Outstanding Doug & Sue! Could you share your recording setup?
Thanks, Steve! Sure, I'm happy to share it, just bring your guitar up when we can travel again - and bring Bruni, too!
But maybe that's not what you meant...
As it happens, we spent the past three weeks rebuilding our recording setup and we made this recording in the middle of all that. The gear we finished with isn't all the same gear we started with. This post goes over the process we used for the video. Probably more detail than you want, but I can't help that - I think it's in my genes.
Until recently, our recording gear was pretty basic. The focus for our music is learning to play and perform, so recording has been a tool for gauging our playing and guiding our learning, not an end unto itself. Most of the youtubes I've posted to the forum here or in BGU Challenges were made in my office: mic or guitar > analog mixer > USB interface > Windows camera app. For VJR audio recordings I've used that same setup with Audacity for my DAW. Sue was recording her drums with a couple of budget mics, somewhat randomly placed and without purposeful EQ'ing, fed through our PA mixer to the mic input of a ZOOM Q2n camera, which she was using as an audio recorder; the video came along as sort of a bonus. Quick & dirty, but as we spent more time at home these past few months, we've realized some limitations and we've been seeking ways to get better quality in our recorded output, to have better options for monitoring while recording, and to make the recording process easier (esp. for the drums). So we made some changes, and the following outlines the current setups.
Upstairs in my office/studio, the system was and still is relatively simple. I have my guitars, a few mics, and a *new* mixer (Presonus Studiolive AR8 USB) with a built-in, 8-in/4-out USB audio interface, connected to my laptop. The biggest advantage of the new system is monitoring flexibility. Also, the Presonus audio drivers brought the latency way down compared to the old interface which was relying on WMA and ASIO4ALL. Anyway, to get this party started, I recorded scratch vocals and guitar to a click track in a DAW on the laptop (I used Reaper), then I added a scratch bass guitar track. When that was done, I mixed the four tracks (click, vocals, guitar, bass) in Reaper and exported an MP3 file for Sue to use as a backing track for recording the drums.
The drums live downstairs in the music room, aka Sue's office, which you see in the video. There we have another mixer (QSC Touchmix 8), also new, with 8 mic inputs that is handling the 6 drum mics (kick, snare, 2 toms, 2 overheads - room for 2 more!). It also has a couple of 2-channel (stereo) line inputs. We send a backing track from a phone or tablet into one of those inputs. The other takes the output from a 2-in/2-out USB audio interface connected to Sue's laptop, which sits next to her at the drums, so she can play backing tracks from her PC or record to it if she wants. The mixer has on-board EQ, compressors, gates and effects, so we are mixing the drums down on the mixer to a single drum channel out to record. The mixer does not have a built-in audio interface, but it has quite a few output channels (2 mains, 4 AUX channels, and stereo headphones). We set up two output channels to carry the "record" tracks - drum mix on one, backing track on the other - to an external audio recorder. Two others are connected to the inputs of the USB audio interface on Sue's laptop. We use two more for a monitor mix for Sue's headphones, and finally two more feed the PA which acts as our "studio monitors." The recorder we used for the drums on the video was the Zoom Q2n camera (see note below). The drum mix and the backing track - the "record" channels - were sent to the camera's mic/line input as the L & R channels, respectively, so we captured not only the video but also the final drum track along with, but separate from, the backing track. (The audio is later removed and replaced with the final mix, but having it available for reference is helpful for syncing up the video files during editing.)
For the other tracks, I brought my laptop downstairs to record guitar, vocals, and bass tracks directly into the Reaper project, where I also imported Sue's newly recorded drum track. I used a large-diaphragm condenser mic for the vocals. I used another mixer and separate USB interface (my "old" office setup, which is also the traveling studio setup we bring along in the motorhome) to connect to the laptop. The guitar went through some pedals and a Sansamp into the mixer. Bass guitar was direct to the mixer. I used the scratch tracks in the DAW to set up a new monitor mix for each of these takes, replacing scratch tracks with the final tracks as we went along. We used Sue's laptop, built-in webcam and the Windows camera app to record videos of my takes, and I sent my monitor mix to the PC line in for the reference audio, though we could have used the Zoom camera instead.
I mixed the audio tracks down to a stereo WAV file for the video soundtrack.
I'm using Wondershare Filmora 9.5 for video editing. It was affordable, the newest version is pretty capable, and so far it seems not too difficult to learn, though I've only just begun to try things like that TTTAAC video. I had used Microsoft's free Windows video editing software quite a lot about 15 years ago but I've not played much with video editing since then.
A few notes:
Using the Zoom camera for audio recording is a holdover from our original setup, more direct but less flexible. When we made that video, we had a deadline (a "Challenge" on Sue's online drum forum). We were partway through setting up this new recording system in the music room, so we paused the setup project and switched to Git 'Er Done mode for the song. Today (a week and a half later), we would record the drum track directly into a DAW on Sue's laptop and run the Zoom camera just for the video, but we didn't have that available when she was laying down the drum track.
A little while ago I started using Reaper instead of Audacity. I'm realizing that a "real" DAW has significantly more (or more easily accessible) features than Audacity, and I'm hooked - although I'll keep using Audacity for quick recordings. But my new office mixer came with a version of Studio One so I'm switching to that from Reaper, the main reason being that there are a lot of folks using S1 here on this forum so I have good resources for advice & help.
My laptop is a Microsoft Surface Go, which is a minuscule 2-in-1 computer featuring a low-power Pentium processor. As much as I do love this PC, I selected it for portability while traveling in a motorhome, not so much for multi-track audio/video recording and editing while isolating at home during pandemics. I have it hooked up to a 24-inch external display in my office, so I have plenty of screen space; still, this system is barely adequate for running a powerful DAW and it is downright painful for video editing.
