Live concert sound...

B

blando3

Well-known member
I shot a live show last night and am now editing, but the sound is not very good...I watched my levels the whole time and they never peaked, but when the drums, bass and guitar were loud and playing together, it would come through as sounding distorted and sh___y in my headphones, although when I took my headphones off, it didn't sound much better.
I used my Audio Technica shotgun on one channel and the onboard on the other (using my DVX). Any thoughts on why this happened? Any ideas on how to fix it?
Thanks,
Andrew
 
Hey Andrew,
There are numerous forms of distortion. Can you elaborate a bit more on what you were hearing? You say you took off your headphones and it didn't sound much better. Was it the acoustics (i.e. reverb) of the room? If so then getting your mics closer to the sound source is the easiest way to improve things although then you need to be prepared to handle high sound levels. In any case, using a shotgun is not what you want to use for recording music indoors.

As for fixing it in post, that would depend on the type of distortion. If the recording has a heavy reverb from the room, there's little you can do. Some EQ adjustment might improve things a bit. Recording a multi-piece band can be an art of its own.

-Dan
 
Sounds like you distorted the preamps (happens all the time with people trying to record club shows). You can smooth it out but mostly you are probably screwed.

Tele is dead on with the shotgun for music: worse choice possible.

Next time just see if you can patch into the house feed.

Cheers
 
Whenever I have had the luxury, I always run the instruments and vocals into seperate channels on my mixer. This gives me the ability to drop the volume on the drums, which are always too loud, and bring out the vocals. Club mixes are always way out, and sound like garbage.
 
If you have to record a concert in a loud club using your own mic what would be a good mic to use for that purpose ?
 
something with a wide pattern, maybe cardioid. preferably two cardioids two get stereo. NOT NOT NOT mounted on camera. use mike stands mounted further back in the venue. Use of something like a sennheiser SKP500 plug on Tx with the G2 receiver is a good way to do something like this on a budget.

You can plug it to the mic, position the mic back , away from being too close to the speakers as to give you a decent dynamic range and not SPL thats popping the mic. Then you leave someone to keep an eye that it doesnt get nicked (or do it yourself in a small club), and go shoot the show, receiving the mic's signal from wireless.

I've used this strategy before as a sound guy, but in CONJUNCTION with a desk feed. the advantage of a mic is that you have a backup from the "this mix sounds weird" syndrome. at least with a mic, you're hearing what the sound guy is hearing, so it can be a closer approximation. Having the backup mic also gives you a "live" feel as you get the audience interaction (applause, singing etc). Always go for both.

If you had to record in very very high SPL environments with an on camera mic (like right under the speaker stack at a big gig), you'd probably want to use attenuation on the mic (prob -10dB, maybe -20), and please god wear incredibly closed headphones so you dont damage your hearing. Some guys even wear ear plugs UNDER the headphones at very high volume jobs. Use a wide pattern mic - I'd even try an omni to minimize off axis sound if you want to shoot the crowd.
 
Great post tim! It reminds me of how I started in 1999 with a gl1 and fcp1 on my imac g3 400mhz w/13gb hd and 128mb ram. I would stand on the pa's up front or in the crowd and have so much fun filming bands. I wished for a setup like you are talking about. I remeber one Grunttruck show standing on the PAs next to the bassist and the crowd going crazy I kept getting kicked by crowd surfers. I kind of miss that stuff doing corporate and education documentary style a/b roll stuff.
 
yeah, its fun doing that stuff. its also incredibly stressful if you are on your own I imagine because getting the sound AND picture in that situation is close to impossible. I came off a shoot in december with 4 major concerts in 4 days in different cities in SA. I was the sound guy for two camera's - stress!!!!!!! It was incredibly difficult, BUT wireless made a massive impact.

Here's a REALLY detailed how to:

For that rig, I decided on G2 because we knew we'd need a lot of wireless, (I dont have enough Lectro), and noise floors are totally NOT a problem at a rock concert.

For pick up the crowd/PA sound I used an Oktava cardioid with SKP500 on an elevated mic stand as far back as possible without inducing a noticable delay from the direct feed due to the audio taking longer to reach the mic than the direct feed took. This feed was bounced to the receiver on my rig, and then passed via SD302 to the "master" camera. I tuned a camera mounted receiver on the roaming cam to the same frequency to pick up a duplicate signal - useful for two reasons: nice to have it on the roaming cam, and secondly I was stationed by the mic, so I could instantly create a sync point for the camera's by tapping the mic. Nifty.

I used another G2 system to pull a feed from the desk. I didnt want to go wireless, but our master cam was too far from the desk (with a crowd inbetween) to run a cable safely. So G2 it was. Seeing as we had some time at some gigs to set up, I organised a spare auxilliary output from the desk which allowed me to make a custom mix of the desk feed on location. I was lucky to have a great mix engineer who would constantly check in with me that the feed he was sending via the aux was sounding good - basically it was an independant headphone mix. nice. It worked great - no "drums too loud" stuff.

Lastly, I put an RE-50ish type old mic I have (crazy I know) on the roaming camera. Its an omni, with low sensitivity, so it could go close to the speakers without exploding, and it even picked up some nice crowd interaction (people screaming and stuff) when the camera was close to their faces (as I planned out with the operator). I gave him Sennheiser HD280pro phones to wear - good isolation so he can actually hear whats going to the tape. Level from the G2 I set manually, level from the on-camera mic was on auto - I wasnt chancing that.

This basically gave us 3 different feeds to work with in the end - and quite honestly they were all useful in some way. Main ambi mic plus desk feed gave the soundtrack, on camera mic gave some nice filler shots and quick audio clips of the crowd. Worked great, series aired in february. Got my next gig with the company next week - Rock Festival in Dubai!
 
Thanks Tim these are great ideas. I've been doing a lot of concert work and i've had the good fortune for most of them to get really good sound engineers who have been doing great mixes off of the board but lately I've been doing this one venue and twice now i've been having problems because the sound engineer isn't that good and it's a club type place so I find myself generally right next to a speaker. I also always wear my in ear plugs under my headphones after I get a good level.

Thanks for the info and i'll try it out next time

Oh quick question. Is it possible to set two G2 transmitters to the same freq. and Tx to one Rx ?
 
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