The recording was done with two Rode NT5 mics positioned A/B with 2m distance to each other, approx. 30cm under the ceiling of the room, near the stage. They were plugged into a Tascam DR-70D recorder directly.
It turned out, that this positioning wasn’t such a good idea. There were plenty of over-emphasized frequencies and the recording is lacking low-end since the mics where too far away from the subwoofers (on the floor under the stage).
However, Ardour did a great job, together with x42q, Harrison XT-MC multiband compressor, a small amount of Calf Reverb and some final boosting using Voxengo Elephant 4.5 mastering limiter. The latter is a WindowsVST which I run wrapped to LinuxVST using LinVST, so far the most stable solution for this.
I think the result isn’t bad at all concerning the not so optimal mic positioning.
The video was captured with a Panasonic V777 camcorder and edited and brought together with the audio in Lightworks. I used to use Kdenlive, which amazes with features but shocks with instable behaviour and performance problems. Lightworks is a breeze, once you get used to its really strange usage concept. It can really seize the power of fat Nvidia cards at fullHD for real time preview.
Guys, did anyone of you ever click the “share” button below a YouTube video? It will give you a youtu.be URL. I don’t know when they introduced this, but it must have been ages…
I think this sounds great! Capturing a live performance is no easy task. Microphone placement worked just fine in my opinion. There will always be room for improvement. It is most important that you caught the performance and shared it.
Thanks, guys. OK, “Smooth Jazz” is the wrong label, sorry my English, still the piece is smooth. I still haven’t found an optimal mic positioning for that place yet. The low end is very week, which is especially noticeable in the bass drum that only has the high attack part, not the low boom. But hey… working on it, and this is volunteer work. (Otherwise I’d done multi track etc.)
Concerning the atmosphere… that got pimped a little using Calf Reverb. I tried GVerb+ from Harrison but I must confess I really don’t like it. Depends on the purpose though, I guess. Might be good for wet snare drums and the like.
In order not to bother people with new threads, here’s a two more experiments with 2-mic-recordings and Ardour.
X/Y positioning of 2 Rode NT5 in the middle over the first row of the audience… way too much drums, guitar and vocals weak. since the speakers are to the side and the drums in the middle closer to the mics: https://youtu.be/8bkct7O_mLE
Wide A/B positioning (~2m distance) of 2 AKG C1000 in the back of the room (I did not set up this, I only used the recording)… these old C1000s sound strange in my ears, but the positioning yields nice results, except for with loud audiences (between stage and mics): https://youtu.be/XrKuj2DGhWk
I will do some more with Audio Technica AT4021 and Line Audio CM3 in different positions. All processing done with Ardour using x42 EQ, Harrison XT-MC, Voxengo Elephant, sometimes Calf Reverb. I might go back to using Voxengo GlissEQ again. After all, it seems to run stable wit LinVst. The second recording would have sounded better with dynamic EQ somewhere around 140Hz.
These videos were captured with a Canon XA10 camcorder that I got used. I think something less expensive such as the HF G25 by Canon would have done this well, too. (Given you get those units used.) Audio was recorded with a Tascam DR10D recorder. Video editing was done on Linux using Lightworks (payware edition). I use kxStudio/Kubuntu 16.04 64bit on an old Xeon workstation.
The original recording sounds OK to me on headphones. The kick drum doesn’t have much low end, but not hearing it in person I can’t judge how it was supposed to sound. There is nothing from how the bass guitar sounds in the mix to make me think the lower range is drastically wrong, just a little on the light side.
The Rode mics have a bit of low end roll off because they are cardioid mics tuned for closer typical use (vocals, etc.). Any cardioid mic will have a falling low frequency response because of the way the directional pattern is created by the diaphragm, but that can be tuned for distance to a certain amount, closer than the flat response distance and you get a rising low frequency response (the “chesty” sound that many people like about U47 or U87 or similar mics), farther than that distance and you get a falling low frequency response.
You could try using omnidirectional mics. I like the Jecklin disk style (because it was popularized by a recording engineer named Jecklin) which is omni mics separated by about 15cm to 20cm, with a foam covered disk in between to increase left-to-right separation at high frequencies. With omni mics you can get very good low frequency performance. That said you can only record what can be heard at the microphone position, so you can only take advantage of the better low frequency performance if there is not some acoustic problem at the microphone position.
Thanks, ccaudle, for your feedback. I like the idea with the Jecklin disk, I didn’t think of that option I currently don’t have omnidirectional mics available, because apart from these kind of things, there is hardly any use for them. Given you’re mostly into live sound reinforcement and mixing. Most important is, however, that there are only few positions in that given room that sound well. In my later post you can hear the same distance from stage but with X/Y positioning, the drums being too dominant (speakers to the side), and an a/b positioning at the FOH position which seems to be the best choice if and only if you have a quiet adience.
I guess some Jeckling disk style stuff in the middle of the room would work well. But this would be in the middle of the audience, which is not an option.
Btw, I recently tried the Line Audio CM3 and they did better on the low end than the NT5s. That work is not yet published (waiting for the artists to give the final go), once it is ready I will post it here in this thread.
Which mics would you recommend for the Jecklin disk thing? I’m always watching out for better mics and perhaps it should be a pair that has cardoid and omni capsules available.
“Which mics would you recommend for the Jecklin disk thing?”
The only I really have experience with are the older AKG Blue Line series. I got those because the capsules can be changed, I have omni and hypercardioid capsules to use in different configurations. There are many alternatives for a similar price now but I have not tried others myself.
If the room is somewhat small so that the audience hears a blend of the sound reinforcement and the direct sound from the band, the two choices would seem to be place the microphones near the audience so you record what the audience is hearing (disadvantages of audience noise as you mentioned), or use a four track recorder to record a pair of microphones closer to the band and the feed from the sound reinforcement mixer, and blend those two pairs later when you are in a quiet environment and can make judgements on the proper blend.
This time I had 2 Line Audio CM3 mics in X/Y. However, I mainly used the main outs from the console. So this was a 4-track-recording. I did quite some funny processing… added a little bit of reverb using IR LV2 with the M7 samples. Harrison XT-MC Multiband, Voxengo Elephant as mastering limiter (via LinVST, works great!).
Let’s see what I will try out for today’s concert at this venue.
The Visualizer will help you to use the right distance between the mics, the right angle if you’re using XY or ORTF and the right distance between mics and band. But maybe you know this already.
And claustrophobic video+reverb just doesn’t mix well
Weiter so, ich wünschte ich könnte so gut vor Ort aufnehmen!
Thanks for the Link, Tiltshift. I didn’t know this one yet. The first video uses a positioning that tries to mix the PA loudspeakers as a source with the direct sound from stage. This turned out to be sub-optimal, but other tests revealed, that it is still not the worst thing to do in this room. I always wanted to try other mic positions with the same idea, a bit further away from the PA speakers where sources should blend better. Worst option ever was the 2 mics of the Tascam DR70D (AB, ca 20cm) at FOH position.
Btw, the link in my post above from June 29 is wrong. The mix of X/Y from CM3 mics and the console output is this one: https://youtu.be/km5PzoZx6b4
In the meantime, I figured out how to use the Soundcraft Impact console as an USB interface. For singer/songwriter stuff, it is easier to do a multitrack something (which is, basically, 2 tracks: 1 vocals and 1 guitar) and do some mixing afterwards. I usually hook up the Impact console to my old Thinkpad laptop running kxStudio 16.04 and record directly into Ardour.
Let’s see what’s next, I will have some mostly unplugged something soon in that venue, time for more stereo mic positioning self-teaching.
