Recording a live performance

[The Unavoidable]

A couple of friends of mine have a movie studio, and they record alot of videos for bands, and alot of those are live gigs. But they always have the problem of recording sound for the videos. Usually the do something like recording straight from the master on the mixer, and that more often than not sounds kinda crap.

So I wanted to help them out, maybe start working for them as a live AE, but I don't know the first thing about live recording. How do most people do it? What kind of gear do you need? Do you record to a laptop, tape, what?

I was thinking getting DI's for every stringed instrument as a starting point. But what about drums, incase you would want to trigger later on? How do the pros do it?

 

[Trevoire520]

i use a alesis hd24 for recording live gigs, is absolutely rock solid and can record 24 tracks at a time, pricey though. but worth it imo for the stability. you've gotta be careful not to clip the inputs though. i find its best to take the mics from the stage into my desk, and then let the foh guy take the multitracks outputs. so if he needs more level he can get it without effecting my recording.

you could use a firewire mixer (mackie onyx, a&h zed, alesis firewire) to do the sound and simultaneously record multitrack into a laptop, though obviously thats creating more work for yourself. and depending on the drivers may not be as stable.

for a cheaper solution you could set up a recording mix using one of the aux's into a portable recorder, would only be mono though, unless you used 2 and put one guitar down one aux, another don the second aux, likewise with the overheads and suchlike. only problem with this method is that you're stuck with what you have after the gig, cant change levels eq etc, and foh desisions will effect your recording, so the sound will change throughout the set.


one of the things to think about when recording gigs is spill in the mics, keeping the stage level low will help to make sure there isn't too much spill in the vocal mics. best bet is to have amps offstage and bands going through in ear monitors, but obviously not alot of band gig like that.

di-ing guitars and triggering drums is a good idea in theory, obviously spill becomes a non-issue, but imo it kinda eliminates the point of doing a live recording, if we're gonna change the amp setup and sample the drums and all that shit then whats the point in calling it a live recording as chances are it'll sound nothing like the real thing? is good to have as a backup though incase the mic gets moved or something.

 

[wishtheend]

I've recorded a few live shows now using 3 firepods chained together. This gives me 24-channels direct into Sonar 7.0. Let's me have plenty of inputs to close mic all the drums, run about 4 overheads, trigger all the drums, mic guitars and bass, DI the guitars and bass, vocals and anything else.

The main thing is to use just enough volume so the band can play together. If it's too loud, you'll get a lot of amps in the OHs and bleed in instrument mics. Taking the DI of the guitar and bass lets me reamp after the recording if there is any bleed in those original tracks. The triggers can be used for samples, but I've just been using them to sidechain gates for the toms and maybe a sample enforcement on the kick.

So yeah, I would just go for a high input firewire setup on your computer. Getting the DIs and triggers gives you a lot of options to really polish the mix afterwards.

 

[The Unavoidable]

Thanks guys, really helpful!

I took a look at that Alesis hd24, and it looks really cool. So you just plug the stage mics into the inputs, then send them of trought the outputs to the mixer? And it records directly to the hardrives? (Which I guess is those things with handles on the front) Do they work like any external hardrive, so you can just plug via FW or usb to a computer?
How about user-friendly-ness? Is it generally easy to use, and to get a good performance out of it? And do you run anyother gear along with it?

Sorry for all the questions, but this is pretty much exactly what I am looking for! (and it wasn't THAT expensive either!)

 

[Sloan]

If your going to be recording AND doing the live sound, i can't stress how awesome the Mackie ONYX 1604 with firewire option has been for me. Just set everything up like your doing a good sounding live show and then just record to a laptop. It gets the raw tracks so you can mix later. Works awesome. It only has 16 tracks so getting extra DI's doesn't work out for me with a 4-piece band. I like using the last two inputs for audience/room mics. They realy help gel the sound together and if you have lots of people there, you need to hear awesome reactions between songs.

 

[Trevoire520]

You need preamps to run into the HD24, as its inputs are looking for line level signals, i just use the direct outputs on my desk, or you could get a bunch of preamps and throw it all in a rack. If you're feeding a seperate FOH mixer then that'll need to take line outs from the multitrack, but if you're running the recording and FOH off one desk then you can just use the direct outs on the desk to the multitrack inputs and leave the outputs not plugged into anything. Or if you're desk doesnt have direct outs then you could use the inserts, though this means you're not going to be able to use any compressors for the gig.

It uses IDE hard drives which are cheap as chips these days, just pop them into the caddy and slide them into the drive bay. You transfer the files to your pc through ethernet, but i could never figure out how to get this to work, fannying about with IP adresses and suchlike. So I bought the alesis fireport, which lets you connect to the drives through firewire. I was lucky enough to get one on ebay for about 1/2 the normal retail, and it'd only been used once!

I'd say its easy enough to use, I always have the manual handy just in case, but then I'm pretty cautious like that. A pretty extensive soundcheck and making sure you leave plenty of headroom is a must, we all know how drummers suddenly seem to hit harder once the stage lights are down.

 

[MartijnPaauwe]

I would recommend the HD24. Just link it with the direct out's from the mixing console and just record it (watch out with clipping though) when you're done and ready for mixing the only thing you have to do is load the files via the ethernet port. Easy as dell