Practice recording: Trying to get the best results

[tothemax]

We have a pretty tight practice room, it's at a church school and we are able to leave our gear and lock the room. It's about a 15x20' space, with standard block design, no windows, and a convenient distance from everyone. I try to use my Tascam DR 40x recorder to get recording from practice. it's four channel so it allows me to use the 2 internal mic's and grab the control output from the mixer, vocals and congas only. I tried to get my diagram as close to scale as possible, we run a couple of 12" monitors (PA Cabs) in the room, no mic's on the drum kit. I've gotten the best results with the DR 40x in the corner near me in the space behind the door (seems to cut a bit of the drum volume). Second best spot has been catty-cornered on top of the Leslie cab. Neither are perfect, but enough to get an idea of how our mix is going and hear the vocals clearly. All of the mics are either SM 58's or 57's, so while there is bleed through to the mixer it doesn't overpower the vocals. The biggest issue are the keys, it tends to be either over the top or missing - that's a Hammond 3500 and it either dominates or disappears. As with most bands when we practice we are there to practice, not tweak the sound system. The keys are critical to the band sound.

We have a small Mackie mixer in the room (7 XLR channels), and it's outputs are limited (main, control room, and a single monitor out). I'm thinking we may want to mic the Leslie and not feed it to the main, that would require a switch from control room to monitor line output. That would require an adapter as this board is limited. Anyway the two DR 40 built in mics are a given, the external inputs are configurable to a degree. These are just practice mixes, we are not going for quality recordings. For editing I use Audacity, for any songs that are worth reviewing, I remove any chatter and do a quick EQ & balance cleanup then export to MP3.

Open for any ideas to improve the overall sound.

Cheers

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[One Way]

If all the cabinets were radiating towards the “audience” you would have a similar setup to one I work with. In that instance I place a Zoom H4e on a tripod directly in front of the drum kit with the microphones facing away from the drums and all the other speakers. That way the drums are in their least sensitive area and minimize the drum volume. You might give it a try

 

[brianrost]

I’ve used a Yamaha Pocketrak for many years now. It’s the same idea as your Tascam, but only two channels and really tiny. I just try to find the best spot in the room where I can get a balanced recording where I can hear everything well enough to make out the individual parts. Luckily digital recorders can run for hours on a battery so you can turn it on while people are still tuning up and capture the whole rehearsal or gig in one long track. Then I take the file and trim out the dead air in Audacity.

 

[tothemax]

Since initiating the updated recording system there have been a number of positives.

• First, with the old recordings I would spend time cleaning up the recordings, Levels, EQ, and Compression. Now unless the track has a huge EQ issue (say, low end turning the recording to mud), the only edits made are:
  • Syncing track volume levels
  • Cutting out the chatter and exporting each song to MP3.
    • From 30+ minutes to about 10. Huge difference in the LOE.
• Dynamics, when we get to practice we'll discuss where the dynamics are working and where they aren't. The recording is getting what is going on in the room. So things stand out that are easy fixes, like looking away from the mic and having the vocals drop out, bass too loud and droning on the mix, etc... Mostly basic stuff, but we're old guys and not pro's so it's cool when you can address it before it affects a gig.

The recordings have improved quite a bit, using the 4 channel recording setting, built in mics for the room and splitting the monitor output to the external channels. After doing a bit of digging it looks like the DR 40x supports independent level control on channels 3 & 4, so a second mono feed could be supported. The mixer monitor line out is mono only, so at the moment splitting the signal provides a little more to work with.

I added a mic on the Leslie, and while it's plenty loud in the room, the keys seem to get lost in the mix in the mellower sections (internal mics). Being able to add it to the monitor mix is great (and keep it out of the main mix). There is one open channel on the mixer and thinking about adding an overhead condenser between the two guitar amps and add that to the monitor mix as well.

One of the drawbacks of the Mackie mixer is that it only has one Aux / Mon channel. But as the Buddha said, "there should always be one fly in the meditation room"... It's all good