Drum recording setup - Will this work ok?!

[mwbowen]

Just thought about this and won't get chance to have a go at it for a few days but in theory will this setup work fine and sound good?

I'm looking to do more or less all guitars and vocals at home but want to record proper drums in our rehearsal room with several mics.

Mic up the kit into a tascam 2488 - get a good mix on the desk - then RCA the desk into a Griffin iMic and record onto a track in Auria. Essentially using the tascam as a mixer to get a stereo drum recording.

This will record as a stereo track in Auria as mixed originally on the tascam perfect for adding my overdubs later surely?

Thought I'd get some feedback before getting the iMic and being annoyed at how little it does for me! To be able to work like that would be perfect for me - spend a day at our rehearsal room getting lots of drum tracks nailed then taking my time at home to record overdubs.

Thanks guys.

[Chris M]

Hello,

Yes this is a totally feasible set up--however, the Griffin iMic is fairly low quality. If you're using decent mics and the Tascam unit, you may want to look into a better two channel interface. The Focusrite 2i2 or the Presonus 22VSL would both be good options.

Best,

Chris
WaveMachine Labs

[mwbowen]

Yeah I did think it might be a bit rubbish.. The Presonus looks great. Be good to have a totally portable studio.
Cheers!

[mwbowen]

The Akai EIE looks ridiculously great value for money mind. Ah it's a tricky one!

[offthesky]

Hello,

Yes this is a totally feasible set up--however, the Griffin iMic is fairly low quality.

i've been using a griffin imic for a while as it's totally portable and highly affordable(so i can spend more money on auria's awesome plugins!). plus it has a "mic" setting that supplies extra power to my stereo mini mic. since it's powered completely by my ipad2, i can also run other usb midi devices with it via a hub: all non powered and mobile - i've used a nanokey and a behringer umx25 together with the imic+hub with great success.

anyway it's an incredibly noisy device(especially on input) but i've found creative ways around that: i've noticed it's extra noisy when the ipad is at full charge but taking the screen brightness up to 100% fixes this. when the ipad's battery drops down to about 90%, the screen brightness can be set to any level without any extra noise from the iMic(guess i can't speak for the ipad 1 or 3 on this problem/fix). if you have the fabfilter pro Q vst within auria, you can notch filter out all 6 main native noise frequencies emitted internally by the iMic's input channel (using "notch" for each band and q's set to 40): 996hz, 1994khz, 2985, 3980, 5040, and 6164khz(btw, i set the q on this last one to around 15). i also add a low shelf and high shelf band to bring down some extra hiss/humm in the high end. also using auria's built in expander you can gate out even more hiss, rather well i might add.

obviously, like chris said, this is not an ideal audio interface by any stretch however it is highly affordable and 100% mobile and if you can send it a moderately hot signal, the noise is not noticeable(especially with the proQ+expander technique i mention above added in there). the only other interface i've read about that's high-fi and 100% self/battery powered is the zoom h4 but not sure how well it works in relation to auria.

anyway, hope all that nerd-babble above helps others out there get better quality out of the imic.