Recording Again

FW has an interest in recording and I have no interest in paying for such things, and so I've started futzing with my equipment again to see what is possible.

Last night I recorded several drum tracks for Breeders songs. I did a dynamic mic inside the bass drum and two dynamic mics overhead. Ran those three through a mixer and then stereo out to my usb interface and into Audacity. Turned out real nice.

My laptop then promptly freaked out. The old gal is in her final days and is totally full. It is an XP (no longer supported) machine with a relatively small hard drive by today's standards. I probably need to strip all but the essentials off the thing and then store any large files on an external drive. The Audacity project files are pretty huge.

If I ever have a few thousand extra dollars I'd like to get a dedicated recording laptop and a multi-track usb interface with 8 or so inputs. But this is unlikely to ever happen. Really for what I need, what I have is fine. I just need to clean up the laptop.

As for recording FW, the challenges are less about my equipment than about my expertise in using it ...and about the level of experience with recording in general of the performers. And I'm not sure I'm up to negotiating the ups and downs of the process. But in the meantime I've got a nice start on the Breeders tribute recording that I've been meaning to do for a few years now.