live recording primer

[doulos]

hello all im trying to understand the basics of live recording. I'm planning on recording a church band using a fostex multi track rec taking the direct outs off a mackie live mixer into the seperate tracks and adding stereo paired mics for the crowd. then dumping all into pro tools. I know taking the direct outs I'll bypass the eq wich i prefer, but is this approach worse then splitting the signal at the mixer? aka seperating the feeds? I'd like to get the theroy down cause I'm thinking of buying a true stand alone hard disk rec for this to use with my tascam dm24, but i want to cut my teeth on the church band with portable gear till i understand what im doing a bit better? any info on this topic would be greatly appreciated thanks

 

[venuesound]

live recording

I have found that splitting the feeds using isolation transformers works the best for me. I recently went to a dedicated hard disk (Alesis HD24) and am getting great results. The setup is a little more pricy, but worth the money spent.

 

[Angie]

As Venuesound said, a splitter with isolated transformers is the best way to go. But I have done small events using the direct outs of a Mackie also. If you can feed the house instead of the the other way around... even better.

One other thing you should consider is having a back-up recording system. Rent some DA-88's or the like and feed the Pro Tools rig thru them. Computers are much more stable these days, but it just takes one crash during a live performance to ruin the whole thing.