Tonefiend Forum

Are you intending to record a 'personal' album - your name, focusing on your tunes and playing/singing, or do you want to do a 'band' recording - the bands name, with everyone playing their part?

If it's a personal recording and you just want a fairly basic rhythm section behind you, then there are a lot of fairly cheap and surprisingly decent sounding drum synth/vst/machine packages. I haven't used any in awhile and don't recall all the names, but some google searches should give you the main list and audio samples. Most of the current generation sound quite realistic and are versatile enough to program a realistic and diverse track. There might be a small learning curve, but it would allow you to easily track drums and then focus on guitar/vox.

If you want to use the band members and live recording for the drums, then the investment becomes rather significant. It takes a minimum of 4 mics/channels to track drums and the space really needs to be treated if you plan on adding dry tracks from other spaces simply because the room sound and reflections will be hard to match. So if you've got the mics, enough channels, and the space is treated, then you can try doing it yourself. If you're just recording drums, then I suggest that you have a click track and scratch tracks already prepared and have the drummer play along to it. If you have a suitable space, good separation, and enough mic's/channels, you can dry doing a full 'live' recording, but if you want to re-track vox and guitar later, then you have to make sure that you have sufficient separation so that the discarded performances aren't bleeding through into the drum mics or whatever else you plan to keep.

If that's not an option, then you can consider going into a studio. Finding a big enough studio to live track a full band won't be cheap, but would probably be worth it. On the other hand, for about the same price, you can buy some mid-level mics and a multichannel interface and start developing your own recording skills. The reality is that given the current state of tech, you can build a pretty satisfactory studio for around $4k-10k if you know how to use it and have an adequate space.

For my own purposes, I have a pretty satisfactory setup at home for recording the instruments I play. When I need drums, I have a couple friends who have their own studios and play drums so I just send my tracks over, they add drums and send them back. You might be able to find a similar collaboration if you ask around. Maybe even just post to craigslist in your area for anyone with a recording space that has drums. That might be a cheap option.