[Arny Krueger]

"HL0105" wrote in message

At the bar where I do karaoke, I talked the KJ into
making recordings of our singing. So he
brought a (Gemini IKey Plus) Portable USB Recorder, and
connected it to the (RCA Record Out) on his (American DJ
QFX Pro) mixer.

When we listened to the recording the next day, we
noticed two problems. One was that for some of the louder
singers, there was distortion. The KJ's theory on why
this happened was that the gain setting on the mixer (set
at one quarter setting) was too high for recording
purposes.

There are level indicator lights on the front of the Gemini IKey Plus. Is
overloading indicated by them?

And that gain setting could not be turned down;
it had to be at least that high since this was karaoke in
a bar environment.

The other problem we noticed was that there was no
background noise at all to supplement the singer's voice;
it sounded like a studio recording. And without this
ambient crowd noise, you heard every imperfection in the
singing. And since karaoke singers are amateurs; well
there were LOTS of imperfections.

As other posters have pointed out, this is a common problem. The ideal
solution is to add another mixer and microphone, and use that mixer to add
background noise to your recordings.

So we tried a second recording attempt. This time without
any input from the mixer; the recorder's built-in
microphone was used. The result had plenty of crowd
noise, so we accomplished that. The problem: *too much*
crowd noise. The noise of the crowd was at such a high
level, that in some cases you could barely hear the
singer. I couldn't believe that this tiny microphone on
the Recorder was that sensitive. Imagine hearing about 25
loud conversations at once - in a phone booth.

As other posters have pointed out, what you want to do is do acoustical
mixing. You can vary the proportioning between crowd noise and the Karoke
sound by moving the mic closer to the crowd, or closer to the Karoke
speakers.

So for our third recording attempt we placed the Recorder
one foot away from the monitor speaker, assuming that
this would result in the singer's voice being the loudest
part of the recording, much louder than the crowd noise.
Didn't work. At all. Regardless of the fact that the mic
was that close to the speaker, it was the exact same
result. The noise of the crowd was at such a high level,
that in some cases you could barely hear the singer.
Baffling!

I agree, I'm surprised that your experiment with acoustical mixing couldn't
come up with a better mix.

(Now more specifically, the mic was situated closer to
the woofer, rather than higher up and closer to the
tweeter...but I don't believe that would be a factor
here.)

Maybe yes, maybe no.

So we're back to square one. How the heck do we get some
decent recordings?? If anyone has any insight on this, it
would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Get another small mixer to front end the Gemini IKey Plus. The mixer needs
only one mic input. The other input to the mixer should be from the Karoke
mixer, the signal you origionally intended to send to the Gemini IKey Plus.
Feed the output of this new mixer to the Gemini IKey Plus. By varying the
channel gains on the new mixer you should be able to get the proportioning
of Karaoke sound and room sound that you desire.

BTW, while we don't do karoke at my church any more, I do something similar
for recordings we make of our church services. I have some room mics that I
use to mix room sounds into the feed to a recorder and some remote places
where people listen to the church service. We had the same problem with the
imperfections in the largely amateur singer's voices sounding kinda nasty in
the recordings we make of church services.