25 bands in 3 days! 75 track to be recorded....

  • Thread starter Thread starter sonusman
  • Start date Start date
sonusman

sonusman

Banned
Okay. This is the deal:

Our club is throwing a Marque Benefit show for three days this weekend. The proceeds of course go towards relighting our marque. Cool deal, and one that the bands really like!

So, I am not only tasked with mixing 25 bands in three days, but with tracking three songs per band, so that one song each band can be choosen to go on a compilation CD which the proceeds from will go towards the same thing.

The plan of attack!

Each band is only playing for a half an hour. No sound checks, or even line checks. Basically, they throw their gear up, and I put mics in front of it, and I mix and record.

I have about 3, maybe 4 songs to work out levels going to the ADAT's to record, then for the last 3 songs of each set, I record them. No benefit of hearing the sound to tape, or moving mics around, unless something extreme is bad, which would only show up in reference to the live mix.

Most of the bands are 3 or 4 piece bands. Drums, bass, guitars, and vocals. There will be a band here and there with a keyboard, or a horn, but maybe 2 or 3 out of the 25.

I have a Mackie 32/8 console that the mics plug into. The Direct Outs feed to Type I ADAT's, and the ADAT outputs feed to my Soundcraft Ghost console for the live mix. No eq, except some low shelf on certain things will be applied, and of course, so fader moves for the live mix will show up on tape, except for on the room mics.. I have the Direct Out's from the Mackie half normalled on patch bays to the ADAT in's so that I can insert comp/limiters while tracking. Again, I don't have the benefit of actually hearing what the track sounds like while recording, so any inserted processing with only be for extreme audio troubleshooting. Being conservative is a must in this situation!

I have 16 tracks available, with two of those tracks being room mics. From there, I plan to mic the Kick, Snare, Tom's (up to three mics for them) and stereo overheads, bass guitar, two guitars (if they have two guitars), an extra track for keyboards, and up to 4 vocal tracks. I think I should have enough tracks available.......:)

Guitar Center is actually sponsoring this show, so I MAY actually be getting some nice mics to play with, and if I am lucky, some more limiters (I have found that in live sound, limiters are your best friend!) GC has already kicked down all the ADAT tapes I will need, and for that, they deserve a great big THANK YOU!!! We figured we needed at least 16 40min ADAT tapes, and they were nice enough to give us pre-formatted tapes, which cuts down on the hassle factor significantly since I don't have to format any tapes now! At 2 tapes per 40 minutes, that would have been a lot of formatting!

Anyway, I plan to document the production of this live recording. I will list mics, and any somewhat normal processing I did to tape.

I will be mixing and mastering the compilation CD, so I will have some stuff to post about that, and some mp3's for all to enjoy.

Keep yourself posted. This should be a lot of fun, and possibly a good learning experience (even for me! :))

Ed
 
I've just been thinking about the same thing, in small! Our youthclub is organizing a benefit tomorrow, it needs a new roof etc... There will be 6 bands playing, starting from 6pm. This is an hour/band. This hour should be: setting up material, small soundcheck, and a half hour show.

We rent a complete PA for this that consists of an A&H mixer, a rack with gates/compressors/limiters and 2 eff. processors, and amplification. I have worked with this setup before, so I know what to expectm and what is left for tracking. The tracking will be on my VS1880, so I have just 8 tracks.

There are 4 or 5 auxs left. (rest used for eff and stage monitoring) These will be used for making submixes of drum and vocals. (The inserts of these channels will be used for gates and comp/lim anyway.) For guitars and bass, I can use the inserts, to have them go directly to the recorder.

The hardest thing is; the band that we most want to record, is the one I play in myself. (sessionthingy, hehe.) A (less-experienced) friend will do the mixing, and he hasn't got a clue of how to work with the VS! And, extra trouble: I play sax, and 3 different keyboards! Alot of worries... But I might be able to sell some of the other band's recordings. Hehehehe... Ca$h... I like that. :D

Any comments on the setup, or tips are welcome.
 
