I made a very nice open rig recording for a top local instrumental musician with a great band Friday night, and the most optimal recording position in the entire room was directly underneath the first row of seating.
It was under one of two picnic tables immediately in front of the band, and I'm not joking in the slightest when I say this was the most optimal recording position. The recording would not have worked out as well if the rig was placed on top of the same the table, nor anywhere else IME. The room is a brewery, operating in an open-air sheet steel walled warehouse type building - a very reverberant space. There is also a rather high noise floor from brewery refrigeration equipment in the back of the room and noise and gusty breeze from two gigantic ceiling fans. Last year a modified shipping container was added to form a partly enclosed stage, converted with the front wall cut out of it and sound-damping material with woven wooden lath over it added to the interior back wall and ceiling. This generally improved the sound by directing the primary sound output from a non PA amplified band out forward towards the audience rather than directly illuminating the ceiling and sidewalls. Yet even with that improvement the critical radius of reverberation in the room remains small. The reverberant quality is not bad, but is quite high in level any considerable distance from the stage.
By placing my mic array directly into a folding tripod foot without any vertical stand or bar, the microphones were only about 3" or 4" above the concrete floor. This provided a direct line of sight forward to the band beneath the bench seat, yet also a clear line of sight out horizontally in all other directions to the interior dimensional limits of the space. The picnic table and bench seat surfaces above the array acted as horizontal baffles, attenuating reverberant sound arriving from above the horizontal floor-plane, shielding the microphones from fan gusts, and significantly reducing the pickup of chatter from nearby audience. This worked especially well with the OMT8 recording array I was using, which has microphones pointing in all horizontal directions, including two wide-spaced omnis and a pair of supercardioids facing rearward. The positioning placed the front facing microphones in a sort of left of center stage-lip position in front of the 5-piece band, with the rear and side facing microphones picking up good ambient and reverberant room sound without wind, much close chatter, or too much pickup of the vertical arriving reverberant room sound component, which in any horizontal-arrayed microphone arrangement tends to be reproduced more monophonically than the horizontally arriving reverberant component.
I post this as a reminder to approach each recording situation creatively, considering the core goals of the recording with an open mind, rather than falling into rigid ideas of what always works and what doesn't.
Its a mindset particularly well suited to amatuear live music recording, even more than it is to other types of recording, and its one of the reasons I love doing it.