Recording live sound with a Tascam 424 MKIII

iaxxal

New member
Greetings,

This might sound like a dumb question but how would I capture a band's live performance in a small venue? Would I just simply have to send the main stereo outputs from the venue's mixer into the sub inputs on the back of my Tascam 424 or would I have to directly send the output from the venue's mixer into channels 1 and 2 of my Tascam? The band I want to capture are a three-piece rock and roll band with lead and backing vocals.

Any further tips for recording a live performance on a 4-track cassette recorder would be appreciated!


Thanks,

George.
 
You'll probably have to jam it in the actual input holes. I don't think you can assign the sub ins to tape tracks.

But the mix off the board is almost never any good for a recording. Most of the time the PA is only there to reinforce the elements that aren't already loud enough coming off the stage and it's usually mostly vocals. If the soundguy has anything else coming through FOH, it's likely to be EQd so heavily as to be unrecognizable - probably all hype at the low and high end without much substance.

If you could get direct lines for each instrument (preferably before any EQ), you might could do something with that, but with only four tracks you'd still probably have to submit some stuff.

In all honesty, the best and easiest thing you could do with that machine is set up a decent stereo pair of mics somewhere in front of the stage to capture as much of the band in the room as possible while trying to minimize audience noise. It's not always easy to put the mics where they sound best without blocking sight lines or causing tripping hazards, but if you want anything worth listening to, you'll have to figure it out.
 
You'll probably have to jam it in the actual input holes. I don't think you can assign the sub ins to tape tracks.

But the mix off the board is almost never any good for a recording. Most of the time the PA is only there to reinforce the elements that aren't already loud enough coming off the stage and it's usually mostly vocals. If the soundguy has anything else coming through FOH, it's likely to be EQd so heavily as to be unrecognizable - probably all hype at the low and high end without much substance.

If you could get direct lines for each instrument (preferably before any EQ), you might could do something with that, but with only four tracks you'd still probably have to submix some stuff.

In all honesty, the best and easiest thing you could do with that machine is set up a decent stereo pair of mics somewhere in front of the stage to capture as much of the band in the room as possible while trying to minimize audience noise. It's not always easy to put the mics where they sound best without blocking sight lines or causing tripping hazards, but if you want anything worth listening to, you'll have to figure it out.

I agree with all of this. Another option is to get the room mics on one pair of tracks and capture the board mix on the other pair. Sometimes blending the two can be better than either one alone. One pitfall is if the mic is far from the stage there will be some acoustic delay relative to the board feed. If you can transfer all four tracks at once to a DAW it would be a trivial matter to nudge them into alignment.
 
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