Not much into live sound, but been to many a show... I have seen this done once before.... At this smaller show, the board was stage left, yet instead of facing the band, it was facing the side wall. Then the sound guy, had his keyboard rig, right there on a 90 degree angle to the console, so it was facing the audience..... and he took care of the both of them....The only problem was... he had to run out in the audience numerous times, to check the sound and the sound did suck.......Hope this helps in some small way Roel.
 
hehe... Nope, it doesn't. :) The PA is off stage, back left in the room. But the dude should be able to handle this. Once connections are made it's just making a mix. He can handle that. And I can setup the VS so that it will just be pushing REC and making the submixes. With a little explanation he'll be able to do that too.

It's just the compressors and gates that he is not comfortable with. But we don't need that all that much. And without rehearsing, we won't be all that good anyway. :D (Me and bassist ad interim, and the guitarplayer can't improvise... hehe)
 
sonusman said:
I have a Mackie 32/8 console that the mics plug into. The Direct Outs feed to Type I ADAT's, and the ADAT outputs feed to my Soundcraft Ghost console for the live mix. No eq, except some low shelf on certain things will be applied, and of course, so fader moves for the live mix will show up on tape, except for on the room mics.. I have the Direct Out's from the Mackie half normalled on patch bays to the ADAT in's so that I can insert comp/limiters while tracking.
Click to expand...

Ed, why do you use the 2 consoles? Do the direct outs of the Mackie include the EQ in the signal path? What's the use of eq before going to track? (I can see the use of compression and limiting, but when mixing on a better console and better environment, eq?)
 
So, by your explanation of your bands abilities, what you are trying to say is, a bad mix might be actually benificial :).. (kidding)
 
The Mackie is only used for preamps to the ADAT's. This way, I can record without any fader moves or eq being applied that I might do in the live mix. I am then free to mix the house sound on the Ghost without the recording being changed (except in very slight ways, with bleed into the mics and all....).

I choose the Mackie as the front eq and the Ghost as the liver mixer mainly because the Ghost has much better headroom and a superior eq, two things that are important for live sound. I am not totally fond of the Mackie preamp, but in this situation, can live with it to gain the versatility of recording all the instruments without fader moves or eq applied.

For an example of how this can sound,
. This was tracked at the club last weekend, although I only spent less then 10 mins on the mix.

Ed
 
Night 1

6 bands tonight (the slowest of the three!). Had to head out to Guitar Center to bum some room mics from them. Wound up with a pair of Behringer ECM 8000's. Not my first choice for room mics by far, but beggars can't be choosers eh? :) http://www.behringer.de/eng/products/micro/ecm8000.htm

I did a quick soundcheck of the mics using CD music played back on the system. Indeed, they are flat. Maybe too flat for the application, but with a little low shelf roll off, the sound was quite accurate. I used my TL Audio Classic tube mic pre direct to ADAT on these mics.

I finally decided the mic pack I would use. One of the owners of the club also promotes shows outside of the club, and had a few brand spankin' new SM 58's and a couple brand spankin' new 57's, and shared the love for the weekend since he didn't have any other shows this weekend.

So, the mic arrangement is as follows:

Kick - Audio Technica Kick/Tom mic from their Drum Pack.
Snare - Shure SM-57
Tom's - SM- 57's
Overhead - The ride cymbal side overhead is a AKG C1000S, and the hi-hat side is a Tascam PE-125 electret condensor. I like the PE-125 as a hi-hat mic (most of the stuff I have tracked in the last 4 years has used it....).
Bass - DI'ed using a Behringer Ultra DI DI-100. This is a very nice sounding and sturdy DI box. If you are looking for a DI box that is affordable, I would recommend it. The OT-1 transformer is not quite as nice sounding as a Jensen, but is very clean.
Guitars - SM-57's
Vocals - SM-58's. I have a few Audix OM 3's, but now with the improved acoustics in the club, via a bunch of rockwool being applied to the wall opposite of the stage, they sound way too bright in the 4-8KHz region, and was finding myself eq'ing out that area in the live mix to make them sound balanced. The eq never quite made it sound right. Tonight was the first night I used the 58's, and several regulars commented immediately on the improved vocal sound. I like 58's as a live vocal mic, and am glad that now the room will allow for a vocal mic that doesn't need hyped up high end to make the vocals cut.

