Gig 3: Close Miking With Eight Mics
For their third gig, the duo added a couple of sidemen on lap steel and electric guitar.
The venue’s mixer had only six mic inputs, so I patched a small 4-input mixer into two line inputs in the venue’s mixer. The combination created enough inputs to handle all of the instruments and vocals.
Here’s an audio sample of the board mix: Eight mics board mix
Mixers are amazingly affordable these days, so I bought a mixer with eight mic inputs to handle future gigs.
Gig 4: Multitracking With JamHub Tracker
One drawback of a board recording is that you can’t remix it—except slightly with panning and EQ. We wanted to try multitrack recording for the next gig.
Here are some options we considered:
• Split the mics to the PA mixer and to an audio interface plugged into a laptop. Use recording software (Reaper, Pro Tools, Sonar, etc.) to capture the tracks.
• Connect an audio interface and laptop to the mixer’s insert jacks.
• Connect a multitrack hard-drive recorder to the mixer’s insert jacks.
• Use a recorder-mixer to record the show and mix the house sound. In other words, record the tracks while sending the monitor mix to the house loudspeakers.
In perusing the web, I came across the recently introduced JamHub Tracker MT16 (Figure 3). It’s a 16-channel multitrack recorder the size of a stomp box, and records up to 24/96 wave files onto an SD card or USB flash drive and costs only $399. It seemed like an easy way to record multitrack off the band’s mixer. (More about the Tracker MT16 here.)
The Tracker has eight 1/4-inch jacks that allow recording from eight mixer inserts. JamHub also offers a 16-plug breakout cable as well. The user can choose how many tracks to record simultaneously.
After the multiple wave files are recorded, they can be transferred to a studio DAW from the SD card and then can be mixed. Another option is to upload the files to Bandlab, the shared Cloud recording studio.