Help mixing a live recording...please :)

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

StraightEight <straighteight@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>I've been given 17 tracks, direct outs from each channel, complete 5
>piece kit with bottom snare, stereo over heads and hat mics, two guitar
>amps, and the guitar amps, apart from having pretty shitty tones sound
>like little combo amps that were at 1. The bass is DI'd, although has a
>horrible horrible distortion pedal on it, three vocal mics, lead
>singer, and the two guitarist do occasional back ups from their side of
>the stage. There are also two room mics which I think were pointing at
>random angles into the side walls from the roof.

Well, you got what you got.

My feeling about this sort of thing is that it's important to get the
room mikes right, and if you have that, you can build a mix around them.
If you don't have them right, your job is a lot harder.

It would _sure_ be nice to have the bass DI'ed _before_ the distortion
pedal rather than after the distortion pedal, but I would bet that
reamping the bass would help a lot, and rolling off everything over
200 Hz might not hurt things either. Maybe even both. Spend a little
time playing with the bass and guitar tones in isolation.

Reamping _might_ even help with the guitar tones... sure, you are dealing
with a track that has already been through an amp, but a second pass
around might not hurt.

>I haven't really mixed a live recording before. The first thing I
>noticed is that the seperation in mics seems pretty good, a lot better
>than the recordings I have made, maybe better mics and technique, the
>accoustics aren't too bad in the venue either..but the levels on these
>tracks are VERY low...I've normalised all the wavs to 0db and the
>signals are still very weak. As soon as I try some compression I bring
>in bleed from all over the stage. I was going to try gating the kick
>and snare before compressing them and then filling them out with some
>reverb, but it gets a very unnatural sound.

Don't worry about the low levels. If you want, you can try turning them
up by hand and ignoring the normalization... you'll probably find there
are occasional huge spikes here and there from things like people plugging
and unplugging amps which prevent the normalizing function from increasing
the level. If you do it by hand and make sure the music doesn't clip, it
doesn't matter of the noises clip.

Another problem that might be keeping the levels down is a lot of low
frequency junk. It might not hurt to high pass most of the tracks
around 75 Hz or so and see what they look like. Even though your
separation is good, you may have a lot of low frequency trash leaking
into other mikes, and your monitoring may not be good enough for you
to really hear what is going on. If you drop in a 75 Hz filter and
the level drops but you don't hear anything, this is definitely the
case.

Don't think about reverb during the first pass. If there are vocals,
start out with vocals, then bring the guitars and drums in to fill
into the vocals. Try gating and compressing the drums with the other
tracks up... if they get unnatural you may not even notice it with the
other tracks up.

Think about what the track is _about_. If it's a song with vocals,
it's usually about the vocals and your goal is to get the vocals to
sound as good as possible and to build everything else around them.

You will probably either need to bring in a little bit of the room
mikes at the end, or consider using fake reverb in place of them.
If there is audience noise in the room mikes, this can be to your
advantage, too.

>The guitars sound really shitty, they're drowned in distortion and the
>amps were so low on stage to allow the sound man to take full control
>of the level for the gig, the bass as I've mentioned is a distorted
>mess, and the singer....threw the room mics I hear a very raw sound
>(they're a sort of punk/metal/hardcore band, if you can imagine how
>that will sound! vocallist has a diet of gravel and broken glass!) but
>through the mic itself I hear this little 3 year old jack russel dog
>that just sounds so weak, the PA in question is a 20kW rig (in a
>bar!!!) so he definitely doesn't work off output distortion from the
>speaker, but it just sounds really intense through the room mics, and
>so wimpy on the channel itself. Again, compressing his mic brings in
>all sorts of stage bleed. The back up singers roar into the mics aswell
>but must stand further back from the mic (rather than cup it) as their
>voices are projected well, and when blended with the room mics, is
>quite a pleasing sound (if you like that sorta thing).

If there is stage bleed in the vocal mike, then you _don't_ have good
seperation at all.

If the vocal sounds intense through the room mikes, and the direct feed
sounds bad, then think about the differences. First of all, there may
well be a bass boost from the room, and secondly there is a huge amount
of natural reverb. Sit down with the vocal in isolation and see if you
can get it EQed and reverbed to sound good.

Adding compression on the vocal will make the leakage more of a problem,
and what is worse it will make the leakage pump up and down with the
vocals. Don't do it.

You _might_ consider retracking the vocals if you have to.

>My question is ... help! Where do I start? The room mics sound ok, but
>they're pointing at walls and i think are just meant for crowd noise
>between tracks. All the levels are very low, much lower than I usually
>record at, two of my overhead tracks and I have my whole kit, on this
>recording I just have this wimpy splashing sound of a cymbal every now
>and again. Does anyone have experience mixing more heavier bands? How
>do I get the intensity of my room mics into the whole mix? Any hints to
>start me off would be great and we can take it from them.

Start with whatever the track is about, and I assume that is the
vocals. Don't worry about the low levels... you have faders for that.
Turn them up.

>For what its worth I'm working strictly in Cubase SX2 (its all I have)
>and a fair few plugs (sonitus compressors and reverbs, some voxengo
>compressors and EQ's, and the free anwida reverb, as well as the usual
>cubase plugs) The tracks came from a soundscape rig, and the soundscape
>engineer gets quite a good mix, but I've always thought it just sounds
>like a polished direct out of the board rather than packing any energy
>into, which is certainly which the band would prefer. Can that sound be
>prefabricated or was it lost when the amps were turned down to 1?

A polished direct out of the board mixed with some room mikes can give
you just what you're looking for.

Try also bringing the room mikes up and then bringing the individual
tracks up into it. That's how I like to work when I have a good
room feed, and you might be surprised how things sit when you do that.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."