recording band practice

Most internal mics are designed to pick up sound from all directions, and at very low levels (eg voices sitting at a table).

To get a better recording, you're going to need to use the sends from your PA. If you just add one mic over the drum kit to pick up all the instruments, and send it out an Aux out to the right mic input on your G4(don't add it to the PA mix), and take the main line-level signal into the left input on the G4, you should have something reasonable that you can work with, without buying too much gear.

If you only have one line-input on the G4, then you'll have to mix all of the mics into the Aux send.

Make sense?

-Laz

What my band (4 poor, ambitious teenagers) does is put a boom-box tape recorder in the middle of us arranged in a circle (instead if us facing something like an audience on one side). Being in a garage, everything echoes loudly, and it sounds suprisingly good on tape. Drums, both guitars, and keyboard all show up quite nicely. Not professional strength, mind you, but that didn't stop us from showing every poor soul who walked in the door our tape :lol:

We did have to do some tests to get the amp volumes right, and figure out which way to point the boom box (the mic is in the speakers, we think). Just takes some fooling around.

get a good microphone an a laptop........i prefer windows based cuz i know how it works. In windows there is a video recorder were you can record video and create dvd's and such..........hook the mic to your laptop and hit record on the Windows Movie Maker it ill record all audio picked up.....then go and edit out all the dead space with the movie editor and you can have a tracked CD when your done i've done this many times......

of course u need to balance everything before this, and put it a decent distance infront of your group

I use a MiniDisc recorder with a set of binaural mics when I go to a bands rehersal. Works well enough to talk with them about song structure and the like.