Board recordings VS. DAT recording from Mic out front...

[Mr.Skellington]

Sorry, couldn't come up with a snappy Subject line.

 

Here's the deal:

 

I recently got a board-recording and also a live recording made with a DAT machine and condensor mic in the audience. Same show, two Awfully different recordings!

 

The vocals on the board-recording are kind of awful. They sound sort of out of key, flat and just ugly. But the DAT-recording sounds great! The vocals are quite audible, so I'd be able to tell if they were out of key. But, they sure don't seem to be.

 

Is there some weird thing that happens when sound is taken right off the board? Is it just because the mix is ill-balanced(too much glaring, dry vocal, no guitars, all snare drum vs. the nice, lush mix from the FOH captured on that condensor?)

 

I don't think I'm kidding myself here. Every board recording I've heard sounds just awful.

 

What's the deal?

[Brad Harris]

It all depends on how the system is setup for how well a straight board tape will sound.

 

Ideally, what you hear in your headphones when you pfl/afl inputs/outputs, sounds just like what you hear from your speakers.

 

In some cases, well the board channel eq sounds better than the mains eq.

 

 

Next time (if you can), play a reference source, and use the main eq/processing to make it sound the same as your headphones. You probably will get a better quality recording.

 

But, if you don't have a full mix coming out of the board, well, you need to make a full mix somehow (spare auxes) to record, otherwise, as you said, you'll have stuff missing aside from bleed into other mics.

 

I've always found an audience mic or two does the trick to blend in with the board tape recording (not back out through the mains!)

[tremendo]

I'm pretty happy with some board recordings we've done. I run an MP3 player at 128kbps/44.1K into the 1/4" main outs. I have the dual 31 EQs running as board inserts, and all effects are present.

 

Yeah, it's a little dry and clean and very easy to hear bad vocals, your not really picking up the room and very little crowd (we have no crowd mic). But the recording sounds fine to me. Even when I mixed it down to a 10 minute mix of like 12 songs, it lost a little clarity in the conversions, but for what it is, I'm very happy recording like that. If you care to hear how the recording quality sounds, there's a demo mix recorded at a live party on our site in the Audio section, www.LiveResponse.net.

[B. Adams]

I've had better luck with board recordings than with a mic. Here's a typical board recording in a fairly small bar. This is a band called "What the Funk?", and I've done lots of shows with these guys. You may notice that some things are quiet, while others are louder, but for a small place, I think my recordings turned out fairly well. This is just straight out of the main outputs.

 

BTW, this isn't a tiny file, so don't be clicking the link over and over. I'm cheap, so I only have so much bandwidth. That's why I'm not putting up more files. And they sounded like ass if I made them lower qualility than this, so that's the way they are. At least it's smaller than the 25MB file it used to be.

 

Anyway, I think that depending on what you're putting through the board, one method may work better than the other. You're never going to get perfect results until you have a seperate board with a big multitrack, so you'll have to compromise at some point.

[Old Steve]

 

Originally posted by Brad Harris ....I've always found an audience mic or two does the trick to blend in with the board tape recording (not back out through the mains!)

 

 

I agree that this tends to give the best results. The key is getting the mix right. In an ideal world, you'd have it all running into a multitrack recorder of some sort and could mix the various feeds down later (even fatten up some of the 'dry' stuff with some effects). A simpler way of approaching the same thing is to mix your board output into one mono output and use one relatively centered mic in the crowd for your 'mixed' source. Then, later on, take the recording (i.e. right side=board, left side="mix" mic) run the tape through two channels of a mixer and re-record the new mix using the two channels of the board to get the levels right, play with the eq, etc. The only downside is that you'll end up with a mono recording (unless you WANT to keep the two mixes separated), but it at least allows for some 'editing' after the fact.

[ATOMICDOG1]

I do board recordings of most of my shows. Currently I have a mixer with a matrix so that I can mix any of the subgroups and the main L&R outs in any way I see fit. This makes it possible for me to do a stereo mix seperate of the mix going to the house. I used to use a A&H GL2200 32 channel and I had to use two aux sends on that mixer to do the same thing. I think that I prefer the matrix mix instead, though I did get acceptable results while recording off of the aux sends (pre fade of course). I record straight into a Tascam CDRW with a DBX 166 compressor in line.