Tough project! Your thoughts?

[jasonwick]

Tough project today recording a 5 piece band consisting of 2 acoustic guitars both with vocals, keyboard with vocals, electric bass and standard set of drums played with brushes.
It's very much an acoustic style band, blues, country etc. We were going for a fairly accurate rendition of their live sound. They wanted to play live and have visual contact with each other.
Here's what I did. We were in a fairly large room. For the drums I put up, Kick mic, sm57 on snare and 2 overheads. The bass amp was mic'd and DI'd. The keys were Di'd and his vocal was sm58.
Now the problem area, I began by putting up 2 condensers for the acoustic guitars with 58's, sm7 for their vocals. However the condensers were picking up huge amounts of vocals, drums and bass. When the acoustic guitars were being played very lightly the actual guitar became difficult to hear beneath the spill!! So I cut my losses and DI'd the acoustic guitars.
The Di'd guitars sound fairly rubbishy but the vocalists were loud and what with the drums bass, visual contact and live performance I felt I didn't have an option.
Monitoring was provided by 5 sets of headphones all sharing one mix consisting of everything except the drums.
Any thoughts? Could I have done better? Thanks

 

[skwee]

I'm curious about the distance you had between players. I've been recorded with a live situation that looked like this:

Cantus In Concert - The Calm Before The Storm | Stereophile.com

What I Did on My Vacation | Stereophile.com

Obviously, this was in a large room. But we split 5 mics between 9 singers. My acoustic guitar was miced with a condenser right in front, and as you can see, the drums and aux. percussion was done with overheads. This was recording a live show so we did it semi-circle, but you could go a complete circle if you needed.

My own preference would be to DI the bass only, use sound hole pickups on the guitars (I have a Lace that is good, and I find the tone easier to work with inside the DAW). I'd use plastic shield around the drums if I couldn't get distance. That way, you could actually record with acoustic sound in the room, even sans headphones if you wanted, the way we did.

 

[mjbphotos]

Retrack the guitars by themselves. Movable gobos to block bleed is the answer when recording live bands.

 

[witzendoz]

I have recorded several projects like yours, some of them were released as albums. Typical line up was , acoustic guitar / singer, mandolin / singer, Violin, dobro, double bass, drums with brushes, all recorded live.

The trick was having drummer that could play at a reasonable volume, gobos placed around the drums and acoustic instruments, setting the room positions up so that the bleed would be minimal. Oh and having a talented band that could pull a good sound live.

I love recording this way.
Alan.

 

[Bobbsy]

Yeah...all good ideas above. Careful positioning in a largish room lets you lay things out so the performers have the visual contact they need but let you use the null points of the directional mics to reduce the pick up from other people. That, along with screens around the drums and occasional re-dubbing can give pretty good results.