Me and my Rode VideoMic

[kwkeirstead]

I do a lot of recordings of music groups under some really less-than-ideal situations. My Rode VideoMic has more than once saved the day/night.

Here below is an example (at an angle at end of a bar in a community center, bad lighting, no sound link, broken backup Tascam field recorder, need for constant surveillance to prevent people from tripping over my tripod legs).

Anyway, looking back, recent recordings seem better than the ones I did a year ago.

The funniest story was the time I used construction lights with "fabric softener' as diffusers. As the night went on, the room (and the recording) started to acquire a sepia look. No one seemed at the time to notice/say anything but the fabric softeners were "well done" by the end of the evening.

The singer raved about the recording, she was singing songs from the 1920's to the 1950's and thought the "look" was appropriate for the occasion. It would have been better, of course, to start with a sepia look and gradually transition to normal.

I can't quite figure out how I would manage to do that.

Anyway, tell me please what you think about this recording done Saturday, Jan 26th.

http://youtu.be/zDgY8vX3uPA

I have another to do Feb 6th in a club that has good lighting, good sound.

 

[Noiz2]

It sounds like your in the room. Personally I would like the vocals up by 1/2 again (at least). Not sure how you would accomplish that though. Maybe if you could take a feed off the board into another track?

I'm guessing that your true to the sound of the room so I would, politely, sugest that the vocal mics get bumped a bit. Singers are always mixing themselves WAY back i the mix but for the audience the vocal is a major part of the song.

Just my 2cents. Looks like a fun show.

 

[kwkeirstead]

Thanks for the feedback.

They did have voices only at their sound board and could have given me a feed.

I suppose I could have recorded ambient from the on-camera mic and linked in the voices to the other channel.

I wonder how that would have worked?

I have huge problems with the AC160A volume controls. one tick lower from a setting that seems reasonable on the sound level meter and it's down to nothing, but one tick higher and you get red line distortion. This is at -50db.

 

[paulears]

The clue is that you can't see the pa speakers. The small speakers often used for gigs like this have very directional horns, and most of the clarity comes from them, so all you get is the back line, which is a bit unbalanced (but nothing you can do about that) and the muffled off-axis sound from the PA. A feed from the board into one channel camera mic on the other would have been ok, and you could then mono it up and balance it in post.