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Author Topic: Live Recoding tips and tricks  (Read 3492 times)

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rnolan

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Live Recoding tips and tricks
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Hey all, I started this topic so we could have a place to discuss the various approaches you can take to getting a live recoding of your band at gigs, rehearsals etc. and also to share our collective experiences and ideas. As with studio recording, there are many different ways to do it, and no one "right" way.
Probably first up, you need to decide what you are trying to achieve. e.g. just get on ok recording of the performance so you can dissect it to make the band better through to you want a great recording to release or go with a video clip.
Then what gear have you got (have access to etc.)

Taking a feed from the front house desk is probably the most straight forward and easiest. Most desks will have a L/R tape out (generally RCA plugs). On more elaborate consoles you can derive the tape out signal from various places, but mostly it's a split of the main L/R outs. The down side to this approach is what is being sent to the front house speakers (main outs) is a mix of the stage mics balanced with the sound coming direct off stage. So it tends to be mostly drums and vocals as they are the softest and need more in the PA to balance with the bass, guitars etc.  So this is an ok mix for reference and fine tuning the playing/songs etc. You can improve this mix by keeping you stage volume down (face cabs across stage etc) to have as little stage sound as you can out the front so the PA mix has a good balance of everything. A variation of this approach is to take one desk feed and put up a decent mic near the desk pointing back at the band to pic up the room mix.  We only had stereo (mostly cassette) back when I did allot of this.  If you can do 4 digital inputs, you could use both desk feeds and put up 2 mics and mix it all later.
You can just put up 2 or more decent mics out front and record them, this is getting more elaborate and not always easy to do at a gig but should be very indicative of the performance.

If the sound guy is up for it and has spare aux sends/sub groups you can do a separate desk mix more optimised for the recording (generally this would be mixed with headphones) and works better if there is a separate person controlling it, it also takes more setup time (not always doable).

The best results tend to come from taking a split of the stage mics (like a monitor split from the stage box) into a separate desk (preferably isolated from the stage sound e.g. another room) and either do a stereo mix (so you have to make mix/EQ and FX decisions at this point) or just record each mic into multitrack (if you have enough I/O channels) for later mixing which gives you more control and, for the recording, you just have to make sure the levels are good. If the front house desk has direct outs for each channel (some do), and you have enough I/O channels, you can take the split there. Or if no direct outs you can use the channel inserts to get a signal but you need to make RTS to TS leads (join R and T together so the signal chain isn't broken and peel off the T signal). I've used this approach for recording to get direct desk outs.
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Studio Rig: Stuff; Live Rig: More Stuff; Guitars: A few
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