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Post by happychap on Jul 30, 2018 10:49:33 GMT -6
Anyone here ever use a PA (instead of headphones) for monitoring live tracked vocals?
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Post by svart on Jul 30, 2018 12:02:06 GMT -6
Tried it once. Couldn't get rid of the comb filtering afterwards and ended up having to do the vocals over again. I know some folks swear by it, but I could never get it to work right. Lowering the volume to the point where it didn't cause all kinds of phasing issues and the singer couldn't hear the monitors, and then when you raise it up so they can hear, you can't get around the strange phasing/comb filtering during the mix.
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Post by drbill on Jul 30, 2018 12:31:38 GMT -6
To state the obvious, the mic choice becomes critical with this technique. An 87 or 47 or the like is not gonna cut it.
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Post by jazznoise on Jul 30, 2018 12:55:38 GMT -6
I mean if they're using a handheld/or eating the mic it's a perfectly good idea, otherwise no. The phase reversal technique where you cancel out the bleed works very well but can be timing consuming and means you can't have insert compression on the way in.
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Post by happychap on Jul 30, 2018 13:33:32 GMT -6
Put your producer's hat on for this:
Let's say you have a trio- upright bass, drums, acoustic guitar and vocals. Now let's say you don't want headphones and don't want to have everyone in booths. You want a live band in one room.
The guitar and the vocals are going to have a tough time taking their rightful place, volume wise. So, let's run the acoustic to an amp and the vocals through a quality small PA. Let the players get their volumes all dialed in so it sounds great.
Now put your engineer's hat on:
Utilizing any combination of techniques, who here is confident they could make a good sounding record that way?
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Post by jazznoise on Jul 30, 2018 14:03:23 GMT -6
Put your producer's hat on for this: Let's say you have a trio- upright bass, drums, acoustic guitar and vocals. Now let's say you don't want headphones and don't want to have everyone in booths. You want a live band in one room. The guitar and the vocals are going to have a tough time taking their rightful place, volume wise. So, let's run the acoustic to an amp and the vocals through a quality small PA. Let the players get their volumes all dialed in so it sounds great. Now put your engineer's hat on: Utilizing any combination of techniques, who here is confident they could make a good sounding record that way? I've basically been in this situation a few timesand the real issue is that the bleed will make life very tough. The 2 scenarios I've had are thus: Live 5 piece band (Drums, bass, ac. guitar, fiddle and tinwhistle) - drummer is quiet loud, and what we end up with is an issue where the drum panning is distorted by the panning of the fiddle and whistle mics. Acoustic guitarists movements away from the mic (nervous guy?) make it tough, but since I mic'd his amp for his pickup I do have some level independance. We used acoustic panels to do what we could, ideally we'd have redubbed the instruments with the worst bleed. Live 3 piece: Ac guitar + vocals, bass and drums. Doing it all in a big room, so I put in acoustic panels and space them as much as possible. Bleed is managable, except now the vocal mic is also a reverb return for the drums! No one wants to hear it, but the best bet is to simply move the louder instruments to a different space or, better again, use the quiet instruments as guides and overdub them after. |
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Post by svart on Jul 30, 2018 14:07:18 GMT -6
Put your producer's hat on for this: Let's say you have a trio- upright bass, drums, acoustic guitar and vocals. Now let's say you don't want headphones and don't want to have everyone in booths. You want a live band in one room. The guitar and the vocals are going to have a tough time taking their rightful place, volume wise. So, let's run the acoustic to an amp and the vocals through a quality small PA. Let the players get their volumes all dialed in so it sounds great. Now put your engineer's hat on: Utilizing any combination of techniques, who here is confident they could make a good sounding record that way? What you describe is essentially recording a live concert. People do it.. But as mentioned, you need space and baffling. You're not going to get good results in a bedroom or small living room. You need a stage sized area. |
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Post by johneppstein on Jul 30, 2018 14:45:49 GMT -6
Put your producer's hat on for this: Let's say you have a trio- upright bass, drums, acoustic guitar and vocals. Now let's say you don't want headphones and don't want to have everyone in booths. You want a live band in one room. The guitar and the vocals are going to have a tough time taking their rightful place, volume wise. So, let's run the acoustic to an amp and the vocals through a quality small PA. Let the players get their volumes all dialed in so it sounds great. Now put your engineer's hat on: Utilizing any combination of techniques, who here is confident they could make a good sounding record that way? EDIT: I have to revise this - I'vbe checked with William and He says that Cyndi did in fact use cans and a small personal mixer for he cueing on the Detour album. My bad, I misinterpreted or misremembered some of the remarks in the original thread (no longer available for checking.)
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Post by happychap on Jul 30, 2018 14:59:03 GMT -6
Thanks for the replies.
What we have is the issue of energy- and how to best gather it and release it, against how to best capture it. Sometimes those things don't line up! All too often that means giving up performance energy for the sake of sonics (because engineers tend to get the last word).
Daniel Lanois recorded Neil Young's vocals through a PA for Le Noise. Why? Because that was where the energy was. So- are we resisting these kinds of ideas because of the sonic challenge?