Tonights line up was a mix of Pop Punk and Hardcore Metal bands (weird combination for sure, but the owner wanted his favorite bands that play their in celebration of 4/20! :)). All of these bands are fairly tight, and write decent songs for their age. Mostly 20-24 year old musicians. One of the bands is actually signed on Edge records. http://www.edgecore.com/newsociety/index.html

Anyway, the only really bad surprise or the night is that one of the bands was forced to play a acoustic "unplugged" set because their drummer was hit by a drunk driver last night and was in the hospital and needed surgery on one of his feet. The drummer in this band is a very talented young man, but one of the loudest fucking drummers I have ever heard! His charm is the only thing that keeps me from putting duct tape on the tips of his sticks though....:) So, the band decided to play acoustics. A large feet for a Pop Punk band! They didn't even get to practice the set!

The only other somewhat surprise was the last band. Full on 80's rockstar drummer here! He came in with a damn double kick drum, 8 piece drumset! What a chump! Having limited tracks to record to, and the nature of quick setup shows like this meant that 4 of the toms shared 2 mics, something I just hate doing. The second kick drum I have always felt is a bad idea. I much rather work with a double kick pedal.

Anyway, nothing bad happened during tracking the show. I played back a little of the stuff that was recorded at the end of the night, and me and the club owner who is promoting this show agreed that the tracking sounded pretty decent, and that at least one song per band would sound pretty killer once mixed.

Sorry that I don't have any push mixes for you all to hear. It was a very long day in preperation for the show and I just didn't have it in me to do a quickie mix before I left. Look for some push mixes mid next week on this stuff.

Ed
 
Oops! Forgot to add a little info.

As a default, I used a Behringer Composer between the Mackie Direct Out and the ADAT for the lead vocal and bass guitar for the whole night.

Many of these young bands play with far more passion then technique, especially the bass players and singers, so the Peak Limiter on the Composer is a godsend for tracking live stuff where I cannot work with the musicians on good technique. Capturing the show is the priority, and I cannot expect them to do things differently then they are used to while playing live. But I DO need to have good levels to the ADAT's and not clip the A/D converters. I have said it many times, and will say it again, the Peak Limiter on the Composer is very good! Not a single clip on the vocals or bass the whole night, and upon listening to the tracks at the end of the night, I heard no bad artifacts from the few times that the limiter engaged on the signal.

Another little tidbit.

I am allowing the eq and fader to be part of the signal chain from the Mackie to ADAT. I have found that a little low shelf roll of on the snare, overheads, guitars, and vocals allows me to get much hotter levels to tape without thinning out the sound on these instruments. I am sharing this because of some of the recent threads asking about applying EQ while tracking. My stand is that on certain things, turning down the low shelf EQ works out very well because uneeded low frequencies that you will never use during mix time will not get tracked to tape, and seeing's how these low frequencies eat up a lot of headroom on a A/D converter, you can achieve much hotter levels by removing them by at least a few dB.

On problem I didn't share that I ran into twice tonight had to do with drummers and the little holes they put in the front kick drum head. In these two cases, the hole was towards the bottom of the drum. This is not a good idea because it means that the mic is that much farther away from the striker! While I can get great low end on these kick drums, trying to pull out some of the striker hit is almost impossible. The proper place to put the hole is on the same heigth as the striker, and about 2-3 inches away from the side of the drum.

