mixing tracks recorded 'live'

[idaguide]

So I was reading--in another wombforum--some tales about recording bands 'live' in the studio...you know, the "we're doing it more like we did back in the ol' days" kind of thing.

Having not done this on a large scale, I'm left wondering, how do you go about mixing these sessions? What are the issues?

I'm specifically referring to 'bleed' between, say, guitars and vocals. Do you just accept that there will be some guitar bleed in the vocals and that it won't be noticed in the end? Or do you work hard to get rid of it...or both?

Pardon my ignorance here, but it sounds like a technique to use, and I'd like to have a few clues before I try.

Thanx,
grae

[mrufino1]

Make sure the bleed is good bleed. In other words, if the guitar bleeding onto the vocal mic is phasing, it will cause problems (or vocals on the guitar mic). That happened to me yesterday, and I am upset because I checked it, so I thought. But in "Mixing with Your Mind," the authot talks about bleed and makes a point that if you know you are going to brighten a vocal later with eq, make sure the things bleeding onto it are dull sounding so that when you bring your eq up it brings the bleed to where it should be, rather than being too bright. Not that I have mastered that yet...YET! That's a great book to purchase by the way. Expensive but packed with info that is 100% useful. But using the polar patterns of your mics is important as well, you can get decent enough isolation like that. Check out the remote forum on Gearslutz, Steve Remote talks about this, calls it "Virtual Gobos." He did some recordings for clear channel's internet music show, and the one with Montgomery Gentry is such an amazing recording. I think it is strippedmusic.com . By the way, A Faces concert from a british TV show is on VH1 classic right now. I have not heard them much (just Stay with Me, which I have played more times than I've heard), but it is AWESOME adn sounds great recording-wise. The drums (Kenney Jones) are miked in the "Glyn Johns" technique with what looks like 414's maybe, and they sound really amazing. The whole thing was amazing. Anyway, enough out of me, hope my late night ramblings helped a bit...

[CHANCE]

I do this a lot shooting videos synced to 24tr audio via SMPTE. After the audio/video is finished, we mix, sweeten, and correct any mistakes in the audio, then using the TC, the doctored audio with the synced video is burned on to the master DVD

[idaguide]

Thanks.
I did buy "Mixing With Your Mind" about a year ago. It is everything you said. Every page has very useful stuff...much of it new to me. Money well spent.

[lebouche]

I've recorded twice for bands at my local jazz club and both times it sounded FUCKED!!! Thank god I only did it for the experience...it sounded good at the time on the cans.
Matisyahu Live at Stubbs strikes me as an amazing live recording

[idaguide]

Yeah, LeBouche,
I'm not really talking about live club recording. That does sound tough. I'm interested in what I guess you'd call 'live studio' sessions. Somewhat controlled, as much as possible, but in the studio with everyone playing at once.

[Old Man]

This may sound counter intuitive at first but bear (Bare?) with me.

Bleed or leakage is your friend not your enemy if you know how to use it to your advantage. An example could be acoustic guitar and piano leaking into each other or drums leaking into piano mics or drums leaking into the acoustic, etc.

If I had drums, acoustic and piano banging away together I would:

Put the drums between the acoustic and the piano and AS CLOSE TOGETHER AS POSSIBLE! (sorry for yelling). Now I know this sounds crazy, because the closer they are, the more leakage there will be.

BUT

Face it, the leakage will be there even if you put these mics as far away from each other as possible, but if they are close the leakage will not also introduce DELAY caused by distance in the room. That unwanted delay will cause the drums to sound more distant than you want (unless that is what you want, but I would use specific room mics for that purpose).

So put these players right next to each other and make the leakage good and useful leakage that is controlled by careful placement of baffles and good mic technique and let the leakage help you make the mix come alive.

Edit: OH!!! this thread was about mixing PREVIOUSLY recorded trax.........nevermind!

[lebouche]

OH!!! this thread was about mixing PREVIOUSLY recorded trax.........nevermind!

I'm hoping people dont mind if they learn something interesting like that.

Just occured to me, does that mean if you are recording a band performing live and you cant get the instruments close together because of asthetics, that you could overcome that problem with wedges/monitors? e.g. pump some of the drums directly towards the piano or guitar so they sound closer.

[idaguide]

No, NOT about previously recorded tracks. Old Man, you are right spot on with what you're talking about. Tell me more if you have a chance. This is exactly the kinds of clues I'm looking for...very helpful.

