Recording Live Music

Last night I saw a show broadcast on a local Kentucky PBS station featuring the musicians who did the sound track for the movie "O'Brother Where Art Thou". The stage of a theater was set with a hodge podge of 6 or 8 large condencer and ribbon mikes placed around on floor stands. All the musicians played acoustic instruments and/or sang unaugmented. No one was ever closer than a half meter to any mike and then only if they had a featured passage.

The sound was wonderfully ballanced and full. I was so pleasantly surprised to see what at first appeared to be a cobbled together setup from several pawn shops be so brilliant. It made the talent of the performers really show through clearly.

It was also refreshing to see a performance with no Lasers, pyrothechics, background dance troup, and ego much larger than the performers' talent crowding the stage.

I have read many of you talk about mike placement and selection. Intellectually, I understand the physics behind it, but watching this performance, it struck home how it really works. The sound people were fantastic. They were nearly seemlessly quick to adjust for any imballance. The performers obvious talent sure helped, and without stage monitors too.

So, is this how you guys make the magic happen?

hi!

i recently saw a 1950's nat King Cole Show. It must have all been live, and Nat just wanders from one scene to another, and it is musically perfect. the quality of the recording is miraculous, the balance sublime, and there is never a mic in shot! in some scenes any mic would have had to have been at least 20-30 feet away from the great man, and yet the vocal sound was SO intimate! How on earth did they do it? Makes me feel sure that we have lost something along the way somehow . . . .

wish i'd seen the show in question . . . U47/8's rule my roost too! I love RCA/STC/COles ribbons too . . . fig8 is great for isolation if you think about what you're doing.

Andy P

[quote author="thomasholley"]Last night I saw a show broadcast on a local Kentucky PBS station featuring the musicians who did the sound track for the movie "O'Brother Where Art Thou". [/quote]
That was Alison Krauss and Union Station, no?
Was Chris Thomas King there too?
Those are some amazingly talented artists. :thumb:

They were all there. Ralph Stanley, Alison Krous, Chris King, Emylou Harris...

> The stage of a theater was set with a hodge podge of 6 or 8 large condencer and ribbon mikes placed around on floor stands. All the musicians played acoustic instruments and/or sang unaugmented. No one was ever closer than a half meter to any mike and then only if they had a featured passage.

I was going to say: if you were in a good theater with that act, no PA, you would have heard a fine performance.

The better old-time vaudeville/movie houses have excellent sound, no amplification.

On an act that knows how to PLAY, all you might do is add solo mikes. Now that you are committed to amplification, you put the choir (ensemble) about half Dc back from the mikes to give an overall PA-flavor, so when the soloist gets closer to a mike the sound does not leap from the stage to the speaker-stack. And given a good act and no need for 100+dB SPL levels, the soloist does not need to get ON the mike, just 2 to 4 times closer than anyone else, to raise level a little and also to shift the reverb balance.

But.... nobody performs that way any more, do they? I've even been asked to supply monster PA for a string quartet in a 600-seat hall made for music. Maybe you've never been to a large-room concert without PA?

> Nat just wanders from one scene to another, and it is musically perfect. the quality of the recording is miraculous, the balance sublime, and there is never a mic in shot! in some scenes any mic would have had to have been at least 20-30 feet away from the great man, and yet the vocal sound was SO intimate! How on earth did they do it?

In many cases: ribbons (bi- or uni-) on booms in a very dead studio. (Nat was with RCA, right?) But 30 feet is a long way. Are you sure there was 20+ feet of headroom? Your eyes may be fooling you. I'd prefer to take a guy like Nat to TV from a little closer than 30 feet. But I often record singers for CD from 20-30 feet in rooms livelier than some old-time TV studios.

But Nat also hired and inspired good recording technicans/artists. His work is more complex than Bing Crosby or even Frank Sinatra, his contemporaries.

Dammit, stop putting the mikes so close, and LISTEN. Good musicians who can really put on a show for a crowd do NOT need it. You can't put 100 ears in the bell of a sax or touching the grille of the guitar amp or skimming the drumstick path. Yet music was enjoyed LONG before mikes were invented.

I have heard some good music in some (now defunct) clubs and a few old theaters. Carlos Montoya, without amplification of any kind, Ray Charles big band with the only mike for his voice, Taj Mahal in a recently restored concert house.

It is just difficult to see so many good acts because they dont play for small venues and the large venues suck. I know I am old, but once upon a time I saw Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Count Basie, Ray Charles, B B King ...all in small venues.

I was at a Humble Pie concert around 1974. The room held about 5000 people. At one point, Steve Marriott did a vocal solo with no mic, just screaming his lungs out. Man that little guy had some pipes. You could here him clear as a bell all the way at the back of the hall. I have never seen anything like it. RIP Steve!
:guinness:

So, is this how you guys make the magic happen?

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The fact is, with a truly good performer(live or in the studio) an engineers work is minimal. This has been the most important lesson I've learned so far. There is no substitute for someone who knows their instrument-by far it makes more difference in sound than any ten mics you throw at them. I've been fortunate enough to be have had the opportunity to train under and learn from some of the best engineers around (across several genres of music), and that rule seems to be pretty universal no matter what musical style you do. It's amazing how little effort it takes to make a great sounding recording when you work with good musicians.

