Projects, Projects, Projects

Project 1: Live Recording of the Marsden Lee's
My good friends, Aaron, Jared, and Paul are in a quite fantastic pop/indie band. We are planning to record a studio track in the next few weeks. I recorded their live show to have a reference point, as as they say, practice makes perfect!

The band:


My vantage point from the wings (which happened to be the pool table room, and I was kinda in the way):


You can see my trusty Heil PR-40 as a mono drum overhead (which did a good job at capturing highs, even though it's a dynamic). 57 on the kick, 58 on the bass (which didn't get the sub-80 lows, but still sounds essentially like a bass), sennheiser e835 on the guitar.

A LESSON: Live guys don't always know good gain staging, or they are running into amplifiers with fixed gain so they operate their desks way under 0dBu. The solution: run your desk send (for me it was the vocals) into a preamp rather than a line in on your recording equipment , you can control the level and record it at exactly the level you like. Unfortunately, you just have to put up with the raised noise floor.

This is the result. I used limiting on the drum kit to tame these extremely annoying peaks in the waveform the heil somehow picked up. The drum overhead was sitting nicely at around -18dBFS, but for some reason, the odd transient (just on some snare hits) jumped up into the red and clipped .. when you look on the waveform, it's a single 1/2 wavelegnth long peak ... most strange .. light compression and reverb on the vocals, moved the guitar a few milliseconds out of phase in the right channel for 'fake' stereo guitar .. done
Sarah - The Marsden Lee's by Adam Friend Audio

Project 2: Contemporary works for flute and woodwind at the Artisian gallery, Brisbane
This was an extremely interesting setting, in an art galley with works hanging from the roof:

I borrowed some Behringer C2's to use as an XY stereo pair, and threw my Heil PR-40 up right in from of the players, so I could blend in a dryer signal if I wanted (the gallery place was quite wet).



And finally, I put my Zoom H4 in the corner exclusively for ambience:


Of course, sound will be forthcoming. One thing was, whether it was the air conditioning in the gallery or the self noise of those C2s I got a lot of background noise ... will make a conclusion on the viability of Behringer C2s for classical recording in due course.

Last, I present to you a track from the City at War recording fresh off tape, Ramble and Tamble. Enjoy:
Ramble and Tamble - City at War by Adam Friend Audio