Dear Chris,
during my mixing works on live concert recordings I’ve always found very exciting the process of the room mic’s, and the ambience ones. And during the mixing process in my studio after, many times surprises me (in a good way ) the accident bleed of other open microphone too. May I ask you about how you treat that in your mixes when we are talking about live concert projects? And next to the basic concept of your go to EQ, compression, and Dly-s, I’m very curious your mixing advices, parallel tricks, as well! And your favourite placements of the room mic during the recording phase too, mostly for small and medium sized jazzclub, with 250-600 people, achieve that “oh hell yeah we are there!!” feeling when we are listening back in simple stereo. Thank you very much, and I really appreciate your thoughts, and answers will be very inspiring to me!
Màrton
Hey Marton ! well every show has different issues…yes small venues are easier and you can use the leakage …i mix all different sizes…i clean up the session and get rid of it all…on the vocal i creat a track of just the leakage incase i wanna blend it back in…once you tune vocals …well then the room can have an issue…many things to think about…creating an audience loop to help the transitions is very helpful also !
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Hello Chris,
thank you! Usually when I treat the room tracks, I try to get the frequencies out which couses issues in the mix blended in, consider most how it affects the most important element of the music, usually the vocal. I used to blend into the mix at relatively the end of the process, after I have a ballanced static mix with the close ones, before automatation anything, till I feel it works in general, and makes the live vibe. In my field, accoustic music genres such as, jazz, folk, (ethnic) world music, is rare I need to use tuning. If I understand correct, you design the room tracks, and the leakage tracks to enhance the main element of the mix, you compress it and send to additional reverbs too? Is there any useful second thoughts about the situation when more sounds of the audience reactions are missing, but blending in affects badly the mix, you just replace it with a samples?
What mixing desisions makes a live concert record sounds huge?
Thank you very much Chris!
Márton
Hey Marton to put it simply live recordings need automation…the audience tracks or room tracks whatever you wanna call them are the work…you ride these all the time to add energy and crowd responses…get your mix working with these tracks low to start
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Thank you very much your time and answers Chris,
I wish you all the best!
M.