so i went about to doing some home studio recording the other day using my dj gear, thinking that it would be a pretty epic fail situation and not produce anything good. but oh was i proved wrong! armed with ableton and a cheap condenser mic, alongside my regular djing setup (audio 8 soundcard, horrible behringer dj mixer) i managed to acheive some of the best recordings i’ve ever done.. happy as larry and cheap as chips (bonus!) 

so here’s how i did it…

…if that makes any sense.

basically, everything recorded on a cheap condenser mic, which goes into the xlr input on the audio 8 dj soundcard. this came with a pop shield and shockmount, which made things more useful! I output 1/2 to channel 1 on the mixer, and subsequently 3/4 to channel 2.

on ableton, 1/2 was set to the master out, and 3/4 to cue (which becomes useful later..) the input was obviously set to 5/6. it’s handy to go into prefs and make sure these are the only assigned ins and outs, otherwise you’re wasting cpu speed, which is crucial when recording on a laptop.

from the mixer, my lovely new dj cans are cueing everything in the normal way, and the master out goes to my speakers.

that’s the i/o out of the way - now for the setup.

it was handy to have control over the master out and the cue out from ableton on the mixer - as i could assign a click track or metronome to channel 2, and the master to channel one, and then freely choose what i wanted coming through the headphones and speakers separately, which meant quick playback (just the flick of a channel fader) and removing the click and obviously no unnecessary overspill into the recording! when recording, i could assign one specific track through the cue channel, and monitor that more loudly in the headphone mix than the master - allowing me really free control over what i was listening to when recording..

i think that’s pretty much it! and all with standard dj equipment.. not bad eh!

listen to the recorded tracks by visiting this page.

APPENDIX - i forgot to mention.. you’ll need phantom power to use the condenser mic - and unfortunately none of my equipment provides that.. for that i bought a behringer phantom power supply off ebay for £20 (from a douchebag who forgot to post the plug!) got it to work fine in the end though!