Isolating "Live" recording

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guinsu

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I'm thinking of trying to convince my band to try recording us "live" in the guitarists basement. Currently we track everything separately in this basement (well, the guitarist is the recording guru) and we've all commented that something is missing from the sound. The guitarist has tried to spice things up with compressors, tube preamps and all that but I don't know if it will get us there. So I want to try recording our 3 piece live. I figure 4-5 mics on the drums, 1 for guitar, 1 for bass (or maybe go direct) and a scratch vocal will do it. Then some overdubs later. I want to keep all the amps in the same room. We wouldn't have anywhere else to put them and I think we will be a lot more "on" that way.

How can I arrange the amps and mics so that the bleed through is minimal? I am sure there will be a few glitches that need to be fixed (most likely my bass glithces to be honest). Are there some sort of acoustic baffles I can use between the amps to keep sound away form the wrong mic? I looked through some old posts and on google but I just wanted to make sure I had the idea clear before I pushed for it at practice. I appreciate any help you guys can give me, these forums have been a big help to me so far.
 
Put the amps in different rooms or closets and listen with headphones.
 
This is exactly what we are going to do, we have a long room though, with another room in back that we are going to put the bass cab. There is pleanty of room to create sound barriers. We have a lot of foam we found in a dumpster that works great, we put it on the "barrier" (basicly a big sheet of plywood covered in foam) along with curtains etc to wall off the drums from the guitar amps. This created a kind of drum room, so we can get a bit of room ambiance off the other walls and ceiling (covered with sheets to stop excessive echo) and we will all be playing in that area.

We are going to put the guitar amp (Fender Vibrolux Reverb) in a couch and close mic it with a lot of cushions blankets etc. You might want to get some long cables, put the guitar amp in a bathroom or something, make sure everyone has head phones so you can hear the amps etc, and record together. You can have the bass go direct if its causing problems bleeding onto other tracks as well.

We have not started recording yet though, we might experiment with room sound on the guitar amp by putting it in the bathroom and putting a mic farther away.
 
Can you make a raw drawing of the room?
I mean an upper view with measures and a small list of equipement...

That will help me know what you can do...

I've done a recent Garage recording (live) and it sounds cool...and I edited a lot at home

Peace...

PC
 
I'm not sure if I will be able to isolate the amps into their own room due to size/distance constaints. How could I do it all in one room, like how Butch Vig recorded Nevermind?

I'll try to get some drawings and equipment lists later, I don't have that now. Is there a minimum room size for this to sound good? Basically its a big open basement and we are recording onto a Roland VS1680.
 
I'm about to do pretty much the same thing tonight - for a Deep Purple tribute band, no less!

I'm tempted to think "bugger the spill" and just crack on, but I'll let you know how it pans out tomorrow.

(I'll be using a 1680, too)
 
Get some plywood and curtains/blankets or something, buy old stuff at a thrift store, used matress maybe? Build a kind of "room" around the amps and close mic them, just dont turn up so loud. Just get a good sound on tape. Have the bass Go Direct into the board. That should work I would think.

Maybe put blankets on the walls so there is not so much echo off the drums.
 
As promised…The "Deep Purple" Session…

Band line up:
Bass (Peavey Mk4 Head, running 2 1x15"cabs)
Drums (Tama Kit)
Rhythm Guitar (Marshall Stack)
Lead Guitar (Marshall Stack w/Line 6 POD)
Vocals
Keys (Oberheim OB3 + Sharma Rotary Cab)

Recorder - Roland VS1680 (MT2 mode)

Mics:
AT Pro 25 (Bass Drum)
Shure SM57 (Snare Drum)
Shure SM58 (2) (Guitar Cabs) - I know it should have been 57s, but I've only got one!
AT Pro 31a (Hi Hat)
Behringer ECM8000 (2) (Drum Overheads)

Bass - taken from XLR DI out on the amp.

