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sav
 
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Default Recording in a Remote(ish) Area

Mike Rivers said the following on 05/03/2006 01:12 pm:
sav wrote:
Hi, Sometime before the end of this year we will have the opportunity to
go to an island in the Pacific, with the purpose of making decent
recordings of the local music. I have many questions because it is about
25 years since I did any studio recording and about 15 years since I
stopped mixing live gigs.


I hate to try to give advice to someone who starts out a posting like
that, but I didn't want you to feel like you were being ignored.


Well, thanks for replying... what did I do wrong?!

A combination of budget
restrictions, portability and power restrictions made me think something
like a Korg D32XD might be the best compromise.


That's a pretty cool gadget, but whether it would be what you need
depends a whole lot on what you'll be recording. I don't expect that
you're going to be doing much in the way of studio recording there -
you might dedicate a hut for working, but you aren't likely to get
people who will be overdubbing parts. Until you start expanding it, the
DX32XD is only an 8-track recorder. While it might be convenient to
record a group with 8 mics and separate tracks, this is overkill for
that. The other risk is that everything is all in one box and if
anything fails, there's a pretty good chance that you'll be out of
business. I doubt that your budget will allow you to carry a spare.


Most of the music is already westernized, (though they might think
otherwise--the missionaries' bad taste) 'island beat' is similar to
reggae. I reckon we could use 'modern' methods and do something really
interesting. There are singers who travel round the islands doing gigs;
the ones I've met are pretty well familiar with (or open to) working
with overdubs and so on.

There would be times, I hope, for recording real tribal stuff, but then
I'd go out with a minidisk or something like that. What I imagine for
the studio is to get people to come there, make a rough mix then do each
track individually. For that I think 8 track would suffice, but then
there is the possibility of putting on live gigs and recording them, or
maybe just recording 'live' in the studio. In that case, the extra
module would be good. I'd probably have to do all of that and see what
goes down best.

If you plan to live there for a few years, set up a production
facility, and do all the work over there, that's a justification for a
full-out workstation like this (though I'd still recommend having a
spare). But if you're going to do field collecting, bring your
recordings home, and do the busy work under more controlled conditions,
I think it would be a waste and a risk.

What else have you looked at, and have you considered using a laptop
computer for your basic recorder? That's something that you can scale
to the size of the project, and laptop comptuers are cheap enough so
that you can carry a spare.


I did look at that first. I like computers for making web pages, doing
email and other stuff, but I never really got to like them for audio
recording. I'd still need a half decent desk, I couldn't fiddle with a
mouse moving faders, but the automation is attractive. Maybe a separate
desk and HD recorder? I've seen some you can hook up to a computer, and
get similar features (but better) to the all-in-one, but this looks
expensive. I'd like to have a way to control from the computer but have
the automated mixdown and so on, and have some real controls. Bear in
mind this is all new to me (ssl desks were but a dream when I was last
doing this) and there are so many different things around.

I read things like
http://studio-central.com/phpbb/view... c&highlight=
"computer sequencer or hardware recorder?" and end up agreeing with both
sides. Am I right in thinking that to get similar performance to a
dedicated HD recorder I'd need a pretty expensive computer system, and
thus would be in much the same price bracket as with the separate HD and
computer used only for control?

sorry, I really should have had more concrete ideas before posting, but
that is half the problem. We could probably allocate about 5000 dollars
on gear, maybe 6 if you include mics and all the bits.

Would a round design be good acoustically? I think there
are advantages to it.


Both advanatages and disadvantages. It's all workable.