Also, another slight problem, which always presents itself with hardcore and punk bands in how the drummers will play their snare so soft during fast passages in the song, but when it slows down, they hit the hell out of the snare! You of course have to set the preamp level for the loudest parts of the song, and when they DO hit is hard, the snare sound killer! But during the fast parts, the snare is totally lost. Without having the benefit of knowing the bands songs very well, I cannot even ride the preamp gains effectively to get the softer snare hits to get good levels to tape.

The hardcore singers have this same problem. They will go from very soft singing to a scream! Again, I have to set levels for the loudest part, so the soft singing parts tend to not get recorded very loud, which is death on 16 bit A/D converters. At mix time, I will probably copy the vocal part to another track, and use two seperate channels on the board. One for the soft singing parts with the faders up really far, and another for the screaming parts, with the fader much lower.

A little per peave I have is with some of these younger guitar players, and the amount of gain they play with. I am a firm beleive that less gain means more powerful, cutting through sound in a mix! Some of these guys lose all of the guitars natural power by using too much preamp gain. The guitars tend to just sound like a wall of noise when the preamp is saturating the tone so much. The guitar tones will be very difficult to deal with at mix time.

If you are guilty of any of the above, STOP IT DAMNIT!!! :) Give the engineer something to work with!

Please excuse any and all spelling mistakes in this and the above posts. It is 4am as I write this, and just don't have the energy to edit the posts.....:)

Ed
 
Great post Ed!

I'm going to print and file this in my notes under "How to handle live band recording"!

Thanks....good stuff!!!

Bruce
 
Day/Night 2. Hell day!

I am way too exhausted to report much on tonights recording. My day at the club started at 1pm with doing some push mixes of the performances from the night before and catching up on storing locate data on the ADAT tapes for the future mixes. After that, we had 9 bands play tonight. Hell may be a better time!

No major problems in tracking the bands. A few clithes, but that can be expected in this type of production. With the help of another very experienced soundman I hired for the day, Paul O'Brian, who does FOH and Monitors at two prominent Portland "big clubs", we got through this trying day with few scrathes! :)

I am sleeping now. 8 more bands tomorrow. Monday I finishing tracking a song that is going to be aired on local radio in a band "showdown" thing this local station does. This song will be pitted against a national artist, and listeners call in to vote on which song they like better! :) So I still have a couple days of hard work before I can rest and reflect on this whole week much.

Rest assured, more will follow, and I already have some push mixes to link to from last nights performances, and possibly some more from tonights and tomorrows later this week.

Ed
 
Hey Ed, If you needed an assistant you should have let me know...I like twirling dem dere knobs....

Good luck making thru this little "hell on Earth" weekend and good luck on the radio station "showdown"....
 
Wow man... I 'only' did 7 bands instead of 25, and it gave me a near-death experience. Geee...

Worked 12 hours in a row. 15min eating break not included. Making cables, setting up the recorder, small 2 song rehearsel, mixing and recording first 2 bands, my own concert in between, and 4 more bands. Killing. Especially with my lack off experience. :D

Mics used were all SM57 en 58, sennheiser drum-set for toms, AKG-clipon thingy for sax, and some condensor for the Hihat. This went to an A&H GL3300.

I took guitars and bass directly from the inserts. Vocals, drums and synths on various combinations of submixes using the AUX and groups. (My idea of using groups was not that good... You can only get them stereo, the panning is same as in the live situation!! Was to busy to get some cables to use the other AUX left.)

Hell of a job. Setting up mics, quick soundcheck, get the mix right during first song. Then get the inserts and aux cables right, make submixes, and get the recorderlevels straigth. ALOT of work. This 6 times between 6pm and 2am. I didn't get to listening what I really recorded. Had enough for this week. :) Probably next weekend. Some bands were really willing to buy the recording. Finally, $$$... Aaah... I hope it's good enough to sell.

Ed, I really admire you. Don't have as much experience, but 25 bands on 3 days is a killer...
 
