Home » The PARIS Forums » PARIS: Main » Interesting live recording experiment
| Interesting live recording experiment [message #83199] |
Mon, 16 April 2007 17:19  |
Paul Braun
Messages: 391
Registered: September 2005
|
Senior Member |
|
|
Well, last night was our 5th concert with Jim Peterik and friends.
Concert went fantastic. Some immense tech glitches during soundcheck,
but we all pulled together and got through 'em.
How immense?
Let's just say there's another kid at the theatre who's been doing
some sound stuff recently, and not been telling me about it.
Things like rearranging all my gear, deciding which we need to keep
and which we don't, and then taking that stuff home and denying that
he's ever seen it. Until the chairwoman called, and then it's "Yeah,
we have that. We were just sorting through it and will bring it right
back down."
Right. And we're still missing stuff.
My main amp rack at the theatre consists of two Crown Microtech 1200's
for monitors, and three bridged Behringer EP2500's for FOH. All wired
through a dbx DriverackPA controller, and cusom input/output patch
panels on the back. Has been that way for three years.
So, I go down on Friday night to go through my cables and stuff to see
what's missing. Had to make up 4 new mic cables to replace ones that
went "missing". Had to replace a speakon on one main monitor cable
because he decided he needed it for something else.
Annoying, but not a deal breaker.
They decided to put a matinee of the current play on Sunday right
before my concert. Stupid power plays and politics (how long can it
take you to set up a concert? It's just a couple of mics and guitars,
right???) so I don't get my usual whole day to set up and troubleshoot
before the artist arrives at 4pm. I get to start setting up an entire
stage at 4:40. Nice.
So, we get the mics set up, get the cables run, run the drive snake
from the monitor board to the back of the amp rack. So far, so good.
Then I open the front door of the rack and notice a huge, gaping hole
where my two Crowns should be.
What the F&*K????????????????
So, I run back upstairs, and find the two crowns stacked up on the
floor in the storage room.
So my helper and I run back downstairs, toss 'em in the rack, and try
to patch them back in. Meanwhile, I'm swearing up a storm and
threatening to drive to someone's house and kill them.
Now, this is a permanent instsll, mind you. These amps have been
there for three years. They are not needed anywhere else. I know
they pulled them to use for sound for our annual fundraising banquet,
which I refused to do this year (9 years of being treated like shit
and yelled at by control freaks with no clue about sound.... I'd had
enough.) But the thing is, there was no reason to pull those amps.
I built a portable amp rack on wheels specifically for the banquet.
Has a FOH amp, a monitor amp, Behringer DCX2496 crossover/controller,
and a couple of GEQ's with front-mounted custom I/O panels. I showed
him the damn rack. Explained the damn rack. They didn't use the damn
rack.
The thing is, the theatre people there last night were saying it was
my fault for not checking on it earlier in the day. Like when they
had a fucking play going on. Nobody blames the idiot who pulled the
damn amps and then didn't have the fucking courtesy to reinstall them.
If I had pulled a major piece of equipment, told no one, and then
didn't put it back right before one of their plays opened, they would
have crucified me. Yet, all of this is my fault, not the idiot stoner
kid's.
This is why I've decided to walk away from those people after 26
years. And my friends and I are forming a production company to
continue the acoustic concerts at other venues.
Fortunately, Jim, Larry Millas, and company are good friends, know I'm
not an incompetent fool, and also know the problems I've been having
with the group. So, we sucked it up, soldiered on, and got the show
underway only 15 minutes late. And once we got it dialed in, the PA
just sang, and the show just plain rocked.
Anyhow, enough bitching. Onto the recording stuff.
I've been multitracking these shows into Paris since the beginning 6
years ago. Gives me good source material when I play engineer later
on.
The last couple of years, though, we've also been recording the show
straight to cd and selling it to the audience at the end of the show.
Been taking the feed from the FOH insert. As you know, that never
sounds good in-your-face on a cd.
It occurred to me that I could mix in Paris at the same time I'm
tracking. Duh. Hadn't thought of that before....
My cd guy has a dual cd-recorder rig being fed by an Alesis 6-channel
a/d converter with lightpipe inputs.
This is why I was trying to figure out how to use the adat card just
on output and use the two 8in's on inputs.
I ran a cable over to his position, gave him a C16, turned the monitor
so he could see the mini-mixer up on the screen, and fed his rig from
lightpipe channels 1&2.
Worked like a charm. This "cd-now" cd is the best-sounding one we've
ever done. Giving the recording engineer control over the mix turns
out to be a good thing.....
Then it also came to me that I could toss a couple of EDS verbs on the
auxes to add some "room" and strap a limiter across the global fader
to make sure we didn't clip the outputs. Yes, I've got two audience
mics, but they're facing out from the stage, so they don't work so
well as a natural reverb source. Next time, I might try them in the
back of the house.
We've been contemplating getting a mixer for the cd guy so he could
mix, but this system elminates the need and accomplishes two
recordings from one set of inputs. In fact, there was another guy
videotaping the show, and I paralleled the outputs with the MEC outs
and fed his camera with the same mix as our cd guy was getting. At
least one of those songs will end up on YouTube soon.
I love Paris. And I love the fact that I tracked 16 freakin' tracks
for 2 hours straight on a 300MHz G3 Mac with nary a glitch.
This system just rocks. I think I'm going to build a rackmount XP box
for the home system for final mixing, but I've had such good luck with
reliability in the field with the Macs that I wouldn't use anything
else.
pab
|
|
|
|
Current Time: Tue Feb 04 17:35:39 PST 2025
Total time taken to generate the page: 0.00674 seconds
|
The PARIS Forums
Search
Help
Members
Register
Login
Home
