Tracktion and recording drums

[DarkLogan]

Hey guys. I so don't know how to use this program. What I am trying to do is record my drums. I read a pdf and this is a part of that •Within Tracktion, select “USB Audio CODEC 1” to record from channel 1 of the Mackie mixer (left side) or “USB Audio CODEC 2” (right side). Click the “R” button on the track to arm the track for recording. I did all that and of course I am only getting audio out of the left side of my headphones. I cant seem to find anybody who has used this software to record drums. I can really use some help here trying to understand what it is that is going on and how this whole thing works.

[Peter Widdicombe]

This is pretty open... what are your expectations?

First - what hardware do you have (or willing to invest in... <grin>)?

If you expect to simply play a legacy drumkit and record it in stereo, you may only need 2 good microphones, and MAY not even need a hardware mixer (i.e. if your microphones are USB-capable) - or you need a simple mixer (your Mackie, but you didn't specify which one...). This MAY only give you an overall 2 tracks on the low end ones, or if you have a high-end one with firewire and individual instrument microphones, you can separate into individual tracks per drum or cymbal... ?

The other way to go is with electronic drums - on the surface, a whole lot easier to record with; and you could even record the MIDI output from the drums, so you don't have to worry about neighbors or room accoustics. Most electronic drum sets also have multiple audio outputs so you can have mixer control over each; but if you do, then make sure you have a way of separating them in the mix, if you want to customize individual instruments during a later mixdown. (You can also play BACK the MIDI stream from electronic drums after "fixing" or augmenting; so sometimes can still do a lot without a huge multi-channel mixer...).

[DarkLogan]

That's my fault. Here is what I have and what im trying to do. I have a 7 piece drum set. All drums are miced and are plugged into my mixer ( Mackie profx12) I know nothing about mixing or separating channels or any of that type of stuff.

I read and set things the way it says on tracktions website under FAQ and all I get is audio out of one side of my headphones. I have a play along song with no drums that I want to play along to as well.

At the end of the day what im trying to do is film cover tunes to put on youtube. I went out and bought a camera and a beachtek audio device. With that the mixer would plug into the beachtek and the beachtek plugged into the cam. That was to skip the whole synching video with audio process. But the audio keeps going up and down up and down and is annoying. So somebody told me to lay down the drum track and sync the video after that. Which is what I was trying to avoid. Which leads me to Tracktion and I have no idea what im doing.

[frankvg]

Try reading the manual:

http://www.tracktion.com/wp/wp-content/ ... Rev-A4.pdf

If after that you still got questions, please be more specific about settings or post a screenshot. Otherwise we'll just have to guess what it is you are doing.

[Peter Widdicombe]

For one thing, the beachtek device - is it stereo, and is it getting Left/Right feeds; and is the camera capable of recording stereo? Out of the Mackie, do you have the mikes panned left/right, or center?

for the audio up/down, your camera is probably using automatic level control, so will be pumping up the gain during the "quieter" moments, and bringing it back down again when it gets loud... You'll want to disable that on the camera.

[metrognome]

Also not spoken yet - the Mackie mixer only outputs L/R.
The drums (all 7 mics) would need to be balanced (vol/tone/pan) in the mixer, listening through the control room phones output, before sending to any other device.

There are several beachtek devices, each serving different needs.

[chico.co.uk]

Reading what you said you're already doing, you could try this;

First check whether you can "combine" the two inputs, to record them as a single stereo input, instead of two mono inputs (which is what you're currently setup as)

To do that, go to the Settings tab in tracktion, the "Audio Devices" section, and look over on the right, where you should have some audio inputs. Im expecting you'll see two audio inputs there, which may be called "USB Audio CODEC 1" and "USB Audio CODEC 2", from what you've said.

Click one of the audio inputs, and look down at the bottom of the screen for a radio button that says "Treat as Stereo Channel Pair". If that's there, and not selected, select it, and you may find the two inputs disappear, and one appears instead.

If so, assign that input to a track, arm it to record, and you can record your full drum mix like that. You won't be able to separate out the individual drums, in Tracktion, if (as someone said earlier) there's only a stereo out from the mixer you're using. That's a limitation of your hardware mixer, NOT of Tracktion.

[ianballarddrums]

I highly recommend investing in a good interface (I use a Focusrite Scarlett that was $350) and mixing in Tracktion instead of mixing and summing from the Mackie and expecting stellar results. Most of what I do is track drums and I only use 4 mics (Gil Johns method, look it up) and have clients all over that love my drum sounds. You can get a Scarlett 20i20 that has 8 pres for $100 more if you must have 7 mics on the kit. Still, you are missing a lot of potential bypassing mixing each track in Tracktion since you can't use plugins to compress, EQ and add FX individually. It's really hard to get a really great sounding mix on self-contained summing mixers like those abd the Behringer ones. They have OK fx but they aren't even as good as the FX built into Tracktion. I understand money doesn't grow on trees and it might be hard to pay up for that now but when you can, you'll be glad you did. As much as I love real faders, knobs and using real analog gear, modern DAWs do so much more than those summing mixers can. Presonus and a few other brands make wonderful interfaces too but I like the zero-latency software that comes with the Focusrite that allows you to bypass the output of Tracktion (that will have lots of latency if your computer isn't great) for monitoring for tracking.