creative. 8 of those 15 channels were for the drums. So what we did was take the drum sub channel out into the PreSonus so now we take the board mix of the drums and have 1 channel of drums on the PreSonus. We have our drums on their own stereo sub channel on the board so this was as easy as taking the 1/4″ sub outs on the back of the board and routing them to the PreSonus. This isn’t ideal for the same reasons board mixes aren’t ideal, but has worked ok for us. Going forward we’d like to buy another unit dedicated for the drums.

What to use for recording the captured tracks

Being able to capture the tracks is one thing, but then what do you capture them to is the other part of the equation. There are numerous software recording tools you could use. PreSonus comes with Cubase but there’s also better options like Logic and Pro Tools. We use a free option, Garage Band for the mac. Eventually we’ll get another unit and then switch to Logic but presently for these demo mixes and for sermon podcasting this is suiting our quality needs just fine.

An important feature here is that this unit works whether you are plugged into a computer and recording or not. No rewiring is necessary when switching between the two.

What’s the bottom line cost?

PreSonus FireStudio Project = $425
1/4″ patch snake = $35
Recording software = $0 (Garage Band)

Total Cost: $460

You can listen to some of the mixes from our setup here and more recently here. You can hear the improvement in quality from the older sample to the more recent one as we get more use with the unit.

Took a shot of my live setup with my iPhone this past Sunday. Thought it might be fun to diagram exactly what I play with.

1. Apple MacBook Pro (GR) – this is my workhorse. In addition to running Guitar Rig I use this for most all my personal work. It’s an older MBP but it gets the job done. 2.33 Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 120GB HD
2. Guitar Rig 3 – After leading worship and playing lead guitar in a lot of worship bands in smaller venues I was sick of dealing with stage volume issues. I was having to turn my amp down so low amp didn’t have the chance to get to the warm part of the tubes. Literally I was having to have my amp down at 1 so the FOH guys would stop complaining. So I was really limited in my tone and sound. All direct options whether software or multi effects had such poor quality and weren’t an option until I found Guitar Rig. I experimented with it on some recording projects, then tried it live and was very happy with the flexibility and sound quality. So this is my rig for small venues and I highly recommend it for congregations 300 or smaller.
3. Behringer FCB 1010 Midi Foot Controller – I don’t particularly like the foot controller that comes with Guitar Rig, so I just got the software edition and got my own midi foot controller. 2 foot pedals is a must, dedicated volume pedal then the other for trem speed, wah, what have you.
4. Presonus FireBox – “2 out of 3 musicians recommend Presonus for their firewire audio interface needs.” I’m one of the 2.
5. Apple Macbook Pro (Reason) -My newer machine. 2.4Ghz Intel Core Duo, 4GB Ram, 150GB HD
6. Reason 4 – I talked a bit about how this came to be in an earlier post. Slowly been integrating more synth tracks, live and recorded.
7. M-Audio Oxygen8 v2 – wanted something small and ultra portable with a decent amount of assignable controls and transport. This fit the bill. Great controller for Reason.

Guitars

1. Fender American Standard Strat 3-tone sunburst – not old enough to say the year yet. Over 10yrs old, less than 30.
2. Gibson Super Jumbo Acoustic, J100 Xtra – I love jumbo acoustics, I like them to sound full, deep and rich. Not a fan of bright acoustics.

Some other time I’ll diagram my amp and stomp box setup. So that’s what I play regularly, comment with your setup.