Advise needed: Recording Live shows

[White Lightning]

There are several Jazz gigs scheduled in Israel in the following that, I believe, need to be recorded for a wider audience than the ones attending the shows.

We're thinking of recording the gigs and produce a limited number of CDs/LPs. We're contacting the musicians and the concert hall to get their permission.

Now for my questions:

What minimum recording equipment you think will suffice to get a decent/good recording?

Is it enough to attach a DAT to the control console?

Thanks!!

Barak

ps: B3-er, feel free to relocate the thread. I didn't know whether it belongs to the live shows or the Audio talk, so I posted it here on the misc. music.

[frank m]

Unless you already have the DAT you'll find that the new Sony MD's are just as good and a lot cheaper, going for a couple of hundred to 3 or 4 hundred. Hitching it directly into the audio system seems like the way to go, if you can get the musician's permission. Good luck.

[Jim Alfredson]

MD use compression. I would use DAT before I'd use an MD.

That said, taking a board feed can sometimes be good and sometimes be very bad. Keep in mind the sound guy is mixing the band to sound good in the hall, not on a recording. So that might mean balance issues.

For instance, a lot of times the drums are not put into the mix very much because they are so loud on stage by themselves; you don't need as much in the sound system. Many times horns are very loud in the mix because they are so soft on stage, etc.

I'll keep going if you want. I learned a lot about this by trying to record our tour with Arno Marsh this summer.

[7/4]

Stereo pair or microphone in the right place. DAT is great but think about using more than one machine in case one fails.

[White Lightning]

I'll keep going if you want. I learned a lot about this by trying to record our tour with Arno Marsh this summer.

Please do go on...

[Jim Alfredson]

Well, it depends on how good of a recording you want and how much you want to be able to manipulate it later. Two mics set-up in an X-Y pattern or even an ORTF out in the audience going to a DAT machine might be fine but probably not hi-fi. Taking a feed off the sound board might be fine, but you can't do anything about the balance of the instruments after the fact.

This summer, when touring with Arno, I bought a 16 track digital harddisk recorder off eBay specifically to record the shows with (a Fostex D160... can be had for around $500.) You can use up to a 20 gig harddrive in the machine and the harddrives are held in caddies, so you can swap them once you fill one up. It's a great unit for the road because it uses standard IDE harddrives and you and just keep swapping them out to get more and more recording time. I found that a 20 gig drive would hold about 6 hours of 12-track audio at CD quality (uncompressed 16bit 44.1kHz). Fostex also makes units that record at higher sampling rates.

Anyway, my plan was to use the same mixer that was doing live sound to amplify the microphone, since the recorder does not have microphone inputs. Each microphone input on the mixer had a "direct out" that could be fed to the recorder. So for us, we used 12 channels and I could route those 12 channels from the direct outs of the Mackie mixer into the recorder. That means I could go back later and mix the tracks together and have control over the level of instruments. The tracks broke down like this:

Track 1 - drums left overhead mic

Track 2 - drums right overhead mic

Track 3 - snare drum

Track 4 - bass drum

Track 5 - saxophone

Track 6 - guitar

Track 7 - guitar direct

Track 8 - organ direct

Track 9 - organ bass

Track 10 - organ top

Track 11 - vocal 1

Track 12 - vocal 2

The idea was good. A problem reared it's head, though. Even though I was getting direct outs from the mixer, any time the sound man brought the level of a certain track up or down (say the saxophone wasn't loud enough, so he'd bring it up in the mix for the club) it would mess with my levels on the recorder, too. This is because the direct outs are controlled by the fader for each track. Bummer.

So if I do this again, I'm going to isolate all the microphones using a multichannel splitter. In other words, each microphone will be split and go both to the soundman (front of house mixer) and to me at the same time and each send is completely independent from the other. So if the soundman turns something up or down, it doesn't affect the recording at all.

The only other option is to use your own mics on everything, which means double-mic'ing the whole stage. That seems silly to me. Splitting is a much better option. I'm in the process of building a multi-channel splitter right now, actually.

Confused?

[7/4]

I knew you'd have an answer like that!

[jazzhound]

post this in the audio forum and jim Anderson might respond.