Topic: My First Show: Taped, Transferred, & Tracked...Now the questions...

[phishmarisol]

Ok so with my trusty JB3 in hand I was able to successfully tape, transfer, and track my first show!  I know...n00b...but hey, I'm excited.  The taping went pretty good.  I had a very experienced sound guy who bent over backwards for me.  Somehow at the end of set 2 I had no signal.  Never found the cause.  However the only music that was lost was about 30 seconds of the first encore song so I'm pleased.  So here are the questions.

1. At first I was showing levels on only the left channel.  So the sound guy messed around with my cable and figured out that it was shorting out.  Basically if you plugged it all the way in it was only getting one channel and you had to get it just right and then not touch it at all to get both.  Didn't bother me too much but this could cause some trouble in the future.

2. On the JB3 the levels have a little outline of the box at the top, which I assume is the "red zone."  I tried to keep them as close to that line without going in the box, and that went fine.  However now that I have it transferred you can easily tell that it was low.  But I had it as high as I could without going into the red during the recording...Should I use a program to normalize the tracks now?

And some praise for the JB3.  When I realized I wasn't getting a signal anymore I pulled the cable and patched into a different part of the board.  However, in my haste I did not save what was already there and just started over.  I figured I would lose the whole second set but I guess it automatically saves it because it is all there.

[Brian]

first off, +t for the first moderately successful taping job. and to have such a nice soundman is a true luxury and i hope that you thanked him many times  I, too, was fortunate to have a friendly sound guy at my usual venue when i first started that always dropped great knowledge on me.

i have heard/read here that the line-in on the jb3s can be a little sketchy. as far as levels, what is your peak value.  should be a negative number in dBs.  What audio software are you using.  Soundforge, Wavlab, and Cool Edit all have very reliable normalizing applications. some folks say that normalizing can cause distortion or add noise to your signal.  I use Soundforge 6.0 and have had no problems normalizing to the peak vale and NOT the RMS value.  It was discussed in a thread earlier this week about how normalizing using the RMS value will degrade your audio.  So if you use Soundforge, normalize using the "Peak" value option.

hope that helps and if you have anymore questions, fire away! we are all here to help each other out in this great hobby

Brian

[Sean Gallemore]

lshdgkldfh;ajd;fh;sgjdgykoet67y