Fellow beatniks....lend me your ears! I'm treading into new waters and I desperately need some advice:

Some friends of mine wanted me to record myself playing my drums to prove to them that I was as good as Carter from DMB. Yeah I said it I'm that good..........OK I'm not even close, but certainly aspire to be half as good one day. Anyway, I setup some track lighting around the kit....put my Sony DVD camcorder way up high on a ladder to get a killer angle and ended up with some great footage (so I thought). I was groovin' particularly well that day, so I was really excited to find out what it looked/sounded like on the tv. Much to my chagrin.....it sounded like absolute garbage. Looked great, but sounded bad....just like my truck. The mic on the cam would not pick up any low freq, so all you heard was snare and cymabals.

So my question is, not having any recording experience whatsoever, what kind of equipment do I need to drasticly change the sound recording on the camcorder? The cam has an audio input (I think its 8mm? it looks like a mini headphone input), so could I buy a decent mixer and some mics and ouput that feed into the cam? I have a 8 pc DW setup with a crap load of cymbals and I'm really not sure even how many mics I need to capture everything evenly. My budget is <$1000 and I'm setup in a very large poured concrete basement.

Thanks!   

First off, you wont get any sort of decent sound quality from a camcorder mic.  I dont care which camcorder you may have used.  You may want to investigate a simple recording device with just 2 decent mics for overheads.  But you are trying to utilize a camcorder mic. and make it do what its not designed to do.  You may want to see if your c-corder has an input for an aux. mic that you can plug in. Look in you manual to see if it will.  I do know sony makes a seperate stereo mic that is of better quality than what is on the c-corder.

Several months ago a 90 year old guy comes out to the "open jam" with a camcorder. (He comes out quite often and still gets up on stage.  ) The next day I get a call from the leader of the band complaining about my volumn. He said, "I watched his camcorder and you sounded like crap last night." I replied, "If you go by the mic in that thing you've got a brain about the same size." It's been almost a year since that weely jam started. He's never complained since then.... I must have gotten the point through.