I think this is where engineers need to dig deep- in accommodating the vibe and understanding what's really happening when we record music in real time. I'm not saying some people don't get creative (Sylvia Massey is a very creative engineer), but there's a fairly strict methodology-mentality that I've come across in my 20+ years of being in studios and dealing with engineers, and it's rarely refreshing, creative or accommodating.
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Post by johneppstein on Jul 30, 2018 15:09:29 GMT -6
Put your producer's hat on for this: Let's say you have a trio- upright bass, drums, acoustic guitar and vocals. Now let's say you don't want headphones and don't want to have everyone in booths. You want a live band in one room. The guitar and the vocals are going to have a tough time taking their rightful place, volume wise. So, let's run the acoustic to an amp and the vocals through a quality small PA. Let the players get their volumes all dialed in so it sounds great. Now put your engineer's hat on: Utilizing any combination of techniques, who here is confident they could make a good sounding record that way? I've basically been in this situation a few timesand the real issue is that the bleed will make life very tough. The 2 scenarios I've had are thus: Live 5 piece band (Drums, bass, ac. guitar, fiddle and tinwhistle) - drummer is quiet loud, and what we end up with is an issue where the drum panning is distorted by the panning of the fiddle and whistle mics. Acoustic guitarists movements away from the mic (nervous guy?) make it tough, but since I mic'd his amp for his pickup I do have some level independance. We used acoustic panels to do what we could, ideally we'd have redubbed the instruments with the worst bleed. Live 3 piece: Ac guitar + vocals, bass and drums. Doing it all in a big room, so I put in acoustic panels and space them as much as possible. Bleed is managable, except now the vocal mic is also a reverb return for the drums! No one wants to hear it, but the best bet is to simply move the louder instruments to a different space or, better again, use the quiet instruments as guides and overdub them after. Live 5 piece? Panning? Most of the panning would be determined by the layout ofr the band in the studio. That way you're not fighting acoustics.
Live 3 piece? Set the vocalist up facing the band with absorbance behind to control the bounce of the drums into the mic.
The thing is, you have to do the better part of the "engineering" BEFORE the band starts playing because you can't do it after. That requires careful planning if you don't work that way all the time.
Depending on the singer and how well they can wing it I might not use vocal monitoring at all. I don't monitor myself when I lay down scratch vocal and guitar with the initial drum take and it usually comes out pretty good. After doing so many live gigs with woefully inadequate stage monitoring I'm not all that dependent on hearing myself reinforced.
I AM singing into the M88 I use live, but that's mostly because both my TM-1s are on the kit and I'm not fond of the U87 on my voice.
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Post by jeremygillespie on Jul 30, 2018 17:18:06 GMT -6
Any time I’ve had to do things live, moving instruments away from each other causes a problem. I know it sounds backwards, but you want to move them CLOSER to each other in order for the bleed you get to be usable.
Learned that from Joe Ferla about 12 years ago as an assistant on a jazz album for Regina Carter. The musicians on this track could all reach out and touch one another. It was a very complex setup to get right, but after we did it sounded fantastic.
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ericn
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Balance Engineer
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Post by ericn on Jul 30, 2018 20:31:14 GMT -6
It works on stuff where your not looking for vocal detail, I have been in the studio with a full Clair SM12 rig and XL250. It felt like a live show and sounded like a live show.
Peter Gabriel has a nice Turbo floodlight rig hanging in the big room at real world, I can just imagine how much the AE is using headphones with the band in the room with a floodlight flying, of course the thing about flash/ Flood is the pattern control at Lambue on the field you could duck your head an inch on the field and go from PA to almost no PA!
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Post by the other mark williams on Jul 30, 2018 23:21:51 GMT -6
Any time I’ve had to do things live, moving instruments away from each other causes a problem. I know it sounds backwards, but you want to move them CLOSER to each other in order for the bleed you get to be usable. Learned that from Joe Ferla about 12 years ago as an assistant on a jazz album for Regina Carter. The musicians on this track could all reach out and touch one another. It was a very complex setup to get right, but after we did it sounded fantastic. Holy smokes, jeremygillespie, that sounds great! Man, I love that. I remember reading an interview with Alan Parsons years ago (Behind the Glass, maybe?) where he said the same thing about bleed and proximity. IME, it does seem to work better, even if it's a bit counterintuitive. |
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Post by johneppstein on Jul 31, 2018 0:05:55 GMT -6
Any time I’ve had to do things live, moving instruments away from each other causes a problem. I know it sounds backwards, but you want to move them CLOSER to each other in order for the bleed you get to be usable. Learned that from Joe Ferla about 12 years ago as an assistant on a jazz album for Regina Carter. The musicians on this track could all reach out and touch one another. It was a very complex setup to get right, but after we did it sounded fantastic. That's entirely consistant with what William says about it. You keep everyone pretty close and leakage is your friend. you achieve most of your stereo image naturally, not through electronic fakery.
Incidentally (well, maybe not incidentally) William is also a proponent of fairly strict LCR panning.
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