Recording - August 2014 - 44

By Scott Dorsey

The situation: you want to record an amplified, rock-style concert, but you have only two channels available to record to.
Now, in today's world of cheap multitrack recorders this is less
common than it was in years past, but it's still something that
happens, especially if you're working with video.

position. Raise it up a good ten or fifteen feet. Presumably, the
console has been placed in a good place for listening; perhaps
halfway back from the stage and not on the center line of the
room. So, you would expect this position to be a reasonable
place for an ambient room sound.

Recording Live To 2-Track... But Not The Way You'd Think
A novel approach to capturing a concert with a 2-track recorder
The usual suspects
There are a number of different possibilities. You can record
the room itself with a stereo pair and get a good sound of the
room and the audience, and if the room is a great-sounding
room and the PA is a great-sounding PA, it'll sound great. The
problem is that most of these events take place in rooms that are
far from great-sounding, with PA systems that are far from greatsounding, and so an ambient recording gives you an echoey
mess even with very careful positioning.
You can also record the PA mix off the console output, as discussed by Eleanor Goldfield elsewhere in this issue. The problem
with doing this is that the people in the audience are listening to
a mixture of sound coming directly off the instruments combined
with the PA sound. So if you take the "board feed" from a small
venue, what you hear are the instruments that are amplified a lot,
like the vocals, and you might not hear the drums at all.
In a perfect world, you could make a separate mix just for
recording. In a perfect world, you'd have the PA inputs, and
some ambient microphones in the room, all split out to a recording truck or a console in a quiet recording area backstage
where you can mix to 2-track and record. Or, in a somewhat
imperfect world, the poor PA guy (who is already making a mix
for the PA mains and often two or more additional monitor
mixes) would use Aux buses on the PA console to make a recording mix, as Eleanor describes. It can yield great results, but
doing this under field conditions where you can't really hear
what the recording mix is like is difficult at best... and it's always
a big shock to get back home and hear what you actually got.
Something different
The technique I am about to describe is the fourth option, and
it's a good one. This is a variant on a very old technique that
has been updated by modern technology. It's not perfect, but it's
surprisingly effective under bad conditions where making the
best of the situation is the key.
First, take a good cardioid condenser microphone that is as
clean off-axis as you can get, and put it up at the PA console
44

RECORDING August 2014

Use the most accurate microphone you can find. A Schoeps
Colette is going to be better than a Shure SM81, but it's possible
to get acceptable results with an SM81 doing this. I have even
used a Sennheiser MD441 (the king of dynamic mics) when that
was all there was in the kit that day, and been surprisingly pleased.
Record that microphone onto one track of your recorder.
Now, measure the distance from that microphone to the stage
microphones. If there are a lot of widely separated stage microphones, pick the lead vocal mike. Just pace it off with your feet and
make a note of it. It was nice when we had tape boxes to write notes
on; now we have smartphones, which will let you make a note of
the distance you paced off, as well as the band name, the venue
name, the date, and maybe the cute drummer's phone number.
Ask the PA mixer (the person, not the console) to give you a
feed of the direct main speaker mix. If at all possible, you want
that mix before the level faders on the mains, so that as he rides
overall levels it won't affect your feed. You also want it before
whatever equalization is being put on the mains. Depending on
his console and configuration, this means he might have a mono
output feed he can give you, or perhaps he might have to give
you a post-fader Aux feed that duplicates the main mix (especially if he is running the mains in stereo). He might be able to
give you a feed off the main insert.
Be nice when you talk to the PA guy. Be respectful. He's trying to do his job and you're coming in here with all this recording stuff. The concert is primary, the recording is secondary. If
he wants you to take a transformer-isolated feed, do it. Bring
your own transformer isolation box so you can.
Go through a rehearsal or sound check and set the levels so
that both the microphone and the PA feed are at respectable levels on the meters. If you have to use the first song to set the levels, well, sometimes you have to do that. Be aware that the concert will probably get louder as time goes by and that the loudest sound in the rehearsal will tend to be around 6 dB quieter
than the same part of the actual performance. So leave plenty
of headroom; it's the modern digital world, we have headroom
and should not be afraid to use it.



Recording - August 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2014

Contents
Recording - August 2014 - Cover1
Recording - August 2014 - Cover2
Recording - August 2014 - 1
Recording - August 2014 - 2
Recording - August 2014 - 3
Recording - August 2014 - 4
Recording - August 2014 - 5
Recording - August 2014 - Contents
Recording - August 2014 - 7
Recording - August 2014 - 8
Recording - August 2014 - 9
Recording - August 2014 - 10
Recording - August 2014 - 11
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Recording - August 2014 - Cover3
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