Recording in Live room (blead over?) vs segregated

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Brian01

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We are recording in a smallish room, pretty dead acousticly to 2 adat xt20s. We are going to add reverb to the drums later. The bass is direct, and the guitar is direct via a Line6 Vetta. Normally everything is very much isolated. No problem with sound bleading onto other mics/tracks etc.

The previous recordings did not sound bad, but yesterday we decided to practice our set instead of record (we did record straight to a cdr, but not a multitrack). We had the vocals, guitar and bass comming back through the PA (monitors really). The recording sounded great, much more "live" and realistic than our previous recordings. Its making me think it would be better to have the sound blead onto all the other mics (vocal, drum over heads etc). Sounds a lot like the 60s recording sound. How much of a problem will this be when mixing the drums down, with reverb etc? I am thinking a lot of guitar will be in the overheads. Any thoughts?
 
High!

I do not like the live recordings. Our room is not perfect (far away from that) and you'll hear a lot more on the recordings (just spilling into the other mics). I found it horrible to get the mixes sound like anything.... But that can be recording problem, too.
If you do 'live' recordings then try it with REALLY micing the room and use some additional mics that you can give some instruments a little push...

Just my 2c,

Axel
 
If it works, it works.

To minimize the bleed you can use some baffles to block the amps from the drum mics. Put the amps close to the drums but pointed away with the baffle between the amp and drum kit.

If you like the final results better than do it all live. There have been many great albums done that way in the past and pretty recently.
 
What Brian is saying is that his live recordings sound better. This is because he likes that "room tone" sound.

You can fake it on your multitracks with a stereo pair of room mics going into two if the channels. Consider these to be "natural reverb" channels and bring them up in the final mix just enough to hear them and then back down a tiny bit.

I do tons of live 24 track stuff that ends up sounding too much like studio tracks. What I have found is that when I leave the audience mics up a bit in the mix it has that classic "Frampton Comes Alive" or "Cheap Trick Live at Buddahkan" sound. I would also try to record the guitar with a mic instead of the Line 6 thing if you don't want a sterile sound.
 
jgourd said:
What Brian is saying is that his live recordings sound better. This is because he likes that "room tone" sound.

You can fake it on your multitracks with a stereo pair of room mics going into two if the channels. Consider these to be "natural reverb" channels and bring them up in the final mix just enough to hear them and then back down a tiny bit.

I do tons of live 24 track stuff that ends up sounding too much like studio tracks. What I have found is that when I leave the audience mics up a bit in the mix it has that classic "Frampton Comes Alive" or "Cheap Trick Live at Buddahkan" sound. I would also try to record the guitar with a mic instead of the Line 6 thing if you don't want a sterile sound.
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I agree. There's nothing wrong with live in the room recording if the room sounds good, which to your ears, it does. You only get into trouble when you want to do something with an individual track. Say you want to sweeten up the drum overheads with a reverb. The bass and guitar to some degree will get some verb too since they bled into the overhead mics. And if you want to punch in to change or fix something, the old part will still be under it from its bleed into other mics.
Just something to concider.
 
I record "semi-live" whcih allows for a bit of tweaking. I record the drums with the rythem guitar and have been getting pretty good isolation with the drums and guitar being setup like they would on stage. I like to mic things as much as possible but I am limited on mics and can only do 8 channels at a time. Usually I have 2 SM57's as overheads on drums, 1 AKG D112 and 1 Shure Beta 52 on kick . . . then that leavs 1 SM57 and the preamp out on the guitar.

Then when I record lead I use an SM57 on each of the bottom speakers in the cab and the line out. . . and bass was the AKG, Beta 52, and an SM57 and the preamp out

My PC can't handel that many tracks at 24 bit 44.1 khz so I mix it down about every 6 tracks for tracking purposes then do submixes for the real thing.

works for me :)

peace
sam
zekthedeadcow@hotmail.com
http://www.Track100.com
 
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