Topic: on-stage taping

[Gutbucket]

Anyway, gutbucket you and I met at the mmw show pre-jamcruise last month..

Good to meet both you and Tony.  That was a fun night, and an interesting recording.  I mostly wanted to hear what that setup sounded like from the audience perspective in the big room instead of up on stage in the small one.  Since the PA's SPL level was prettly low, I mostly made a great surround recording of the pre-cruise cocktail party all around us and only a mediocre recoriding of M(S)MW.  I don't think I'll try flying 3 ADK TLS + full bodly SD cards like that in that location again, but it looked pretty impressive.  If you took a picture, send it to me as I'd love to have a photo of that. The surround is quite impressive when that spunion dude tried to run up the blocked staircase in front of the SBD and knocked the clamp loose from the railing and I caught the contraption on it's way down.  You can hear all the tapers go "Whoa!" all around, some girl in back yell, "nice catch!" and her friends break into applause, and Spyder-9 off to the far left call out "Idiot!"

Below is a photo from an organ trio recording session last Wednesday night.  This one was done to make a CD for the band, recorded in the organist's living room, but basically an on stage setup.  The feet belong to the guitarist who stood about 3-4' behind where he's standing in the photo.  The organ was a beautiful B-3 with pedal board and two sequential serial# Leslie cabs on either side.  The right ADK TL is only about a foot or two from the closer Leslie, the other Leslie is farther back towards the rear corner of the drum kit.  No surround pretentions on this one, just two seperate stereo arrays- the three ADK TLS in a supercardioid equilateral triangle on the floor, and the MG cardioid pair ORFT-ish, a little bit farther back and ~4' high.  I ran both mostly to compare them and as a safety in the unknown smallish room, but it worked out best with them both mixed together.  The ORTF pair is sort of add some air like room mics.  Worked out really well.
 

[F.O.Bean]

Not to brag or pat my own back, but last weekend[the 13th] I recorded Consider The Source with my mk21s stage lip, DFC, and IMO, its one of my best onstage/stage lip recordings ive EVER MADE Its just how a killer stage recording should sound. Here is the link. Please let me know what you think

http://archive.org/details/cts2013-04-13.mk21.lb.m10.flac16

[davepeck]

Not to brag or pat my own back, but last weekend[the 13th] I recorded Consider The Source with my mk21s stage lip, DFC, and IMO, its one of my best onstage/stage lip recordings ive EVER MADE Its just how a killer stage recording should sound. Here is the link. Please let me know what you think

http://archive.org/details/cts2013-04-13.mk21.lb.m10.flac16

Sounds fantastic, Bean. A bit drum-heavy, but that can be unavoidable with on-stage recordings.

I have similar thoughts about my on-stage Snarky Puppy recording in Boston last month. Quite possibly the best recording I've ever made with 2 mics, period. Check it out:

http://archive.org/details/snarkypuppy2013-03-30.bsc2.flac24

[chinariderstl]

I have similar thoughts about my on-stage Snarky Puppy recording in Boston last month. Quite possibly the best recording I've ever made with 2 mics, period. Check it out:

http://archive.org/details/snarkypuppy2013-03-30.bsc2.flac24

Damn, that does sound good as shit!! Nice work! 

[Gutbucket]

That does sound good. Well done!

Love the mic Pron Gut...any chance to listen to the results? Hell I'd love to hear each individual track to see how it builds up (to 5.1 Surround?).

I just made my first Soundcloud upload-  an initial mixdown of the recordings from that organ trio session I posted about a few weeks ago.  The idea behind these recordings was to get some material for the band's promotional CD and websites. All these tracks have a snare hit at the begining and end of each track so they can sync video to the audio.  The tracks are not trimmed or normalized like they would be for CD, but are EQ'd, have some parallel compression applied, and the errant peaks manually knocked down with the volume envelope tool- more of that on the last few numbers when they get cooking.  I trimmed the excess between tunes, and it sounds like a studio outake recording with some banter between tracks and a couple false starts, but was played straight through in order, like a live set and the overall dynamics reflect that.

Mic setup was described in my last post (with photo).  I was concerned about the drums in that very square living room but the room sound is ok.  The only computer I currently have setup for editing has an older version of Samplitude that only supports four channels, so instead of importing the 5 mono channels into the computer, I played it back in real time on the DR680 and did a 5 > 2ch mix down using the monitor mix of the DR-680 > SPDIF > R-44.  I then imported the 24/48 stereo file from the R44 and did the work in Samplitude on that 2-channel file.

