Recording live or not?

[Shibby]

my band wants to make our demo. Should we do it it live or each individually record our part? The other guitarist in my band teacher has a thing for 8 mics. I'm not sure what it is. All he told me was that its digital.

thanks alot,
Shibby

[supercobra]

Hey Shibby.
There are two main ways to do it:
1) Playing Live-that means all of you playing the song together, recording simultaneously

2) Multitracking - thats where you record one instrument at a time.

The advantage to recording live is you can get more of a groove to tape. Multitracking can rob the song of its spontaneous quality. The problem with recording live is, everyone has to nail his/her part, or else you all do another take. Also, you will get a lot of bleed-ver from instrument to instrument.

A third alternative is to use a scratch track. That's where you record a live take, where you can get a good groove. Then, you start recording individual parts on separate tracks, over top of the groove you established. After you have gotten all the parts reworked, you can discard the scratch track.

With the setup your guitar player has, you will have some limitations, but there's no reason why you can't do a full-band scratch track on one or two channels. Then, you can use the other channels for individual parts. If you do a full band scratch track, then overdub with drums and bass, you may be able to get rid of the scratch track at that point, so you can re-use those channels.
Good luck. I'd like to hear your demo.

[supercobra]

Shibby,
Did you get a chance t lay some tracks down yet? I'm interested.

[Shibby]

Not yet, we've been really busy with finals and stuff. We're planning to do it in a few weeks after my singer comes back from idaho. We're planning to do it live. we just want a basic demo for now so we figured that that would do.

i'll let you know how it goes when we start.

lata man,
Shibby