At age 17, I dreamed of someday working in a recording studio and listening to music.
Having no real idea what a studio engineer did other than record stuff, I loved the way music made me feel and it seemed to be a pretty good idea to get paid to listen to music.
The energy, excitement and thrill received from unwrapping new sounds into my ears seemed to scoop me away into timelessness.
Even still memories flood back of the way my heart would skip followed by an adrenaline rush of fear when I pictured throwing away my direction toward a career in electrical engineering to join the circus world of sound. I can’t, I shouldn’t, I couldn’t, I won’t, I did.
Almost immediately the dream of spending my life in a studio collapsed. Several substantial hurdles eventually elevated themselves to “irreconcilable differences,” so we broke up.
The first problem encountered was my difficulty staying awake when bored which, as it turns out, is the same problem I encountered in school. Endless reprimands for cycling between fidgeting, reading ahead and forgetting to stay awake at the same time would haunt me in the studio as hour after hour rolled by in slow motion.
The second issue was curiosity. When awake and free to roam away from the tape machine or my “on call gopher” chair, I had a habit of fixing things, or at least, taking them apart. Much to my surprise, studios tend to love things in various forms of broken, and use the broken-ness to get a particular sound. While now understandable, back then this drove me out of my mind.
So here I am, having worked occasionally in studios over the years, but spending the bulk of my audio time in the spontaneous excitement behind the console of live rock shows. This brings be a couple of years ago, where, on tour with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and bleary-eyed after a late night, I was trying to focus on a computer screen while laying in bed in Copenhagen.
Each day or so brings a new venue to work in, everything is in a constant state of change and motion yet the one thing remains fairly constant is that tonight, like every show night we will record the show live. It is a love/hate thing for me.
On one hand the challenge of capturing the event is enjoyable, as it seems to bring some permanence to my purpose.
On the other hand, the spontaneous rock show and its flaws coming under analysis at a later date and out of context can be annoying when shows are sent off to be mixed - “No, I don’t know why the hi-hat mic stopped working 30 seconds into the third song, in Belgium. Flying cup of water? Mic cable unplugged? Heck, I’m 200 feet and 10,000 people away from the stage. And yes, that is the same bass mic we always use.”
Live engineers are faced with everything except an optimum acoustic environment.
Outdoor wind, indoor echo and getting enough speakers in the right spot so the audience can hear something intelligible are pressing issues.
Mistakes are common and acceptable in varying degrees. No show is ever flawless.
Each day the memory of the night’s show drifts into the past and the memory fades in everyone’s minds little by little with each passing day, until all that is remembered are a few key moments and the way it felt to be there, if it’s even remembered at all.
On the other side of the coin, the studio world I left behind spends a lot of time striving for perfection. Even the slightest sonic wart will forever be irreversibly imprinted onto multiple mediums for all to hear, analyze and critique. The rewind button and retakes and Pro Tools-type manipulations allow studio recordings to be gingerly designed permanent sonic structures.
This is why the personality types attracted to the two careers tend to be polar opposites. An entire live rock show will dump trucks, setup gear, perform the show in front of 30,000 fans, load out all the equipment and drive away in a shorter time frame than a studio engineer may take to get the drums tuned and mic’d. Personally enjoying analogies using automobiles and audio, I look at the studio engineer as stretch limousine driver while a live audio engineer drives a monster truck.
The differences between the two are so defined that the exact personality traits that make a person great for the studio tend to make them less than stellar live engineers. How can someone that is hyper aware of every flaw stay clear headed and merrily afloat in an ocean of flaws? How far will a limo driver take his stretch down the Baja 500 before getting stuck? All that said, it’s kind of funny that after all these years spent refining my skills as a live engineer to be drafted back into the recording world, sort of.
Having recorded multi-track recording a majority live performances while mixing for over a decade now, the theory I follow toward live recording a rock band is to grab the most accurate snapshot possible of the live performance with minimal or no alteration. You can always add a compressor or effect later at the studio but it is really hard to take one away.
Recording the microphone outputs directly is the way to go with perhaps some limiters set to prevent a screamer from overloading a mic preamp. Unlike the recording studio where silence is available, at the live show there is no need to set your mic preamp gains as high since constant roar or murmur of audience will usually mask any equipment noise floor.
To accomplish this, I’ve employed several setups over the years.
