Does anybody have any advice to record a cheap but decent sounding demo for a starting band?

we're Drums, Bass, one guitar and a singer playing Heavy Metal so it gets loud. We need our recording to sound decent enough so that its listenable. We have a laptop with audacity for recording and a nice condenser mic the singer owns.


Any advice on how to set this up?

Well the best and cheapest way is to get a PCI sound interface that has either RCA audio jacks and/or mic inputs. The PCI card goes into your computer (it's hardware). And you can mic the drums and amps and connect the mic(s) to the audio interface. The audio interface converts the analog (what you wear out of amps) sound to digital sound. No need for mixers and all that fancy equipment when producing music on a computer!

Welcome to the world of digital recording and producing

This is a fairly brief explanation. If you have any questions try searching tutorials on youtube or you can ask me! (I'm not an expert though)

mic'ing everything is not possible, too expensive for right now.

All together we only have three mics, two normal vocal and one condenser. What are our options by using this gear? I mean at first all we'll do is record a kind of "basement demo" no need to invest too much on a starting project. Later on if we get bigger and get some gigs we may be able to get a guy to record us at his home studio for real cheap.

When recording with limited mics, record ONE instrument at a time. For guitar, bass, etc, just use one mic to amp (no problem there). When doing drums with your 3 mics, I'd put one mic above the whole kit (this is an overhead mic), one near the snare (if the overheard doesn't pick it up well), and one for your hi-hat. Just experiment with mic-ing the drums, it may be very hard to get good sounding drums recorded with only 3 mics.

let me ask though how would it sound if we just took the condenser and played the whole thing live? Or if the musicians played it live and the singer added the vocal track over it?

If you're going to be recording the whole song "live" in the studio, you'll need tons of mics.

Some problems you can run into are:
if one person makes a mistake, everybody has to start over
equipment failing during recording, again, everybody starts over
everybody might not be on exact time

Some advantages are:
you guys will be jammin' and in the mood!
it will be very emotional and exciting playing together rather than one by one

haha all the recording ive done was with the mic from the game rock band and audacity. it gets the job done for now, but you have to record every instrument at a time.