Topic: Help Newbie First Concert Taping

[Church-Audio]

I agree with SparkE! about you doing the right thing. Chris will give you the definitive answer, but on the ST-9000, I believe he recommends +10 for loud shows, 0 for extremely loud shows, and +30 only for quiet stuff like acoustic. If you go +30 at a loud show you run the danger of the preamp itself clipping, even if your levels on the R-09 look fine.

You are correct. +30 On the 9000 is very hot for an r09 and will not be good for really loud shows.

That's the thing, I don't know if a lot of what I see would be called "really loud shows."  Most of what I record is bluegrassy bands in small bars with crappy PA's, so I've got the preamp at +10, the R-09 at 18-22, and I still have to add a few dB's in Audacity.  I'm happy with the results that I'm getting from that combo, but when Chris said to use as much of his preamp as possible it made me question what I was doing. 

I agree with Spark'e you could go + 30 for the light stuff and it would be fine.

[Jeremy Lykins]

Well with my ca 14's rubber banded to a chopstick and the Edirol R-09hr hooked up to the CA 9100 HR at 50 and 9100 at 60-70 my first rock concert was a hugh success!!(Steve Miller - Honolulu) Thanks for all the help.

Congratulations!     And nice work on the home-made T-bar.  I clip my CA-14's to a 6" plastic ruler.

[tonykriegmaui]

6" ruler! - preferrably black! - should've thought of that - would've made things much easier. thanks. But, Chris's mikes and preamp - captured and amazing sound.

What I learned (for other newbies) was it really makes a difference where you are on or off axis to the speakers (duh!). If you look at the venue of the Blaisdell arena ( http://www.blaisdellcenter.com/seating/seating_arena.html) I was sitting at Loge 16 off to the right of the stage. The loges are about 30 feet off the floor of the arena.  The speakers were hung on either side of the stage (I would guess they were 50 feet high on each side hung from the ceiling and made up of a number of individual speakers sorta like a ribbon of boxes strung together).  I thought that it would be better to be closer to the stage to see the performers. But I noticed when Jesse Colin Young opened that the sound seemed to be a bit muffled. So I picked up and went over to the loge 1, dead center and there was quite a bit more high end.  Unfortunately, I was kicked out of the seat mid way in the concert for some late comers who had bought tickets.  I noticed as I was walking back to my original seat (continued recording while walking) that the sound didn't start to get muffled until after about a 45 degree and more off the stage (with 180 degrees being on loge 1 dead center).