Damn Ed! You're just a glutton for punishment man!

I can totally relate to the punk "fast=soft snare strikes", I never did understand that one-I guess they just can't hit hard, and fast at the same time.... what they need to do is switch hands when they do that-so that their snare strikes are with their dominant hands.


Bingo on the guitars as well.
I used to run sound in clubs for all the metal bands back in the 80's, my last live show being Goraphobia, Eulogy, and another deathmetal band back in the 90's.

Man, talk about "gain"! Whew!!
Actually, Those guys were pretty pro as far as stage levels went, but they had the gain cranked big time.
A couple of guys taped the show (both Video and Audio out of the mixer), and supposedly it was released as a Deathmetal Documentary. I don't know, I never saw it.
But it was a freaking nightmare.
I was hired to mix it, they had already rented a "sound system"....it would have just been cheaper for them to have hired me outright.
I get to the show and what do I get for a "system"?

2 Peavey "W" bins".(FH-1's)
4 18" frontloaded boxes.
A pair of 1" Peavy Horns.
NO MIDS.

a ton of cs400's.
No outboard.
a Peavey 24 channel Mixer (Mark IV)
6 Radio shack mic's.
and 2 SM58's.

NO MONITORS IN SIGHT!

Luckily, I lived about a Mile away. I just went home, grabbed a Snake, some wedges, a couple of power amps, and some mic's and stands.

Needless to say it was a nightmare.

Hell if the guy would have given me $75 bucks more, I would have brought in a hell of a soundsystem.... but he chose to rent from one of his "friends" who charged him $150.00 for garbage that was delivered as a "soundsystem".

The guy who put on the show said "I'm sorry".
I told him to lose my number, because he just went on my "Never work for again" list.


I felt I had to go home and get gear, because I didn't feel that it was fair to the bands that they had to put up with this crap.
Being a musician, I've been on the other side of a shitty PA.... It's not much fun on either side.

I used to do a pretty good job (I worked every weekend at various places for years), because guys would hire me to come in with a Rack of outboard, a mixer, and mics.... and they would supply the speakers and power, but that one was the final draw.

hopefully, you'll get some good sleep man, because I KNOW you're gonna be dragging!


Tim
 
7 bands tonight!

Yeah! Draggin!

Stereo house Shailat.

I hate music right now....:)

Ed
 
My record is 16 bands in one day, most of them were heavy young bands too.

I was wondering at the beginning of this thread how Ed could possibly sound so happy about doing this thing.
 
Hey vox, happiness is a nice track cued up on the ADAT's ready to mix....:) It has been awhile since I had a big project to mix (long break up story with the ex girlfriend thing....). While actually mixing all these bands live is no fun really, being able to track that many songs and having the opportunity to mix what is now 22 songs to go on a compilation CD is something to look forward to.

The challenge of making that many songs flow decently on a CD, with each song being from a different band is the biggest challenge I have ever had. I am looking forward to it!

While I haven't flown some push mixes I did of a few of the bands into the computer yet, I did make a CDR on my Marantz unit, and another band that I am co-producing and engineering right now got to hear these tracks and were pretty blown by the quality of it considering it was a live recording! I should be uploading some mp3's in the morning after I wake up and get some coffee in me, so look for the link tomorrow a bit later in the day.

I am now working on finishing up a recording that a local band is doing of an old Roxette cover song, The Look, that is going to be in a on air "battle" with an national act. Listeners call in a vote for their favorite song. This should be fun. The studio I tracked it in has some pretty nice mics and preamps, and the tracking went very well.

A little later this week, I am mixing Quiet Riot at another club. The next night, I am mixing Covenant at my regular club. Two nights, two national acts. Nice....:) Busy week. Should start mixing the live comp next week. With 22 songs to mix, at 2 hours each, it MIGHT be done in a couple weeks....:) Then a couple days to master it all.

Fun fun fun....

Ed
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top