Hi all,

Our band (pub-rock kind of thing) are starting to edge towards real public performance. We've played a couple of times in public, but only in front of sympathetic audiences (friends, or they were before we started playing ;-) so we've no real idea how we sound, or what we need to improve to raise our game.

What we reckon we need is to be able to record ourselves in full flow during practise, and then play back to see how it's going. We tend to practise with the same setup as playing for real (arranged as if on stage and facing out, rather than all facing together in a group) so that helps. We'd also like to be able to record ourselves when we do go for it and start doing it for real, so that we can dissect what went wrong afterwards.

I should mention that I've already seen the earlier threads here and here.

So, any suggestions? We don't have unlimited budgets (the amps, mixer, etc have expended all our brownie points with our other halves!) so it's got to be cheap. From the previous thread, the best idea seems to be a stereo pair of mics set up in front of stage. Linked to an MP3 recorder (they're now cheap) via a stereo pre-amp (which I can build myself), this should do the trick.

Can anyone see any obvious flaws in this plan? And does anyone have any suggestions for particular mics to use?

Cheers,

Graham.