Keys & vox to be overdubbed later…

I took the "bugger the spill" approach, and we set up in an area roughly 30 feet by ten feet. Drums in the middle, bass rig next to it (to the right of the kit as you're looking at it) but facing away from the kit, rhythm stack to the right of the bass rig, lead stack to the left, about fifteen feet, facing away from the kit. Kind of like this:

LEAD/-------------\KIT/--\BASS--\RHYTHM

Hope that's clear. The overheads were set up as spaced omnis, not XY, and the stereo image I got was superb.

Anyhoo…a quick (recorded) level check revealed that everything was running ok, but there was a nasty bassy thud coming from the lead rig, the snare was lacking some bite and definition and the rhythm quitar sound was godawful - muddy and crackly (stock US Strat through top-end Marshall - how could this be?).

Solutions…I shifted the 57 to point directly at the centre of the snare, which sorted that out (along with a coupla db boost at 1K). Over to the rhythm stack. I assumed I was overloading the mic pre, so I pulled the mic back, knocked the gain down and got the guitarist to play. A-ha! There's the problem. His tone was bloody dreadful. Five minutes' work at the amp and I'd sorted out a nice raw tone which blended well. There's a lesson in there somewhere…Now the Lead Rig…A quick listen revealed the thud was coming from the top cab, so we unplugged it. Easy. Nice tones all round and press "Record".

Got the 1680 back home after a successful evening's recordings (they were expecting to get three tracks down. We got FIVE!).

Set the 1680 back up and had a quick listen. Compress the bass using the "CompBass" insert effect…add 3db @ 800hz…nice. Knock everything below 300hz off the hi hat mic and pan to 3 O'clock…[/i]nice[/i]. 3db of boost on the bass drum…punchy - the Pro 25 captured loads of beater click, so I didn't have to eq that in! Again, nice...Pan the guitars to 7 & 5 O'clock…bit more 1K on the snare and a short (0.9 sec) plate reverb. All so far, so good.

Time to check the overheads. First off - believe EVERYTHING that's been written on here about using ECM8000s for overheads! They capture everything from the kit. I also noticed that I had virtually no spill from the guitar amps, and just a little from the bassamp. The sound was a little too "full" though - the cymbals sounded a little too "trashy" and phasey. First I messed around with EQ, which wasn't doing it for me, and then I thought "what about the MTK algorithms in the 1680 fx boards?". After a couple of experiments which got it nearly right, I tried the "MTK: Acoustic" algorithm. Overhead heaven. My o/h's now had a beautiful "sheen" to them like you hear on "real" records. I'd recorded them originally on to tracks 1&2, so I bounced them to 15&16 as a stereo pair and printed the insert fx to tape (disc?) as I did it, so I could free the fx board up for mixdown (multi-band compression is seriously resource-intensive).

Marvellous night and marvellous pieces of kit. I've previously used a pair of 4033s as overheads, but the ECM8000s just slaughter them.

Hope this helps.

KEEP ON RECORDING!
 
You should post the music when it's done, I'd like to hear how it came out in those circumstances.
 
I think a lot of people worry too much about "spill." If you are close micing gtr and bass (or direct) you don't even need to worry about bleeding in those mics unless the amps are way low and the drums are way loud. Just make sure that your kick mic is situated to get the most rejection from the bass amp and guitar amp. Drum overheads are the biggest concern, but some preemptive hi cut on bass and guitar, or facing the amps away from the drums can really help. So far, my experience has been that a lot of musicians hate playing with headphones, live or not. Knowing this, I usually try to track at least the bass and drums at the same time, guitar isn't a problem either.

I end up getting a way tighter sound, for which I will gladly give up a small amount of fidelity.

ian
 
I woulg reccomend recording everything live then just adding vocals later.
 
Don't forget that each microphone has a polar pattern that tends to reject sound at certain points and off axis frequency characteristics. these both can be used to your great advantage when recording in tight spaces, if you have some medium isolation and utilize the natural isolation characteristics of the microphone this should work quite well. I would read up on these specs and use the info to influence where you place your instruments / microphones.

AS A RULE, its okay to have bleed from track to track AS LONG AS THE BLEED SOUNDS NATURAL and is less than 40% the volume of the main track. DON'T go crazy trying to isolate everything.

Jeff
Saunavation Audio Productions
 
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