Gig recordings
Well, its almost one year since my previous post. I’m not sure this new post is due to the sudden emergence of a warm Sydney spring, or a rekindling of my audio recording and production inner flame. I suspect the latter, but I wouldn’t turn away the warm breeze either.
So what has been happening during the last 12 months?
After a long cold Sydney autumn and winter with little progress on musical efforts (probably more on this in a later blog), a recording and production project for Les Violettes was offered to me, which I gratefully accepted. Consisting of voice, piano, flute and melodica, recording and dubbing of four songs occurred over two nights at the Con. Pianist and vocalist were positioned in the same (small) room so the vocalist could feel the piano; piano to vocal mic leakage was significant though.
Mixing for these tracks is ongoing. It has been a challenge to get a rich and balanced sound from the upright piano recording (the piano was a bit out of tune and boxy sounding) and the vocals had a bit of nasal and upper frequency distortion (the latter I think due to poor quality Saffire Pro preamps available in the studio, and the former a combination of room response and mic honk). EQ has been used to good effect.
I experimented with reverb and delay in the mix. Dynamic EQ was used to tame obtrusive piano resonances.
Onto the live recordings: Hey Big Aki and The Wrecking Room were captured last Friday. With insufficient cabling for a proper multitrack recording, two audience mics and 2 mono PA mixes from the desk were recorded. With a bit of mix/mastering twiddling, the HBA recording / production sounds quite good – thanks Jack for the good PA mix.
The Wrecking Room show was also handled and handed over to the band – still pending their review. Here’s hoping for a good one. Their show was super impressive; wall of sound arrangements, male-female vocal harmonies, and a healthy dose of feel good stage presence and banter.
The next day, a trip to record Les Violettes in Leichhardt live. No amplification, so a stereo-pair mic, in X-Y configuration, was setup about 3 feet from the vocalist, 5 feet from the flautist, and 8 feet from the grand piano. The show was a real pleasure. Great renditions of their original pieces and classic French song interpretations. With some minor mixing (panning only) and mastering twiddling, a nice sounding recording was handed over with a good response. 2 out of 2 so far.
Last Wednesday saw the 3rd show in the series; the Gaelic with Elle Kennard and Beaufields. In contrast to the previous shows, I received quite poor audio submixes from the desk and equally nasty sounds from the audience mics. I attempted to salvage some of the performance; a beautiful vox/piano solo song, The Rippling, was mixed (vox channel, stereo “band” and 2 x audience mics), albeit with high noise floor from the “band” channel. The live sound engineer had to scramble for acceptable sound as only half of the PA system was operating. With Elle as the 3rd act, the sound engineer had put together a good sound considering, but for reasons not well understood, the captures onto disk were a bit nasty. Was the PA mix heavily compromised to work with the available PA system? Was the PA eq’d in a nasty way and required channel EQ to compensate? Maybe the submixes received (I recorded 8 channels which included 2 x band, 2 x audience mics, 2 x drums (unusual channel separation, and no overhead mics), 2 x vocals) were a bit skewed on top of the PA mix. Anywho, the mix result was pretty poor, and is abandoned for the foreseeable future.
All in all, good fun capturing the live performances. A good experience mixing/mastering them too.
