Live Recording

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Realistic Sound Check: A Live Recording Method To Ease The Process

Veteran Live Mix Engineer John Kerns provides an overview of the approach he developed while touring with No Doubt to record live shows for later assists with his soundcheck.

I’d like to say right off the top that this is in no way a new idea. Engineers have been recording shows for this purpose for quite a while. However, the ease and quality that can be obtained now is the big change.

My goal is to simply and accurately reproduce the previous night’s show via playback through the same inputs and processing, to emulate at soundcheck in case I don’t actually get one on a show day.

There was a large amount of gear on this tour, and the fact that we would not be closing the show every day led me to be “concerned” about having enough time to do what I needed to do.

As far as the actual medium, I considered using a (Digidesign) Pro Tools rig, and also considered Tascam DA-88s, which I’d used with great results on a previous tour. No Doubt also owns a couple of Tascam MX-2424s that I considered.

Ultimately I decided to go with a Metric Halo Mobile I/O 2882 FireWire interface running the “MIO Console” recording page, as well as a 2882 DSP, and then recorded this material to an external hard drive linked to my Macintosh computer (at front of house) via a FireWire card bus adapter. (The Mac was already being used to run Metric Halo’s SpectraFoo program for room analyzation anyway.)

I’d heard nothing but incredible reviews of the A/D (analog to digital) and D/A converters of the 2882, and they lived up to that reputation. And the fact that these files were saved as Sound Designer 2 files meant that they could be opened effortlessly in Pro Tools later if needed.

As far as analog goes, each 2882 offers 8 inputs and 8 outputs, with multiple units easily synched together using one as a master clock to the other. Because this is an “acquisitional-based” recording process, there isn’t much to go wrong – we aren’t recording into a DAW- or editing-type program.

So it operates exactly like a tape machine. The user chooses, via the MIO record page, which folder that data is to go to, then selects the sample rate and clock source. Next, arm the record tracks, and go. Easy.

For playback, you simply go to the same page, chose the folder/file you want to hear through the system, and go. And it takes all of about five seconds to chose another “show” to listen to. The 2882s are effortless to get around.

I have to say that these units performed superbly – not one issue with dropouts, glitches, artifacts on the recordings, or the like. I recorded most of the shows at 48 kHz, but did do a couple at 96 kHz. (Awesome!)

Because I didn’t want any of this material laying around I actually dumped/trashed all files after listening the next day/show for the soundcheck. This way I only used the most recent material that reflected leakage from monitors, current playing styles, etc.

This particular application required just 16 “tracks” to be recorded and played back – I didn’t want the number of tracks and hardware to become the focus of what I was doing, which was to provide a decent soundcheck before a show.

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