PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production Mixing Vocals With BIAB Tracks

Welcome to the forum and also introducing us to your music. I took a listen to sections of most of your Soundcloud posts. Nice music. I personally found "Day By Day"mix 3 to have the best vocal/music balance.

Regarding your mixes, I think your software/hardware setup makes getting a top notch sounding mix a bit harder to achieve in relation to what you hear from some others mixes. The Tascam DR-05 is more than adequate for digitally storing your recordings but it's primary design function is for field recording rather than studio recording and it's recording capture mic and preamps are lacking for high quality studio grade recording. Not that you can't achieve excellent results but you will have to work harder and smarter getting top quality results and even the best you achieve will be deficient to recordings made with hardware designed for studio recording. Design and physics are against you.

Even its outstanding recording capability is hampered by its lack of quality mic/line inputs and outputs.

Audacity is a good software product and I continue to use it a lot although I have higher quality DAW's. It's ease of use is invaluable. But you will find RealBand to work better with your BIAB recordings.

You can improve your recordings immediately while continuing to use the DR-05 as your recorder and Audacity as your software DAW with the purchase of an external mixer such as a Behringer or Yamaha model. I suggest these because they normally have decent Fx's, better quality preamps and input/output connectors. These two mfgs also are easy to find with single knob compressors that will enhance your vocals. You will need a decent dynamic mic or preferably a condenser mic, recording through the mixer and into the Dr-05. Both mixers and mics are easy to find and quite inexpensive used on Craigslist.

RealBand DAW that is included with your BIAB package is a more advanced DAW than Audacity and you already have it so making the move from Audacity to RealBand will cost you nothing.

I have owned many mixers, including a Presonus digital mixer, several of their interfaces, the two channel and the four channel, an 8 channel Scarlett interface but I still do most of my recording into a Tascam DP-24. I highly recommend it to you as well. It has many benefits to you. It is incredibly simple and intuitive to operate. You still can easily transfer files between the DP-24 and a Computer DAW. It is very stable. No drivers, ASIO, MME or latency issues. You get decent DAW capabilities and effects so you can mix and edit 'in the box' if you wish. You can record up to 8 tracks simultaneously. It has a built in DI. You can mix down 32 tracks. It has bounce capability and virtual tracks.
I owned a 2488 MarkII prior to the DP-24 have I've never lost a file from either unit or had either unit crash. Never..
The DP-24 operates like a mixer with a built in DR-05 for storage. Your recording process will be easier than what you face today and you would have to spend a bit more to get all that is comparable to the DP-24 in a computer DAW system. The DP-24 and DP-32 are virtually identical other than track count. I've never come close to maxing out my DP-24 and don't think the added cost of the DP-32 adds any benefit to me.