I'm Rob Baldock from Re:Live Recordings. We're here at Splendour Festival
in Nottingham this weekend I'm going to take you through the process of doing
a multitrack recording of a live show.
I set up Re:Live about 10 years ago or so now to create live multitrack recordings
of concerts and live events and we've recorded live events from Chase & Status
One Direction, Emeli Sandé, people like that. So this is my fifth year recording
at Splendour, we started off with Jake Bugg headlining the main stage five years ago
and since then we've recorded bands like Jess Glynne was last year, The Specials
was the year before that, and Tom Odell was the year before that.
The main difference between recording a live event and a recording studio is
that all my equipment has to be portable and has to be able to be set up very
quickly in sometimes very confined spaces, but my intention and my aim is to
get a full studio quality recording from live events
and that's why I use the equipment I use.
We're here on the first day setting up and the main
festival kicks off tomorrow, so I thought I'd take a little bit a stage tour just
to have a look around and see what's what.
So effectively all of the signals from
the main stage go over to the stage patch which is over here.
Lets take a wander over that way.
This is the main stage set up here so every single microphone that
appears on stage comes through to the inputs over here and at this point the
signal is split between front-of-house position out there for mixing for the audience
for the monitor section over here to mix for the band on the stage
and then I also get a feed through to the recording from here as well.
We all have complete independent control over our gain settings for the recording for
the front-of-house and for monitors and we're all completely isolated from each other.
So this is the recording rig based around 48 channels of Audient ASP880s
I've got Rack A and Rack B, so Rack A here goes through to the first RME Fireface
Rack B goes through to the second RME Fireface
these two devices are clocked together
and then you can actually feed them into a macbook and
you can set up what's known as an aggregate sound device where both
devices act as one single device, so that gives me up to 52 channels of recording
into Reaper, and I use Reaper as a recording device and just give this
reliability the fact you can record to two drives at the same time and it's
never crashed on me yet.
I chose the Audient preamps purely because of the
sound more than anything else really, they sound really clean even
at really high gain settings, and I have all Audient pres so that I know that every
single channel is the same, wherever I go, whatever microphone I'm putting through it.
The main challenges we face with live recordings is the sheer amount of noise
coming off the stage, so obviously it's a big stage but with a lot of noise going
on there's a lot of bleed on all the microphones and things so we don't get
the isolation that you would get in a studio recording so there's the
challenges for mixing there, and also obviously there's a chance for something to go wrong
we don't get a chance to have a second take at things, so my whole system
is set up with redundancy and set up for reliability really
so we hopefully don't lose anything.
So initially we'll always do a line check which is just the case of checking
every single channel it's working and it's clean and free from any crackles
and all the signals are going to the right destination.
In the morning we'll do a sound check with a band whereby the musicians are actually onstage and we'll
check for signal level from everything from the kick drum, the snare drum
all the toms, through so the guitars, the bass, the vocals etc etc.
During the actual show itself I will just be watching, keeping an eye on the gain settings while we're
recording and then during the changeover we'll get another quick line check
through each of the individual instruments and I can set my gains again
accordingly and then we go for another record and we do the same thing
flip-flopping right throughout the day.
After this process is done I then take the
recordings back to my studio to mix. In the case of Splendour festival we are
mixing for a TV channel called NottsTV I'll be mixing certain songs by
particular artists for the TV shows.
When you have loads of spill to deal with in
a mix in a live situation you just have to kind of go with it if you try and cut
everything out too much with gates it just starts to sound too unnatural.
For a very long time I struggled with getting the vocals to be nice and clear over the
background of a band and no amount of compression was solving the problem,
so actually I kind of reversed the way I mix things now.
I tend to start with the level of the vocals and match the bands to match the level
of the vocals because if you start trying to compress the vocals too much
you just get too much bleed coming through and it becomes it possible to get
everything to balance up nicely.
That's the main issue really and phase cancellation
between microphones, you know with so many microphones live on the
stage at any particular time that phase can sometimes be an issue.
I use a plug-in called Auto-Align by a company called SoundRadix and it's amazing for
phase aligning microphones together, you effectively give it two signals and
it aligns them in phase, in time.
So if anyone was to ask me what advice I'd give to
someone who wanted to get into doing this kind of thing
I personally studied Music Technology at a place called Confetti in Nottingham
that's where I learned a lot of the basics of studio engineering before deciding I'd
get into doing the live aspect of it and the live recording side of things.
So that was a good grounding for me learning the basics of Music Technology.
Just going to local gigs, trying to hook up with bands and things to record
You have to invest in your gear
Make sure you've got some really good reliable kit because you know if your
your equipment goes down, people aren't going to want you to be recording their stuff.
and also just be easy to work with, make sure you get along with people
be nice, be friendly and you'll do fine.
I'm Rob from Re:Live Recordings, I hope this video has been useful for you to
see what goes into doing a live recording from a main stage at a festival.