OK, 6 days have gone by, and I have used the Korg 1600 to make a CD set of a concert that a vocal group that I belong to did in Vermont. The recording came out AWESOME. The whole process of setting up, editing and burning the CDs were so free from glitches that I almost scared myself. This was actually my first "real" production job-- I have been toying around in my house & mostly writing my own stuff for many years, but this is the first time I had to be concerned with a truly finished product. In any case I am quite pleased with myself.
And the Korg is keen.
But, of course, I still have some basic fader questions to torture you all with... But first, some background (how exciting!)...
OK, while recording the concert, I used
one mic,
a Neuman TLM 103. The reason I did this is (a) it the only good vocal mic I could bring with me and (b) it is the only good vocal mic I own. I tried to make the most of it. I had heard that a monophonic recording could actually turn out OK, if well concieved and executed. So I perservered. I was recording a chorus, with soloists and a
very big grand piano, in a medium sized
theater (400 seats?), with good acoustics. My biggest concern was getting the right mic placement, balancing the piano and singers. After a bit of sweating I ended up finding the right spot (that was an education within itself)!
My goal was to turn out a good recoring of a live concert, applause and all.
Fortunately that is what I ended up with at the end. Mission accomplished. I just mixed down with a bit of reverb, all from the Korg, to warm it up a bit, and basically that was all there was-- other than watch the recording levels while they were singing
The music consisted of musical theater tunes, operetta arias, folk songs, a blues number, and a pop song arrangement or two. Basic chorus fare. The soloists walked out of their positions to the front of the stage, sang their solos, some with, some without choral accompanyment-- and then returned back to their spot.
Since there was only one mic, I was recording on only one track on the Korg. My idea was to mix down to two tracks later. Somehow the Korg knew to mix the sound I was monitoring to
Left and Right, on the headphones. I didn't have to worry about balancing several mics or panning, since there was only one track to deal with.
There were basically three controls I had to look after-- the input knob, the track fader and the master fader.
I tried to record "HOT" so that the input signal came in as high as possible, without turning the "trim" light from green to red, which indicates clipping.
I only ran into trouble with two soloists-- a soprano, named Kim, with a enourmous voice. She actually had been on a national broadway tour of Phantom of the Opera, with the lead role. Also a baritone had a real big voice. In rehearsal, I noticed that when these folks sang certain parts, the input would get too hot and start clipping. So my work around this during the concert was just to be heads up when these two showed up, and manually lower the input knob they started heading toward the louder parts, and then raising the level back after things calmed down. Essentially I was acting as a human compressor, I guess. When I
did this, sometimes I would try to compensate by raising the track fader, or master fader (it didn't seem to matter which) to compensate a little for the decrease in input level. But I really didn't do much of this maneuver-- mostly I left the faders alone, and just tweeked the input knob, only for these two singers.
So I guess my question is this: did this approach make sense? Does one normally tweak the input knob while tracking? For some reason I thought you were only supposed to move the
track fader, and leave the input know alone during tracking, but now that I think about it, that idea seems kind of stupid.
Any comments would be welcome.
Thanks,
- JK