It started on a Rage Against the Machine tour where every show was tracked to three ADAT machines. Just dealing with the trunk of blank and recorded tapes was a major chore by the time tapes were done being formatted, labeled and safely stored and transpored. The Chili Peppers started up on Tascam DA88-style machines and that at least reduced the tape size and increased reliability a bit. A couple of years ago with the Peppers, it was a Mac G5 Dual Core with 8 GB of RAM running Pro Tools HD2.
The setup is cool, much as I am remiss to admit, and is set up to deal with multiple configurations.
Primarily it is all about archiving shows. The Peppers love to use live songs for B-sides on their singles released overseas. Invariably this archive recording is where they come from. They’re always in a constant state of creative songwriting so at any given show various band members may request tonight’s CD.
Also, should we encounter an issue during a show that proves difficult to solve, the various recordings allow us to troubleshoot afterward, where in the signal chain the issue occurred.
To accomplish this, every show was recorded to five separate machines:
When configured for show archiving, the Pro Tools rig and FOH console shared a common mic preamp. We started the tour using the Midas H3000 preamps and driving the recording off of the console channel line outputs.
As the tour progressed, though, we migrated over to some high quality studio mic preamps that we have been carrying with us. Initially, the ToneLux mic preamps were primarily for what I call “contracted recordings.“These are the shows when the band has agreed to being recorded for TV, radio or Internet.
Not one to embrace fancy-shmancy esoteric studio stuff, I put them through their paces including running side-by-side vocal channels with one on the Midas preamp and the other on the ToneLux alternating between them in real-time, mid-show and you know what? They do sound clearer, darn it!
The other configuration was for quick turnaround for live-to-disk recordings where we bring in a dedicated Pro Tools engineer to insure the quality of the recording in real-time. This setup incorporated a 500 foot, 32-channel LightViper fiber optic snake system into the recording setup.
The output of the microphone after the splitter hit the analog mic preamp, then out of the analog pre amp into a pair of Apogee AD-16Xs where the signal was converted to AES/EBU digital. The LightViper took the digital AES/EBU in and put out that same signal on the other end, where we hit the AES/EBU inputs to the G5 Pro Tools.
The mic preamps could be located on stage or at FOH and the G5 can be located up to 500 feet from it.
This versatility allows the Pro Tools engineer to set up a remotely located mini recording studio away from the loud gig volume.
The mic pre rack and the recording rack were each only 15 spaces in height and fit in shock-mounted shells.
We also carried two Pelican cases with one holding the 22-inch display, a Command 8 and a CD burner, and the other holding a pair of M-Audio’s BX8A powered monitors.
The archived shows were recorded in 24-bit resolution at 48 KHz, which use about 30 GB of hard drive space for each hour-and-a-half long show. At the start of the tour we were using specialty hard drives manufactured specifically for pro audio for the archive and working drives.
While the 120 GB “working” drives that got shipped out when a show needed to be mixed elsewhere worked well, the 500 GB drive that we were using for archiving had issues.
It turned out that the low frequencies from the subs were causing the hard drive to skip resulting in drive record errors and shutting the drive down. The problem was solved by switching to a Seagate 750 GB drives that have operated without any issues while being subjected to the most extreme volumes.
Storing and keeping track of the multi-tracks while maintaining a safe redundancy was a challenge. After trying several different systems, we settled on using the Seagate 750 GB drives as archive master drives, recorded each show on the 750, and then the following day, the show was backed up to a 1 terrabyte Maxtor drive.
When a Seagate reached capacity, it was then shipped back to one of the Peppers’ recording engineers to be mirrored. The master and mirror drives were then put in storage, and when it was confirmed that the mirror has occurred, we then wiped the terrabyte drive and started using it and a new 750 gig for a fresh set of shows.
Admittedly, recording is far from my favorite thing. However when a live recording is released with my name on it, it really does make me happy. It is a love/hate thing.
I’m a fish out of water in the recording world but with a compact, easy -to-use and reliable setup, even a knucklehead live guy like me can derive a bit of enjoyment and more importantly, it helps the prevent the memory of what I have spent a good portion of my life doing from fading silently into the past.
Dave Rat is the co-founder and owner of Rat Sound, a leading sound reinforcement company based in California. Be sure to check out his “Roadies in the Midst” blog.
More Articles By Dave Rat
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When Hearing Starts To Drift, How To Avoid Becoming “EQ Oblivious”
A Way To Increase The Actual Power That Amplifiers Deliver To Loudspeakers
Dave Rat Transmission: Dynamic Versus Compressed
Dave Rat Transmission: Sometimes Sound Is About Time
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