Live Sound Reinforcement Exprimental recording - 2023
This event was designed to capture a traditional jazz recording consisting of drums, bass, piano and guitar, with modern equipment and a binaural microphone setup. The event aimed to display the performance with clearly defined sound and a balanced representation of each instrument, while also having appropriate redundant back systems to prepare for any possible component malfunctions.
Drums
For the drums, I booked out the AKG drum pack, due to the size of the room only being about 12 meters I was not too worried about how loud the kit would be overall but wanted to mic the kick and snare as they would fight the most with the other instruments. The kick was miked up with the AKG D112, a front address cardioid dynamic microphone about 3 inches away from the drum skin so as to not emphasise the proximity effect. This gave the kick a clear sound which was boosted on the PA and allowed it to cut through really well, in addition, it was side-chained to the bass to make it even cleaner. I was not able to access the padding inside it which we thought needed a bit more padding to give a bit more punch. The snare had the AKG D40 front address dynamic microphone, which was attached to the snare using a clip, we used my drummer's jacket to dampen the snare this gave us a really good sound making it sound really solid, this again was boosted in the PA and was able to come through really well along with the guitar. In regard to overheads, I tried them out in a standard spaced pair using the AKG C430s, felt they were not needed in the room as the rest of the kit was loud enough as it is, this meant we had two spair mics if we needed them for anything else
Piano
For the grand piano I set it up in the half stick postion to allow more reflection into the mics which were a pair of AKG C451 small diaphragm condenser microphones set up in an ORTF microphone position around 15 cms over the hammers this would pick up more attack and definition in the piano which was the centre peice of the live performance.
Guitar
The guitarist was using a Orange Crush 35 amp which I mic'd up with an SM58 laced very close to the amp around the edge of the cone to get the required tone and to boost the bass frequencies with the proximity effect. The guitar amp was placed in the middle of the stage, behind the performer and angled away from the piano to ensure minimal pick-up from the piano mics.
Bass
The bass used a DI to go directly into the stage box, this prevented any more spill which would most likely cut into the other mics. This allowed for a really clean bass which would then be heard back through the monitors.
PA System and Monitors
I had access to two monitors and used 1 for the bass and 1 for the guitar, both other performers said they could hear their instruments without any need for monitoring, this allowed for all the performers to hear each other and play together efficiently.
I also utilised multiple effects and features of the DiGiCo due to a request from the guitar player who wanted a chorus effect on the guitar which was added to the front-of-house mix and can clearly be heard in the recording. The DiGiCo’s EQ feature was useful to being applied to most of the channels. The bass is on input one with a high-cut filter to free up space in the mids, on input 2 is the snare which had a low-cut filter to stop too much of the kick coming through the mic making the kick to loud this method kept the snare sounding pretty nice and kept the kick at a good level, channel 3 is the kick which did not need an EQ applied to it, inputs 4 and 5 are the piano a low cut applied to both mics as I did not want to boost the bass as I felt that came through well enough from the piano, 6 is the guitar which had relatively little work just needed a little boost to make it more solid in the mix.
Recording
To capture the event in a realistic way I decided to use binaural mics to have the best sound of being an audience member. I decided to use the Soundman OKM II which I tested out the day before along with the Roland CS-10s. I set up the mics using the binaural head 5 meters away from the stage. However, I realised during the performance that one of the binaurals had a fault and was not recording. This led to me using two AKG C430s to capture the performance while not encompassing the whole of the room and replicating how a human would hear it would be the best way to capture the whole performance. The C430s were arranged in an X-Y pair to try and capture a binaural representation of performance. The mics were also positioned further back in the room to pick up more room sounds and give a better representation of how the room affects the sound. This was then recorded from the DiGiCo to my laptop with levels set appropriately on logic.