Live club recording

[Jeff Mack]

I video bands in local clubs 3-4 nights per week. It is intended to go to my website so recording from the board is generally working out. Since I go to many clubs, I have many types of boards. I either get an aux or I use tape out into my Shure monitor mixer and then to the wireless bodypack receiver then into my camera. I have a small handheld mic going into the other xlr on the camera. I use a handheld because as the band gets done, I do "on the street" interviews. Here's the question, I would like to add a shotgun of some sort to my arsenal. Often I get to a small club working off a small board where there are only vocals and DI going into it. So I need to be able to capture the full sound of Accoustics, electrics, keys, squeeze box etc. Now I am not needing to do multitrack, I have that gear if I need, but for the web, I just want a decent mix. So adding 1 or 2 crowd mics might give me the desired results.

Any suggestions? I will run these extra mics into my digi 003 and send a mix to my cam as well as going to PT 7.3.1

Jeff

[Remoteness]

This sounds like a two person job to me.
IMO, you need a person running the audio while you're on camera.

So, you capture bands 3 or 4 nights per week; is this a paid endeavor?
I ask this because if it is, you should consider investing in your system.

I don't understand the mindset -- Since it's going to your website a FOH board is okay, but if it was a CD, DVD it is not? I guess we need to understand how important all this is to give you the proper advice, but...

The simple answer to your (short) shotgun question is get a Sennheiser MKH416.
It's the standard many go by, but do you really need that if you want the full sound of the band? I would set up a pair of mics (plenty of threads about that in this forum) and mix that in with your board feed. The interview mic can be another set up. I would get a small stereo mixer to mix all inputs that feed to your camera in stereo via an RF transmitter.

I would consider using your multi-track set up and deal with the mix in post.

I don't think you can ever get a decent mix on your own, especially when you need to concentrate on your camera work and such.

I hope this helped.

[Jeff Mack]

Hey Steve, All valid points. I am trying to start an new business. It is www.texasmusicchannel.net. My goal is to sell advertising space to support the expense so right now, I can't afford a sound guy. This is a part time venture. So what I normally do is capture video for web. The videos are "generally" only seen on the web, usually computer speakers are the listening device which are pretty forgiving. In many shows, I do a live web broadcast so the show is live over the internet. Then I go home and edit the video into songs with graphics. When I get a board feed as a matrix mix or using the tape out, I get a pretty decent sound. I use a Shure wireless monitor mixer to send theis signal to my 1st xlr into my camera. Then I ad another hand held mic into my 2nd xlr. The reason for the hand held is that during breaks or before or after the show, I do man on the street interviews and artist interviews. Getting that to tape really makes the edit process easy.

Now the problem comes when the venue doesn't have a big board and they only run vocals and di into it, I lose a lot of the sound if I relied on that only. So I wanted to consider slinging my digi 003 in as a pass through to take 2 crowd mics and my interview mic and a board feed and then I could take a monitor out into the camera.

Since I started doing this, a lot of the bands are now asking me to hire a couple of additional cameras and pay for a dedicated video shoot with pre fader audio. So with my equipment, I just now am considering building a snake into my HD 24, adding a couple of Octo Pres hiring a sound guy for the night and deliver a quicktie and a pro tools session. I would put this all on a rolling rack and have a small mobile recording facility. But...

My original thread was to be able to go anywhere with any board and be prepared to adapt OR set a consistent workflow and simply use my own crowd mic and totally eliminate the board when I am only shooting for the web playback.

Does this make sense?

Jeff