W
wilfoster
New member
my band is playing saturday night and I want to record it. as easy as possible. suggestions any one?
Hard2Hear
New member
That completely depends on what equipment you have available to you. There are SP many options here. Tell us what you have, or what you can get, then we can give you an idea.
H2H
H2H
Track Rat
Just Your Average Sized Member
Put a mic or two out at the mixer and go two tracks to tape (or DAT, or mini disc,etc).
Tom Hicks
Well-known member
Don't take your recording signal off the main bus of the board.What you hear live is a mix of ambient sounds plus the PA.Use auxes and or monitor sends to construct a recording mix separate from the "live sound" mix.Does your board have enough channels to handle all your inputs?If not,consider submixing drums and harmony vox to free up space.
Tom
Tom
skippy
New member
Yup- just what Track Rat said.
It's nearly impossible to try to do live mixing to tape at the same time that you're doing live mixing for the PA/front-of-house. That's a guaranteed ticket to both ulcers and low-quality results... The workload is insane, and the paranoia is worse- and you can never really hear what's going to tape. So picking off the PA feed is usually a disaster.
By far the lowest workload/highest quality result will come from setting up a stereo pair of mics right at your mix position, setting levels to tape, and then _forgetting_ about them so that you can focus on getting a good FOH mix for the paying customers. if the FOH mix is good, the tape will be as well.
This is one place where a stereo compressor/limiter like the Berhinger Composer Pro (or ideally something better) can save your bacon, and pay for itself in one night. You can use the limiter portion to keep those momentary peaks from burning a hole in your tape (or crunching your MD recorder), and still print good, hot levels. You can compress, too, if you want to- you may find it useful. But usually the acoustic levels at rock shows are pretty squashed just by trying to get the PA over the stage levels...
Set up the levels with 12-18dB headroom during sound check, set the limiters to clamp the levels *hard* at about -2dBFS, and then sit back and mix for the house! Glance down at your recording rig no more than two or three times during the night- if you're hard on the limiters, you'll need to pull down the gain at the mic pres a little. Every act is different, and it'll take a little practice to decide how much to sandbag on the headroom- but leave yourself _at least_ 12dB at sound check, because there's not a band in the world that doesn't play at least 12dB louder once there's a crowd in the room.
Your mileage may vary...
It's nearly impossible to try to do live mixing to tape at the same time that you're doing live mixing for the PA/front-of-house. That's a guaranteed ticket to both ulcers and low-quality results... The workload is insane, and the paranoia is worse- and you can never really hear what's going to tape. So picking off the PA feed is usually a disaster.
By far the lowest workload/highest quality result will come from setting up a stereo pair of mics right at your mix position, setting levels to tape, and then _forgetting_ about them so that you can focus on getting a good FOH mix for the paying customers. if the FOH mix is good, the tape will be as well.
This is one place where a stereo compressor/limiter like the Berhinger Composer Pro (or ideally something better) can save your bacon, and pay for itself in one night. You can use the limiter portion to keep those momentary peaks from burning a hole in your tape (or crunching your MD recorder), and still print good, hot levels. You can compress, too, if you want to- you may find it useful. But usually the acoustic levels at rock shows are pretty squashed just by trying to get the PA over the stage levels...
Set up the levels with 12-18dB headroom during sound check, set the limiters to clamp the levels *hard* at about -2dBFS, and then sit back and mix for the house! Glance down at your recording rig no more than two or three times during the night- if you're hard on the limiters, you'll need to pull down the gain at the mic pres a little. Every act is different, and it'll take a little practice to decide how much to sandbag on the headroom- but leave yourself _at least_ 12dB at sound check, because there's not a band in the world that doesn't play at least 12dB louder once there's a crowd in the room.
Your mileage may vary...
W
Wil Davis
New member
We've made pretty good recordings by running the output of the board to a DAT or a CD-RW recorder, but getting the audience ambience by mixing in the input from the ambient mic used for eq-ing the hall. If you want even better ambience, use a pair of omnis at about 8-10 feet near the back of the room (they can also be used to eq the room). The problem with having a couple of mics at the mixing board is that you get all the comments/coughs/quips/farts/etc from the peanut gallery, if you use the ambient mics you can control now much you use. If you're recording to multi-track, you could even put it on separate tracks and mix it in later.
- Wil
- Wil
W
wilfoster
New member
well. we are playing in a bar for beer. no sound checks there. I definitely want a minimal workload though. I was thinking of just boomboxing it. I wish I had a portable MD recorder. Or the desire to set up my four track and mics. I should have stressed how easy I wanted this to be.
TexRoadkill
Audio Bum
The easiest thing would be to just have a good friend listen to the show and tell you about it later. That would at least be more accurate than a boombox 
At least get a good tape deck and record from the board outs if that is all you can do.
At least get a good tape deck and record from the board outs if that is all you can do.
MiXit-G
New member
My brother takes a generic type 2 track tape deck with 2 mic inputs and points them around,gets good results.(just remember to flip the tape over!!) 