recording choir christmas musical...

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smurfo9

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Hello, my school choir teacher is having a musical on friday in my High School Cafeteria. There will be atleast 400 people observing, and we need a way to record the performance. Now 4 months ago I wouldnt have a problem because I had a sony DAT recorder, but I sold it because I had no use for it. I need to find the best way to record the performance to get the best quality music, and the 2 ways I am debating are:

Plug 2 Audio cables from the PA system into a headphone converter & plug it into my soundcard on my computer, and record using Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.

or

Plug the 2 Audio cables into my HiFi VCR, and record in HiFi on a new HiFi tape.

I know that the sound quality will be more efficient by doing it digital (computer), but I am not experienced with cakewalk pro audio. Do you guys think I could manage doing it through cakewalk, and get high quality sound while doing it? Or should I just do it through the HiFi Audio on my vcr.

After all of this I am going to put the recording on a cd, and my teacher will take it to his friends studio to edit/master it, so If I use the vcr I will need to output it into my computer aswell.
 
The first problem I can see is that if you are recording off the PA, to advise you we would need to know wh at the PA is bing used for. If the PA is being used for announcements and the mic or mics are not placed to optimize the sound of the choir, you will have a big poblem.

Therefore, if nothing else, I would suggest getting hold of a small mixer and some decent recoring mics and then place them in the audience in the prime listening spots (at least two mics for stereo by the way). this will greatly improve the sound.

If, however, the PA is actually being used to amplify the choir, t·en you might be able to take a feed off the PA though I cannot imagine why that would be the case unless the auditorium is huge or something like that. Even still, mics in the audience would probably get a better sound becuase there would be some chance fo the sound to blend and take on ambience from the room.

Anyway, there are some guys on this site that know alot about live recording and can realy tell you if they decide to answer, I am not sure of to much on this particular subject.

Anyway, good luck and Ho, Ho, Ho!
 
... I don't think putting mics in an audience full of HIGHSCHOOL KIDS with yeild the greatist results :)

I get a lot of audience noise from recording the sermons at my church ...

Depending on the schools board I would take control of a sterio submix...like two monitor channels and use one as left and the other as right...and then just djust the per-channel monitor mix and run that directly into the computer... but be sure to practice
...or even better you could use Y cables and record it on both the computer and VCR to see which one is better... then just take the VCR to the studio and have them copy it...I'm sure the guy will look at you funny...
 
I've used overhead choir mics trying to get a good sound with elementary age school kids; it's a headache and a half. What worked best for me in the end was two small condensor mics on booms between the choir and the audience, slightly overhead and at couple of feet in front of the choir members. Even that couldn't really be called "best." My real problem was that nobody would sing once the auditorium (in this case, a church) filled up... bunch of nervous kids.

If you can get access to a couple of large diaphragm condenser mics, try setting them in cardioid pattern and put them on booms, right and left between the audience and the singers. Dump them into a small mixer and use the mixer's preamps to power the mics. Pan a third right and left and run two mains to the computer. At this point, all you're trying to do is capture the signal.

If you can get something out of the PA, so much the better, but the PA is only as good as the microphones feeding it.
 
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