anomie life

My next incremental step in recording was the purchasing of some sort of external mixer. I thought, “mixing in the computer is great, but only being able to record 1 channel at a time is annoying.” At this point I had grabbed a drum kit off of Ebay, a Taye RockPro, and found out its tantamount to impossible to record drums with just 1 input.

So a friend of mine, that dabbled in recording at one time, had a few items she wanted to unload, among these things was a Yamaha MD8 Mixer. This was a pretty decent 8-channel mixer that outputted to Minidiscs, a format Sony tried to push a few years ago, and, like most of their proprietary standards, it pretty much fizzled out. She also sold me a pair of Behringer B2031B Truth studio monitors and a Behringer MDX1400 compressor.

At first I thought the mixer was great. I could record my guitar and voice at the same time! What a revolutionary concept. But then I realized that an 8-channel mixer was almost pointless with only 1 microphone. So I looked online for the most inexpensive drum microphone set that had the most microphones and I decided on the Nady DMK 7-microphone Drum Package. It came with 2 condenser microphones for the overheads, a larger microphone for the kick, and 4 microphones for the rest of the drums.

At last I finally had a sufficient quantity of microphones, but now my problem was adapting them into the mixer. One big annoyance with the MD8 was that it only had 2 XLR inputs. The rest were just regular 1/4″ Line inputs. So this meant I had to buy a bunch of short Female XLR to 1/4″ cables. And I had to buy cables, not adapters, because all the inputs were so close together that a large transformer would take up so much room that the cables beside them wouldn’t fit.

Eventually I got all the right cables and was finally able to record some serious music. Well, not quite. I never thought I would need more than 8-channels, but only having 8-channels and the lack of being able to mix on the computer left most of the “songs” recorded seriously lacking.
The only really half decent thing we recorded was something I liked to call “Oriental Distortion”, a rock/punk version of “We Three Kings”. We recorded it live with 1 channel for Jimmy D on the Bass, 1 channel for Scott on the Electric, and then the other 6 for drums (1 for Kick, 2 for Overheads, 1 Snare, 1 for Lo-Tom and Hi-Tom, and 1 for the Floor Tom). I wish I could find an mp3 of that. Alas, I’m sure its lost somewhere on my desktop at home.

I did find one great, even money-making use for the MD8: Recording Voice Recitals. A friend of mine, Kendra, had her voice recital coming up and I can’t remember whether I volunteered or she asked me, but I got permission from her teacher to record it. And so I brought my mixer and drum mics to Meredith College. I just set up the two condenser mics on either side of the stage and let it run.

It worked surprisingly well, but that was the easy part. What took the most amount of time was figuring out how to get the audio into my computer and slicing each person’s performance into a separate track. I used some random program I got from download.com and a stereo phono to 1/8″ adapter to get it into the computer. Once I had one giant audio file I used Adobe Audition to slice it up into individual tracks and burn it to a CD. Then I had to make about 15 copies for all of the students that purchased one. Needless to say, it was a pain in the butt. Yet, I still think it was worth it and it ultimately made the purchase of that mixer actually useful.