I am recording a small blue grass band that uses one mic and one bass pickup and or mic. I have experimented with getting the sound from the sound board and with placing my own mic in front of the band behind the house mic. I can use a zoom r16 and rode nt4 to do this. What about putting my mic in front and then using a mic splitter to feed the zoom and the house mixer? A sales person at Sweetwater told me my best bet was to buy an Art S8. It has transformers and handles eight channels. Because the mic I use is the rode nt 4 i would need at least two channels anyway and it seems the Art S8 is the cheapest way (although it is $200). It provides a completely decoupled or isolated output for the zoom and direct feed through for the house mixer. My question is does anyone have any experience with this and will I lose quality. I would hate to spend 200 plus and get sound that is not quite as good. I emailed the zoom company to see if there r16 could be connected via cheap splitter cable.
Or can I connect to the house mixer but in front of everything that the sound man is doing? I have been using rca phone plugs to connect to the recorder out found on most boards but then every change he makes effects the sound I get. And I don't get separate tracks for the bass and rest of band.
Or I could use a portable recorder like h4n or Roland r26. Reading the reviews give me mixed results as to the line in and feeding in a bass pickup.
Thanks for the help if anyone knows a best way to do this. Doug
If you want to plug into the house mixer and get direct signals from the various inputs you can tap signal from the inserts. If the inserts aren't in use your best bet is buying/building insert tap cables. They will have 1/4" TRS on one end with the tip and ring connected, and 1/4" TS on the other end. The TRS end goes in the insert jack without interrupting the signal in the board and the TS end goes in your recorder.
The cheap and less secure alternative is to use standard 1/4" cables and put spacers on them so they don't interrupt the signal in the board. I've used 1/4" ID fuel hose cut to 1/4" lengths. Slip the bit of hose on the plug and it will go in enough to make contact but not open the switch inside the jack.
The third option is to use regular cables and carefully push them just far enough into the insert jacks to get signal without cutting it off in the board. But that can be risky.
If inserts are in use you could use a simple 1/4" splitter (1xM to 2xF). You would have to be able to get to the back of the inserted processor and put your splitter on the input.
If you have mic preamps of your own you could buy/build simple passive mic splitters. You don't absolutely need transformer isolation, especially if you are on the same power as the house system. That way you would have total independence from the house system. You could set up by stage or by the house mixer.
EWI offers a cheaper solution. Check out Audiopile if you are in the US. MST-412
If you use any kind of home-made cable split or insert points, it is possible that the process can cause a ground loop buzz. If you have no buzz in the recorded tracks, you are golden. Go for it!
If, on the other hand, you do notice buzzing, you must rely on a proper splitter with ground lifts to solve the problem. If the ground lift switches do not clear up the buzz then it may be due to Radio Frequency Interference coming from longer cable runs. This is where the isolating transformers are needed. They remove that interference that is picked up by the cables themselves and they also correct mic load (impedance) problems which can reduce volume. So, choose your tools based on need not dreams and horror stories.
Just as with DI boxes, cheap iso splitters can cause a slight degradation of frequency response. Extreme lows and highs may not sound as sweet as they should. (But this is difficult to notice without critical A/B listening.) To solve this minor problem, simply use the DIRECT OUT for the recording and send the ISOLATED (Transformer) OUT to the house sound guy. He'll never notice the difference because live speakers don't reproduce those extreme frequencies very well anyway. Just remember that Phantom power will not go from the house mixer through the ISO OUTs. Which means that you will have to provide the phantom power from your preamps for any condenser mics or active DI's on stage. Phantom Power will pass through the DIRECT OUTS to the mics without hurting anything else. (I forget whether or not the ground lift interrupts phantom power.)
Thanks for that link. It is about half the price of the 8 channel art unit.
Also, I had thought about giving the sound board the isolated output, just like you said, I don't think any one there would be the wiser. The difference if there was any would only show up in the recording sound. By show up, I mean that could be distinguished. Live sound wouldn't show it. I am also going to try using trs cables from the sound board into the zoom recorder. This would by pass the zoom pre's and be using the house mixer preamps, and then I would get my signal before any other processing. Next week we will be at a venue where I can try that. Doug
Hah, I do this exact thing quite a bit, even down to the gear. I record a lot of rock stuff live, with a pair of chained R16s. Remember that if you get the transformer isolating box, you'll need to get a lot of patch leads on top of that (Enough to run from the box to the R16, and from the box to the desk). Looking into it, it seemed that the transformer units added more issues than they resolved (Impedance issues that can cause loss of highs aren't actually solved by them, and low quality transformers would degrade the signal further on the isolated side of it). I opted to get a batch of passive splitters, and a phantom power supply to place between the splitters and any condensers (R16s won't work with phantom power flowing into them from the desk. It won't damage them, but you won't get any usable signal so check that with the desk guy. Lesson learnt the hard way on that one ).
Another thing to be aware of, that I found out last time recording live. Reducing the input impedance on the condenser channels with some electret condensers will cause the output capacitor in it to fill too fast and severely clip half of the waveform, so you may want to run your own instead of splitting those if you can't take them from an out on the house desk. ...or get one of the expensive splitting options with a preamp for each channel, but that's on an entirely different level of budget.
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