Band has yet to decide just what they want to do with these. These aren't public files on Soundcloud, but supposedly these 'backdoor' links will let readers of this thread download the FLACs.

Titles aren't listed on Soundcloud but below are links to a few of the ten tracks recorded. 

Download the FLACs (16/44) if you like or just give  a quick listen to the Soundcloud lossy compressed but instant stream and let me know what you think (anyone know what compression and rate soundcould useds for streaming?  It sounds rather compromised to me, but I don't mp3 much)-

song1 umm, I know this one.. help me out with the title
Commin' Home Baby
Organ Grinder Swing
Chicken
So What

[Gutbucket]

Let me know if those links are working or not.
I can post links to the other tracks in the set as well if there is interest.

[Roger Gustavsson]

These recordings of Snarky Puppy and The Toasted Grains are sounding fantastic!

I certainly want all you have with The Toasted Grains. Strange, you have five links but I got six tracks downloaded....

[cybergaloot]

First link works and sounds nice. I don't know the song but it sounds so familiar.

[Gutbucket]

Thanks Walter.

These recordings of Snarky Puppy and The Toasted Grains are sounding fantastic!

I certainly want all you have with The Toasted Grains. Strange, you have five links but I got six tracks downloaded....

Below are individual links to the entire CD length set.  I'm at work on a machine without sound, so I've made no attempt at listening to name the other tracks.  If anyone positively IDs them, help me out with song titles.  Appears that I missed a file split for the tune immediately following Commin' Home Baby, so that file actually comprises two tunes, the second was another Jimmy Smith tune as I recall.

song1 umm, I know this one.. help me out with the title
Commin' Home Baby (and song 3, apparently I missed that split)
track3
track4
track5
Organ Grinder Swing
Chicken
track8
So What

[dnuggs]

Let me know if those links are working or not.
I can post links to the other tracks in the set as well if there is interest.

Links work
Sounds great Lee, I feel like I am in the living room while they jam!

[Hypnocracy]

Let me know if those links are working or not.
I can post links to the other tracks in the set as well if there is interest.

Links work
Sounds great Lee, I feel like I am in the living room while they jam!

No fly's on those recordings Gut....nice....maybe the B3 a bit higher in the mix but that may be out of your control...

[page]

I'll listen when I get home tonight. It's a rare day when Lee opens his treasure chest.   

[Gutbucket]

Thanks Hypno,

The balance between instruments on this is pretty much set by mic placement and the level that each musician played.  So unless it's a frequency region more or less specific to that one instrument, there is not a whole lot I can do to bring up the organ verses the drums and guitar after the fact.  I did pan the left TL inwards about halfway between Left and Center to help 'unstick' the guitar from being hard-left in the left speaker, but all the other mics were simply hard-panned left or right except the center, which was panned straight middle.  Actually at their regular gig the organ can usually stand to be a good bit louder, so I was happy it's more or less sufficiently loud on this recording.  The little bit of parallel comp I used helped bring up the lower level parts and details from all the instruments, and a much of what I was hoping to bring out by that was the lower level organ parts.

How does the overall EQ balance sound?  I'm especially curious about the louder/faster tunes, when the cymbals might get a bit too bright and strident even though I think their balance is good on the lower level tunes.  I notched down what was a relatively hot cymbal resonance and pushed the drums back slightly with an ever so slight mid/side width tweak.  Give So What a listen, which is a faster number with a steady ride cymbal driving much of it, and let me know if that one sounds a bit too hot up top or not.   

With your strong knowledge of mix-down/EQ/comp, I'm curious to hear your critical assesment too, Page.

Next I'll work on getting some of those on-stage surround tracks up somewhere for you guys to mess around with.

[page]

I grabbed a handful of tracks, but I'm not sure i'll have time to sit down a listen (I was hoping tonight, but that didn't pan out); tomorrow's a work day and then travel for a bit.

[MIQ]

This sounds great Lee!  Nice work.

I think the tonal balance is really natural sounding.  The kick drum in So What at about 4:10 to 4:14 sounds different than other spots in the song, like the attack is different.  Is that just Luis kicking it differently or was that section processed some how?

I really enjoyed listening to this.

-MIQ