I was recently talking with some friends in another rock band who had just bought a digital recorder, but didn’t really have a clue where to start.

Like many new people to recording they thought you all just plug in and record at once.  This might work if you had an expensive recording studio with sound proofed rooms for each instrument, where you would get no bleedthrough on to other channels.   However most of the time you should build up a song track by track.What follows is a very basic first time recording guide for a rock band.  This assumes you have mics for everything you need and something to track with, headphones and monitors.

To start get your band into the room and mic up your drums.  At this point the drums are the center of attention.  You should mic them up as best you can.    Generally you will want a mic for the kick and one for the snare and a couple of overhead hanging ones to capture the rest of the kit.   If you are lucky and have triggers, great, you will be able to have a seperate track with no mic bleed through for the mics. 

Find the best position for the mics on the drums and get a good sound.  Record an impromptu drum solo and listen back.   When you like the sound you are ready to go.  If it’s not the greatest drums sound ever, don’t worry you can eq it later.  But, get the drums neutral right now.  Dont’ adjust the eq to sweeten the sound, EQ should be used to balance the mix with all the instruments.

You should have your guitars micd or straight in depending on if you use amps or modeling processors.  And the singer should have his performance mic.

Since the band will be playing in one room the mics will all have bleed from the other instruments.  So, try keep the guitar/vocal/instrument mics away from the drum kit.  At this point it will be much easier to avoid bleed if the guitars can just plug straight in with pedals and or modeling amps at this time and play with headphones on.

The first run of the song will be a reference track for the drummer to play with.  The band will play the song and all the tracks will be recorded.  Make sure that someone besides the drummer counts off so he knows when to start.

Once the reference track is done the drummer will play solo to the playback of the reference track.   This is so that you can get the drums recorded without any of the guitars bleeding over into the drum mics.  Once again if you have drum triggers or an electronic drum kit, or the guitars are straight in and thus no mic bleed, you can skip this step. This is why in recording studios musicans record with headphones on, so the person recording can hear the song without the playback getting recorded over the microphone capturing the voice or instrument being tracked.

Listen to the drums both along to the song and solo to find any flubs or timing mistakes.  Make sure the song is as on time as the drummer can play with no fluctuations.

Once the drums are done it’s time to lay down the bass track.

At this point it’s important to note that this is not a final mix.  So, if any player currently recording needs to hear more of a particular instrument in the headphones, that is alright. Check the bass and make sure it’s locking nice with the drummer.

Next would be the rhythm guitar (s).

Then would follow any guitar solo, or color parts.

Finally the vocalist would redo his or her part to get rid of any bleedthrough on his vocal mic.

So, you can see we start with reference track (s) and then build the song from the bottom up.  Each track is re recorded to eliminated mic bleed from other instruments.