Mixing Live Recordings

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cloneboy Studio
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Cloneboy Studio

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I'm in the middle of mixing some live songs a client wanted me to get, and I've done live recording before with a fair degree of success. I was wondering if anyone had any additional tips that I could run up the flagpole.

Luckily for me the band played pretty good that night and actually got a pretty good recording. The bass sounded *phenomenal* which is in my experience rare as hen's teeth for live recording.

A few of thing things I'm doing, just to throw some perspective on this, is keeping the overall level of tampering fairly surgical--using narrow boosts to bring out certain aspects so as to not disturb the overall "big picture" of the sound. I have found this works good because the sheer amount of bleed, and the limited nature of live setups, means you have to get a lot of the sound from ALL the mics onstage.

Any additional tips or preferences about this are welcome. I'd like to expand my technique more in this area.
 
I'd say keep the panning of the tracks similar to the way the stage was laid out. Of course that might be fairly obvious

The last one I did, all I had to do was throw up the faders and put a wee bit'o compression on the vocals. It came out really well.

Have a listen if ya like http://www.garagerecording.com/
They are on the downloads page.
 
Yeah I've found that just a little editing and gentle compression, combined with a little bit of tactical EQ works best. I was just wondering if there are other ways. It's comforting to know that my gut instincts have been correct. I'm used to the control of the studio, and for live recordings you have almost no control.
 
Cloneboy Studio said:
Any additional tips or preferences about this are welcome. I'd like to expand my technique more in this area.
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Probably want to look into doing some mute or volume automation for tracks that are just adding bleed when nothing is going on. OTOH sometimes you want to use this. I was speaking to John Entwhistle once about a live session for King Biscuit and he mentioned that they used the bleed from his vocal mic on the bass to cut more.
 
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I had 3 vocal mics up and I kept the 2 backup mics on the left and right on even when they weren't being used. It really added to the overall sound in my opinion.
 
HangDawg said:
I had 3 vocal mics up and I kept the 2 backup mics on the left and right on even when they weren't being used. It really added to the overall sound in my opinion.
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Did you have any room mics? If not, I can defintely see where this would help.
 
Man it is a different world then when you do a Gosepl recording with a 12 voice priase tem and a 50 voice choir. It is never that easy to mix one of THOSE live recordings. :)
 
masteringhouse said:
Did you have any room mics? If not, I can defintely see where this would help.
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No room mics. And it was way to dry/sterile if I didn't use these 2 tracks.
 
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