Zach

In my experience the order of priorities goes like this, from most important to least:

1. Great songs
2. Great performers
3. Great sounding instruments
4. Great sounding room
5. Great sound system

If you have the top of the list stuff together it's easier to tolerate the rest being less than perfect. If you don't have great songs, what's the point of any of the rest?

:thumb: :thumb:

[quote author="SPG"]The fact is, with a truly good performer(live or in the studio) an engineers work is minimal.[/quote]

I wish that everyone on every message board who confuses themselves with all sorts of irrelevannt questions about gear would read this and keep reading that statement until they choke on it. Good decisions come from good engineers, but the magic ALWAYS comes from the musicians. I think that Eddie Kramer was a really really really lousy engineer back in the day but he recorded for a chunk of his career starting out one of the most talented musicians alive. Yes, the hendrix records sound good, but when you compare them to other records of the time, there is very little to get excited about with the engineering and a long laundry list of problems that are entirely the engineering, but the records none the less are incredible. Eddie Kramer had little to do with making them incredible.

I often like to tell the story of doing a session with a lousy band on my house equipment and out of frustration I left the console and the patch bay set up. I had another band the next day, same room, same gear and before I reset the board and pulled the bay I had them make some sounds. That recording is one Im most proud of to date and the session I did the day before I have never played for anyone. I didnt change a thing between sessions, the band made all the difference.

Most rock engineers that I know trip hard on trying to figure out the john bonham drum sound. Getting it is so easy people cant even see it, you just set up two mics in front of john bonham, plug it into whatever you want, make sure the signal to tape isnt too hot, isnt too compressed and is EQ'd relatively flat, and there you go. Its not some big mystery. Unfortunately, you need john bonham and instead of accepting that, people put all this responsibility on the gear or the engineer or the room or whatever and its nonsense. I could go ask bonham to get up from the kit and let me play for a while during a session and I would prove that theory in about 2 bars...

Sorry to rant, as more and more newbies post on the internet (which is great btw) the idea that talent in front of the mic is %95 of a good recording is a concept that is really getting overlooked and taken for granted. When you look at the rolling stones or the who or any band that survived the mid 60's into the 70's, you can see how the recording technology grew with the band and how the stuff sounded better, but then it just sort of plateaus out and the recordings are consistent. Big bands back then recorded in all sorts of studios and often not in studios at all (take the stones or led zeppelin or deep purple) and yet they managed to have the most consistent sounding records, consistent drum sounds, just plain consistency. It really begs an explanation about how we behind the glass impact recordings beyond a point and when you listen to the talk on the internet you'd think the engineer was responsible for every sound and every tone going to tape and certainly when you listen to new records done by guys with this mentality, you can certainly hear it as somehow some guy thought it would be appropriate to nudge a kick drum in time or silence the air on the tom mics between hits and all the other super high resolution shit you can do with a computer that should never need to be done to a band that brings the talent to the mic in the first place. Im not a fan of it, but I sure have an open mind and Ive yet to see a band benefit from this new mentality.

rant rant rant. There are talented engineers but they dont make interesting recordings. The best they can do is make a REALLY good recording of a musician doing an interesting thing and if a musician is doing an interesting thing well, its shocking how easy it can be to record it.

dave

you just set up two mics in front of john bonham

Click to expand...

And try not to piss off Peter Grant....

:green:

I see the point.

It took me a while to stop thinking about how to sound like Lenny White and start sounding like Darren Landrum. That realization opened up a whole new world for me.

[quote author="soundguy"]
I wish that everyone on every message board who confuses themselves with all sorts of irrelevannt questions about gear would read this and keep reading that statement until they choke on it. Good decisions come from good engineers, but the magic ALWAYS comes from the musicians. I think that Eddie Kramer was a really really really lousy engineer back in the day but he recorded for a chunk of his career starting out one of the most talented musicians alive. Yes, the hendrix records sound good, but when you compare them to other records of the time, there is very little to get excited about with the engineering and a long laundry list of problems that are entirely the engineering, but the records none the less are incredible. Eddie Kramer had little to do with making them incredible.

I often like to tell the story of doing a session with a lousy band on my house equipment and out of frustration I left the console and the patch bay set up. I had another band the next day, same room, same gear and before I reset the board and pulled the bay I had them make some sounds. That recording is one Im most proud of to date and the session I did the day before I have never played for anyone. I didnt change a thing between sessions, the band made all the difference.

I could go ask bonham to get up from the kit and let me play for a while during a session and I would prove that theory in about 2 bars...

Sorry to rant, as more and more newbies post on the internet (which is great btw) the idea that talent in front of the mic is %95 of a good recording is a concept that is really getting overlooked and taken for granted. . It really begs an explanation about how we behind the glass impact recordings beyond a point and when you listen to the talk on the internet you'd think the engineer was responsible for every sound and every tone going to tape and certainly when you listen to new records done by guys with this mentality, you can certainly hear it as somehow some guy thought it would be appropriate to nudge a kick drum in time or silence the air on the tom mics between hits and all the other super high resolution shit you can do with a computer that should never need to be done to a band that brings the talent to the mic in the first place.
[/quote]

Amen!