Hopeless live recording question

This is a riddle wrapped in a puzzle tied up in an enigma with a big mysterious bow.

http://www.sculpey.com/Projects/images/EgyptianEarrings/sphinx.jpg

Is there someone mixing the show for live purposes?

If so, grab an aux send from them as a safety channel, and then position one mic at the mix position, and another in close proximity to the stage towards the opposite side of the room. Maybe.

I have a feeling that only the vocals will be mic'ed and all the instruments will just run live into the room, it's not a very large space. So probably no mixing.

I want to say a crossed pair in the middle, not too far from the stage, but I don't really know about these things.

Well, I'd still grab a send from the board, even if the only thing you get is a strong vocal that you can mix in for coloration. The nice thing about a multitrack is that you can always 86 anything that doesn't work.

If it isn't a full mix, I'd probably go with placing the mics about halfway back in the room to avoid critical distance audio garble, and place them slightly within the speaker path, depending on the likelihood of them getting trampled and knocked over.

Are you going to be around for a soundcheck? If so, walk around the room and just fine the 2 places where the band sounds best to you, and place the mics there.

I want to say a crossed pair in the middle, not too far from the stage

Yeah, just have someone walk around listening until they find a spot where it sounds good and set them up there as a stereo pair.

steve otm on sound check walk-around.
directionality is going to make that kind of iffy though because human ear stereo != cardioid pickup

when I was in language school I used to have fun walking around with headphones on plugged into a dinky GI tape recorder that had a mono mike on it, listening to the world through a cheap transistor like I was some kinda Eno or something.

In this case you might be able to use a similar setup (phones with long enough cable monitoring sm57 plugged into board) during the sound check and then lay your mikes according to those results.

just have two people walking around with each mic during the show

Do you all have me killfiled? :(

y

FINE THEN

Admin Action:

username: "river wolf"

3 day ban from "I Make Music"

NO NOT REALLY.

:O

I think this actually turned out pretty well, despite some problems. Because of the layout of the room and short mic cables, I had to have the mics behind the PA speakers, pointing at the instruments, which meant I wasn't really getting any vocals through the mics. However, I got the sound guy to run an out from the mixer he was using for vocals directly in to the eight-track, so I had a separate track of just vocals, which made mixing easier. The bad part of this was that the sound guy was turning the vocals from incredibly loud to near-silence at random, but I think I compensated for this in mixing my recordings too, though the vocals are still distorted at some points. The biggest problem with the recording is that the amps were in front of the drums, so the drums turned out relatively quiet on the recording. You can hear some of the results on our MySpace page. "Enough Isn't Enough" is the only track on there not from the show.

the sound guy was turning the vocals from incredibly loud to near-silence at random

Ha, classic. Well, I'm glad it turned out well.

Yeah, it was weird. My band played a show with his band a couple of months ago, so it's possible I did something to offend him and he was getting revenge, but I think he just didn't know what he was doing.