live recording

  • Thread starter Thread starter jmorris
  • Start date Start date
jmorris

jmorris

New member
I do a good deal of live recording of bands in clubs etc. At times all of the bleed and bad rooms ie. boomy, are hard to deal with. How do some of you deal with it other than close mic'ing? I try to give input to band member on equip. placement and control of levels on stage but...gee! Sometimes.
 
Here's what I do-

Carefully place a stereo pair that captures everything as good as you can. Place those mics like they are all you get. Experiment with stereo recording techniques (A-B, ORTF, XY, Baffled Omni, etc.) if you can.

Then place spot mics as you need them. Take a DI of anything that can provide it. Keep things simple. Maybe a mono drum OH, or add kick and snare if you must. Pan spot mics/DI's to match the stereo pair. Spot mics and DI's will serve to support the main pair; give a little presence or allow for minor balance adjustments. That's all.

That's my way. Remember, it is critical to get the main pair right. If you have tracks open, you can place multiple main pairs and evaluate them later.
 
leddy said:
Here's what I do-

Carefully place a stereo pair that captures everything as good as you can. Place those mics like they are all you get. Experiment with stereo recording techniques (A-B, ORTF, XY, Baffled Omni, etc.) if you can.

Then place spot mics as you need them. Take a DI of anything that can provide it. Keep things simple. Maybe a mono drum OH, or add kick and snare if you must. Pan spot mics/DI's to match the stereo pair. Spot mics and DI's will serve to support the main pair; give a little presence or allow for minor balance adjustments. That's all.

That's my way. Remember, it is critical to get the main pair right. If you have tracks open, you can place multiple main pairs and evaluate them later.
Click to expand...

Damn - I'd love to hear what kind of results you get doing things that way - because if your results are good, then it will make me feel silly for reasons I'm about to explain:

Here's what I do - Close mic everything (with directional mics) that can't be run DI (usually just bass and keys if they have them...), paying extra attention to getting the biggest offending bleeders (guitar amps and cymbals - more-so guitar amps than anything) as close to perfectly off-axis as I feasably can from the mics that are micing other things. As for (the likely omnidirectional) overheads on the drumkit, I find that sometimes the guitars will bleed more than an acceptable amount, in which case you can try flipping the phase on the close miced guitars and perhaps even nudging them around a bit in your DAW to try to cancel out the bleeding in the OH mics. The bleeding in the vocal track was always my worst problem with live recordings, in which case the best I could do was to sharply gate the vocal track, which kinda makes this illusion that all the extra noise you hear when the vocal comes in is just how the singer sounds...and that more-or-less worked out ok.

I also have found that it is very, extremely, extraordinarily rare for the kick drum to sound like anything better than terrible on the recorded tracks, no matter how fantastic it may have sounded that night....in which case drumagog (if you have drumagog..) is a quick fix. Drumagog also has the enormous added bonus of making each drum track you use it on 100% bleed-free. Call it cheating if you will...but it works wonders that no other technique can do.

Here's an example of one of my results using these techniques (in retrospect, the kick sample I used was way too clicky, but this was quite a long time ago, when I thought more click was better-period). You can the singer's original stage effects (he carries his own rack of stuff) he was using in some of his longer notes... They sound cool for him live, but he doesn't set the delays with a tap unit, so in the recording, it was immediately obvious they were off-beat...and so the hard-gating on him also helped with that.

Hope that helps - good luck!

http://www.lightningmp3.com/live/file.php?id=14572

P.S. I stopped doing live recordings because the amount of post-production work (dirty trickery, really.... :p) required to make them sound better than the stereotypical-terrible-sounding-live-recording forced me to charge more for the service than if the band actually came in, set up, and did a real recording....and as you can imagine - that doesn't really sell well, heh, with the exception of live dvd kinda things that the more successful of the bands I work with sometimes decide to do, which I still do the audio for here and there.
 
I pull off the FOH channel inserts what I can, DI what I can't, and keep the drums simple (X/Y pair pointing backwards from the front of the kit and a kick to boot.) If the electric gits are not miked for FOH, then I'll mic them myself just like in a studio.

If the FOH guy is an un-trusting sort and won't let you near his board with your snake, then leddy's idea of using a stereo pair as the backbone for the rest is not a bad idea.

