I always video our gigs and have an external stereo mic that captures the sound and it does a reasonable job of picking everything up. It does lose some top end sparkle and with the auto gain reduction there's a little bit of volume pulse in parts where one instrument doesn't play. Plus its not always easy to find a place in the pub to mount a camera with external mic that won't get bashed, blocked, stolen, whilst being optimally positioned for a balanced sound. But the goal is to capture to essence of the gig not pristine audio
Back home I edit the audio in cubase and experiment with various EQs, compression, maximizer, limiter, filter plugin's but never quite get a sparkle onto the sound. I think I'm just rubbish at mixing & mastering. I'm not expecting a polished recording, and agree its difficult to polish a turd, but I must be able to apply a little sprinkle of something onto it to brighten/even it out a little.
I wondered if anyone else regularly does this and has a tried and trusted set of processes they use they I could benefit from hearing about.
I appreciate this is such a massively wide open topic but since rock bands recorded on a single stereo mic in a pub gig probably all sound roughly similar in terms of quality of audio captured, there might just be a chance I won't get flamed for asking
Couple of audio samples here from the raw audio:
1) Example of dynamics
2) Example of full pelt and guitar solo
cheers
Comments
Go to around 22.00 onwards, it showssyou how to identify a Bandwidth and then adjust it up / down
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Only reduce eq, not add any
Multi band compressor
Limiter
Tiny bit of ambient reverb
And a combo of that seemed to polish it up ok.
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If so, you can probably take a simple stereo feed from the desk. Not ideal but it'll be clearer than the room mic / camera.
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Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after youYou need to be able to boost (roughly) 2k and 5k, but you simply don't have the headroom available enough to make a difference before it starts clipping- a few places in the recording already clip so it will make those bits worse too.
You could try a multi band compressor around those frequencies- to bring them up without going over 0dbfs.
Or you need to cut everything else.
Even still you are going to end up over accentuating the cymbals and hats.
Better to close mic the individual instruments and multitrack but if that isn't the option then try what I have written above.
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I played around as much as my limited skills let me and in the end settled on a combo of:
10 band EQ
Multiband compression
Reverb
Limiter
Clearly there's nothing much I can do to add more sparkle to the vocals without bringing the guitar and cymbals even louder, however, this this seem to make it have a little more ambiance than the original audio.
Thanks all
But my goal here is not "how to capture a quality live recording", but simply to learn some better mastering techniques for adding a bit of sparkle to an existing live recording. Thanks
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1. Positioning is key. Often this is a practical matter, but if the mix sounds unbalanced, cluttered or woolly at the location of the mic then you're already limited in what can be achieved, no matter how much processing you have available.
2. Turn off any compression, auto levelling etc at the mic. Record with plenty of headroom and you can do any of that stuff down the line, but it's hard to undo once it's been recorded that way.
i normally then just use a bit of gentle eq to massage things, especially in the low end which is rarely where it should be. Then some gentle compression (no more than 2:1 and pay attention to how punchy things are with the attack time, and listen for any pumping when tweaking the release time.) If more drastic measures are called for (e.g. The vocal is too prominent) then multi-band compression can help make the best of a bad lot.