[tls11823]

My band wanted to create some demo tracks that we could send out to potential employers. We needed to record drums, bass, two guitars, keyboards, and from one to four vocal parts, depending on the song. I have an eight-input Zoom R16, which isn't nearly enough to capture everything at once and do it justice. Our plan was to start out with just the rhythm tracks (bass, drums, and the predominant rhythm part - usually guitar or keyboard), and then to layer things from that.

Before that, we had been recording our practice sessions. It was definitely non-optimal, since we were all playing in sort of a circle, crowded into a too-small space. Everything bled into everything else, and we only had one track for all the vocals and three tracks for the drums But it was good enough to listen to our practices and fine-tune our parts.

One day, the drummer had a suggestion. Why not start with a rehearsal recording and, one by one, lay down new tracks to replace the original ones? It was an interesting idea, and we gave it a go. We started by muting the previous drum tracks and letting the drummer play along with "the band". Yeah, there was still some bleed from the previous drums into other tracks, but that was easy enough to ignore at the time. After he'd laid down the drums, I did the same with the bass part. That was easy enough to do, since the original bass part was recorded with a DI. Little by little, we replaced each original track with a newer, cleaner version with no bleed. Each vocal part got its own track instead of all of them being squished together, and the end result was actually pretty decent.

Best of all, we got a "live" feel, since it was all based on the original recording, which had everybody on it. Every track that was laid down was done while listening to some combination of the original and whatever replaced each part. It was interesting enough that people didn't get weighed down with blindly playing, and everybody had a good time in the process. And, while we were laying down drums, we did all six of our demo songs in one night. Then I did the same with the other parts on separate nights, so nobody had to hang around listening while others were recording. Well, that's a bit of a lie - we did sometimes do multiple vocal parts simultaneously to provide a more gelled sound, especially for backing and harmony vocals. But it was still a pretty layered approach.

You may want to try a similar method. It allows you to exploit more input channels than you could for a true live performance, while still preserving a live vibe and giving you plenty of tracks to get everything laid down nice and clean.