On one of my regular bands, their keyboard player started playing around with one of those new portable pocket recorders with the built in stereo SDCs on the top (I forget now which brand his was). Even in a lousy-sounding room, this guy got surprisingly workable results just sticking the thing in a little fishnet sock/bag and just hanging it from the front man's mic stand. I would have had no qualms about using that as the backbone recording on which to overlay the other tracks to fill in the details. The result would of course sound live, but it would be better than many of the live recordings I have heard in the past from much more gear than that.

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I pull off the FOH channel inserts what I can, DI what I can't, and keep the drums simple (X/Y pair pointing backwards from the front of the kit and a kick to boot.) If the electric gits are not miked for FOH, then I'll mic them myself just like in a studio.
Click to expand...

Reminds me that I should have mentioned that I was running FOH every time I've done a live recording - oops. I also just tapped the inserts.

SouthSIDE Glen said:
On one of my regular bands, their keyboard player started playing around with one of those new portable pocket recorders with the built in stereo SDCs on the top (I forget now which brand his was). Even in a lousy-sounding room, this guy got surprisingly workable results just sticking the thing in a little fishnet sock/bag and just hanging it from the front man's mic stand. I would have had no qualms about using that as the backbone recording on which to overlay the other tracks to fill in the details. The result would of course sound live, but it would be better than many of the live recordings I have heard in the past from much more gear than that.

G.
Click to expand...

Speaking of which - a lot of the bigger country bands I have done sound for (Tracy Bird, Randy Rogers, Kevin Fowler to name a few) bring those little things EVERYWHERE - It's sort of become a standard among them to record every one of their shows with one, in case something magical happens that night, I suppose. Pretty cool, and it speaks volumes (in a pretty blatant contradiction to my first post on it, no less :D ) to see real, major label acts using these little things to make real recordings that just might get released some day.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
On one of my regular bands, their keyboard player started playing around with one of those new portable pocket recorders with the built in stereo SDCs on the top (I forget now which brand his was). Even in a lousy-sounding room, this guy got surprisingly workable results just sticking the thing in a little fishnet sock/bag and just hanging it from the front man's mic stand. I would have had no qualms about using that as the backbone recording on which to overlay the other tracks to fill in the details. The result would of course sound live, but it would be better than many of the live recordings I have heard in the past from much more gear than that.

G.
Click to expand...

http://myspace.com/katetband

Every song on our myspace page except for the first one ("everything") were recorded on a tascam dr-1 at a party we played. I just hung it from the celing with zip ties. The levels were too high so you can hear a lot of clipping but it still did a good job. I was upset with myself for not being a little more cautious when setting the levels otherwise we would have had a pretty decent recording of our live set.

I borrowed the recorder from a friend but I might just buy one. I was pretty impressed with the thing.
 
Last edited:
Just a general comment since I don't do allot of live tracking gigs- and it fits the same for a good live sound in general; A good clean, stable stage environment makes for a cleaner tape. Things like appropriate volumes, monitors that aren't booming or with frequencies that are near feedback -factors that avoid adding long decay times in the room and on stage.
Ever notice how if stage monitors happen to be a major part of what's heard out front from the mains that it's often a muddy (it's mostly the nondirectional frequencies) sound bouncing in off the stage back wall/ceiling out of time? That's a cue (or opportunity :D) for asking if maybe the monitors can be filtered down some to sacrifice on the low end for the sake of cleaning things up overall.
Along the same line.. (rant time :) Allot of PA guys either don't seem to hear, (or don't care?) to clean up even fairly obvious low, low mid resonances in the system/room...
 
TyphoidHippo said:
Speaking of which - a lot of the bigger country bands I have done sound for (Tracy Bird, Randy Rogers, Kevin Fowler to name a few) bring those little things EVERYWHERE - It's sort of become a standard among them to record every one of their shows with one, in case something magical happens that night, I suppose. Pretty cool, and it speaks volumes (in a pretty blatant contradiction to my first post on it, no less :D ) to see real, major label acts using these little things to make real recordings that just might get released some day.
Click to expand...
Yonce N Mild said:
http://myspace.com/katetband

Every song on our myspace page except for the first one ("everything") were recorded on a tascam dr-1 at a party we played. I just hung it from the celing with zip ties. The levels were too high so you can hear a lot of clipping but it still did a good job. I was upset with myself for not being a little more cautious when setting the levels otherwise we would have had a pretty decent recording of our live set.

