Recording Your Songs in a Live Location
Recording in a lively environment such as a large hall or school stage—with or without an audience present—allows you to capture all of that lovely room ambience that you can’t easily get at home
Even if you’ve got a suitable-sounding home setup, there’s something to be said for packing up your gear from time to time and relocating to a live environment such as an empty auditorium, a small hall or a band practice space, with the ability to capture that otherwise hard-to-get room ambience. Or you may want to record an actual live performance in a club or concert hall, complete with audience response (assuming the crowd is a good one). Either way, here are some ideas for getting the sounds right when working in a larger remote location.
Using the right mics. When recording in a spacious room, in general your best bet is to use mainly directional, lower-gain dynamic mics that are suited for stage applications, among them Shure’s SM57 and 58 vocal and instrument mics, as well as Sennheiser’s venerable MD 421 (for drum miking in particular) and e609 (for miking guitar cabs). If using a condenser mic over a drumkit, for example, take care to use the microphone’s pad switch to reduce the amount of gain as well as bleed from nearby instruments.
Capturing that room ambience. Though it’s necessary to keep noises at bay, covering your home’s recording area with sound absorption means your studio will always lean arid. Which is one of the great things about recording in a large open room—you can finally grab some live ambience without having to resort to plug-ins and such. To capture the space in all of its glory, get out those condenser microphones and suspend one on each side of the room, facing the performance area and situated a good 20-30 feet back (bear in mind that sound waves start to be delayed at around 90 feet, in case you’re looking for something really cool).
Empty hall, or packed audience? So far, we’ve approached this like we’re recording in a concert environment, without the actual concert—that is, using all the attributes of a large space but not having a crowd of onlookers. However, let’s say you’d like to combine the two—performing a set of new songs before a live audience. First, the sound of the room will change noticeably simply because you’re putting bodies in the space, which absorb a lot of the excess liveliness. To capture the between-song audience response without all the extraneous noise during the performance, elevate the room condenser microphones a bit more so there’s less direct sound. You’ll also need to decide how much crowd reaction you want on the recording—cranking the room mics will make an ovation more thunderous, for instance (not necessarily a bad thing, of course).
Bringing it all back home. Assembling tracks from a live performance in an acoustically dynamic space can be significantly more fun (and challenging) than the usual studio mix process. For one thing, all that reverb you hear is real—no matter how good emulators have gotten, nothing canned can top that wide open, actual room sound. Having said that, it’s up to you to use the room in a way that doesn’t completely overwhelm the recording. Start by arranging all of your “stage” tracks as you would for a normal mix, with the vocals, bass and bass drum centered, guitars and keyboards flanked left and right, and so forth. Once you have a good balance, pan the hall mics hard left and right and gradually bring them into the mix, to the point where there’s a fairly even balance between dry and reverbed signals. If recording with a live audience, level the room mics so that there’s sufficient “wet” signal but with minimal coughing, chair rustling and other crowd sounds.
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