Ive been rather busy with things, havent had time to post much. But i have some news which is fun, right?
The Hostages. A sort of melodic-rock band with no bass. two guitars and a huge drum set.
Since my 8 track is in the shop i decided to try out recording live to minidisc. just a straight up live mix, and now that i have the old cap-g mackie i can play around with more room.
It was recorded out at house of hits on 88th.
Ive recorded at the other house of hits before,
and had some problems with loud ass bands in adjacent rooms, but this was later in the evening and there wasnt any noise next door, so we lucked out there.
It was a nice room too. I set up in a corner hiding behind whatever i could. the drum set was a huge 6 piece rack thing with *tons* of different sized cymbals. 10 i think in all. yikes! i was scared at first. so what i did was this: akg d112 on kick, sm57 on snare, the i used my classic mk-219's on the toms. the toms were set up in two groups. two smaller on the left, two bigger on the right. so i used each mic sorta in the center tween the two drums in one group. thes mk219's are a flat mic witht he capsule pointed out the side rather than out the top, so i put the mic flat with the drums, with the capsule pointed down towards the floor. these things down sound too good up and over the drums, so i use more of a shell sound i guess. but it worked pretty good.
i got a decent sound out of the drums, inserted compression on the kick and snare and gated them as well. nice and punchy.
the two guitar cab were stacked on one another,
and i had a problem getting the straight mic stand close enough, (dude, go out and buy some more boom stands!!!, oh yeah, jef=broke) so i angled the two cabs and got it in as close as i could. the 4x12 i just used a desk stand and it was on the floor.
there was also a vocal, which was easy enough.
run the 58 into the board, aux out for the PA and controll the PA with the Aux. right on.
we started up and i started playing with the sounds. its a little sterile. so i pulled out one of my older berhinger mixers and my sony stereo mic. i ran that stereo signal to one of the line level channels on the mackie and turned it up. Woah! it got loud real quick. good move jef.
we started going through songs and i had a hard time getting the vocals loud enough, so i had to bring down the band to make room for vocals.
Now im recording onto the mini disc, and its a hard beat to tame. im using the manual recording level set to about 15(30 max) and i still need to bring the master fader on the mackie down to about -5/10 db so as not to clip the minidisc. which is fine, cause i can "master" it with no problems.
so we rolled through songs, i adjusted the guitars to match each other, and the drums i had no problem getting a good sound out of,
so over all it was a good time.
i expect that once my machine is up and running again, we will be doing some real tracking.