I borrowed the recorder from a friend but I might just buy one. I was pretty impressed with the thing.
Click to expand...
Yeah, this keyboardist has been doing much the same thing for a couple of years now, just playing around and experimenting with cheap, simple little invisible guerrilla-tactic ways of getting basic stereo recordings of their live shows. He played around for a while with slapping a couple of PZM boundary mics on various floor and wall surfaces, for example. Most of the results he's gotten were dubious, at best.

But I saw him playing with this thing when I was helping set up one night a while back. (The more I think about it, it may have been a Marantz (?), but I'm not sure about that. I'll have to check on that next time I talk to him.). Anyway, I asked him how that was working out for him and he took me out to his van to play some raw CDs he had burned off the recordngs he made of a couple of bands he's associated with on this thing.

Some were hanging from the mic stand like I said, others he tested various locations, including his keyboard rack stand and even one of the PA mains tripods. I think he may have even hung it from the ceiling once like you did, Yonce, but I don't remember for sure. The results were mixed (the results, not the recordings :D), but there were some done in venues I know to be not very good sounding where the results were surprisingly decent. Nothing I'd consider a full final product for anything other than a bootleg-style release or maybe a mySpace sample, but surprisingly good enough to be used as a base that could easily be sweetened up by a few strategically-placed direct outs and wind up as a live recording that sounded good enough to run with the pack, for sure.

G.
 
mixsit said:
Just a general comment since I don't do allot of live tracking gigs- and it fits the same for a good live sound in general; A good clean, stable stage environment makes for a cleaner tape. Things like appropriate volumes, monitors that aren't booming or with frequencies that are near feedback -factors that avoid adding long decay times in the room and on stage.
Ever notice how if stage monitors happen to be a major part of what's heard out front from the mains that it's often a muddy (it's mostly the nondirectional frequencies) sound bouncing in off the stage back wall/ceiling out of time? That's a cue (or opportunity :D) for asking if maybe the monitors can be filtered down some to sacrifice on the low end for the sake of cleaning things up overall.
Along the same line.. (rant time :) Allot of PA guys either don't seem to hear, (or don't care?) to clean up even fairly obvious low, low mid resonances in the system/room...
Click to expand...
+1. Like any other place you record you need to fix the source first. I swear the PA is the most misunderstood of all instruments :)
 
Hm? you guys tent to go a bit more simpler than I. I mic everything. Every acoustic instrument gets a mic even if it has a d/i. All drums are mic'd, kick, snare, each tom, 2 overheads and hihat. Of course all amps and vocals.
 
jmorris said:
Hm? you guys tent to go a bit more simpler than I. I mic everything. Every acoustic instrument gets a mic even if it has a d/i. All drums are mic'd, kick, snare, each tom, 2 overheads and hihat. Of course all amps and vocals.
Click to expand...


this is the best way to do it with the bad rooms you were referring to. if you're doing this and and it still sucks...i'm willing to bet the band cannot balance themselves properly...

....and if they can't play live well, there's no reason for you to record them. :eek::D

Mike
 
jmorris said:
Hm? you guys tent to go a bit more simpler than I. I mic everything. Every acoustic instrument gets a mic even if it has a d/i. All drums are mic'd, kick, snare, each tom, 2 overheads and hihat. Of course all amps and vocals.
Click to expand...
opps, I meant "tend" not "tent".a duh!
 
i think those sound really cool. a little crispy but that's less a technique thing and more of a gear thing. have any with drums?

Mike
 
rad. that drummer on the Bill Tiberio track makes life easy no? awesome.

Mike
 
as long as you already have everyhting mic-ed, have you thought of renting, or borrowing an Alesis HD24?

If your FOH board has direct outs, you could use them. Otherwise, you could use the inserts-to-the-first-click thing.

Once you have the tracks, you transfer them to a PC, and with some trial and error, and some descent monitors, and multi-tracking software, you could get some very good recordings.

I've recorded my band like that for years, and have gotten some amazing recordings. (do a search in the mp3 mixing forum on my screen name (or Beatles) for some examples).

I've had studio owners claim I'm a fraud for the clarity and quality of some of the mixes I've done. But I assure you, everything was one-take, right off the stage recordings.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top