[Gary Eickmeier]

John Williamson wrote:
Gary Eickmeier wrote:
The first problem is my main concept of placing my Zoom H2n up front
to get the good, close sound that I am used to goes down the drain
when the big stage monitors and PA speakers are placed right near
where I would like to be. In my experience what this does is cause
the AGC to go nuts from the bass frequencies because all of the
speakers are facing away from the recorder, and the bass is most of
what it hears, and all I get is whump whump whump. So that is out,
and I place the recorder back further where it is safe, but that
ends up in the same spot as the video camera, which is high up on a
tripod about 40 ft back.
Set the H2 to a conservative fixed gain setting, and use the built in
limiter. You could also try hanging the H2 above the stage, if you can
find a sensible spot during your sound check.

You have any similar tales? Live amplified band recording has to be
the most difficult job anywhere.

Which I why I use a portable multitrack recorder and mic everything up
myself, using, if permitted, splitters on the vocal mics. A Zoom R24
will give you 8 mic capable tracks with 6 phantom power points, and
can be slaved to another R24 or R16 to give 16 available tracks. The
preamps aren't the best, but the results are surprisingly good on the
choir and 60s band that I've used it on so far.

Quality or convenience?

Thanks to you both. I know that if it were a sound recording gig the
professional way would be to bring my own multi-mikes and see if I can place
them without getting in the way if they still need their own amplified
system. But this was just a video shoot and I didn't want to get in their
way or interfere when they were setting up.

I do have a Zoom R16 that can do 8 channels at once, two of them powered. I
have but three good microphones, and a few cheap Sony lavalier mikes that
would work with a job like this. If I could get up there and hang a stereo
pair, that would be lovely, but I don't know how they do it without a fire
department lift.

I wonder if you could use whatever mikes they do have set up for their
sound, then add as many of your own to that going to your own recorder along
with the board mix - if you had enough line, wouldn't get in the way, and
knew where everyone was going to stand!

This was certainly not a high enough paying job for all that, but I suppose
the really correct way would be to have a real recording engineer with
proper equipment and knowledge work along with you. I would also bring a
couple of spot lights that I could supplement the available light with, if I
could concentrate on the video side. For this job I used the main camera on
tripod catching everything that happened, plus a roving camera that could
catch angles and close-ups. And some fancy moving camera stuff.

Gary Eickmeier