:Thumbsup: :D :Thumbsup:

Never thought about the delay. Funny how so much of this stuff turns out to be somewhat counterintuitive.

Thanks again!

[dikledoux]

...Just occured to me, does that mean if you are recording a band performing live and you cant get the instruments close together because of asthetics, that you could overcome that problem with wedges/monitors? e.g. pump some of the drums directly towards the piano or guitar so they sound closer.

I'd think that this would be likely to cause more problems than it solves because then you'd have bleed from multiple directions/sources to deal with - not to mention that you'll have to pay attention to the monitor sound itself. You'll just introduce more variables to fight with. Maybe you'll luck out and it'll go well. But I wouldn't bet on it.

dik

[Old Man]

With regard to the question from Lebouch, Yes, I have done that. On a feature film that had a concert performance, the vocals were overdubbed later and to keep the live feel, stage monitors were set up in the studio so that leakage could get into the vocal mic.

It worked really well and the performer was able to get into it a lot better as well.

I would have to say, however, that this idea of monitors in the studio would not work all the time and could make things worse in some situations, but I do recommend trying it in a non-pressure situation to see how it goes.

[John Suitcase]

With regard to overdubbing vocals after the fact (on a live concert recording), I have done this before, and it worked out fine. The only problem areas were spots were the music was quiet, and the room mic was picking up too much of the original vocal. I just ran the new vocal through my monitors, and set up a mic about 10 feet back and recorded that to another track, which I then delayed another 15 ms. Gave just the right tone, so I could cut the real room mic out, and still have a room sound.

Lots of albums have been done 'live in the studio', and I agree that if you can't separate an instrument (like a guitar in an iso booth), then you should put instruments that are going to bleed close together. In a situation where you have two loudish acoustic instruments, like drums and piano, you can't really have them across the room from one another. If you do, you'll have delayed piano on the drums, and delayed drums on the piano.

Something like vocals, or acoustic guitar, I might put farther away, and behind gobos, then use delay or shift the audio tracks, so that the drums that bleed in aren't too far behind the main drum tracks. This only works if there's no reverse bleed, no vocals on the drums, etc.

Another thing, strategy-wise, is to keep in mind that you won't be able to punch-in very easily in this situation. So instead, do several takes of the entire song, then edit the best sections together, rather than taking the best take and trying to fix botched notes, etc.

I read once that the Rolling Stones used to track live in one room, with mick jagger's vocals through a pa system. They might go back and retrack his vocals, but those originals still can be heard on the drums, etc, as a sort of reverb...

[idaguide]

So I'm picking up here that when handled properly, the 'bleed' can become a sort of beneficial ambience. Am I getting that right? What about bass--would it be better to DI it and everyone wear headphones? Or is it not a problem?

Any other instruments/setups that cause particular kinds of problems, besides what's already been mentioned?

Also, anyone find they have to vary their 'mix techniques/practices' in predictable ways when doing this? Another way of saying that is are there things you do normally that you absolutely wouldn't do in this case, and vice-versa.

Thanks again...this is all very helpful. :Thumbsup:
grae

[Old Man]

Yes ambience can be your friend, but as John said, punching in can be a problem due to the leakage. I like his solution of editing together many takes so that you don't have to start punching in individual tracks.
I remember back in the day being very careful in some cases to avoid leakage because I knew we would have to punch and repair individual tracks due to musicianship issues. Back then editing meant cutting 2" tape and yes we would do that but not to the extent that we would today using Pro Tools or whatever daw you use. (I am a PT guy and make NO apologies).

Getting back to the mix, I don't think there are any special rules, we all just do what we have to do to make it work. Perhaps I would use a convolution reverb plug to emulate the natural reverb in the studio or maybe I would not do that at all. Every case is different and also it depends on what type of "stage" you want to put the music in: perhaps you want to make it sound like a small club, or perhaps you want make it sound like arena rock or bad echo from Red Rocks. Pick your poison.

[jdier]

I have done two projects like that. One is done: http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/6815624/a/Your+Final+Ride.htm
while the other is currently being mixed down.

I did not have any phase problems but we started with the notion that the vocals were going to be scratch, so they were sung at a very low level.

I chose (based on advise from others) to only use dynamic mics (with the exception of one LDC mic that was put in the middle of the room, cardoid, pointed away from singer, towards the drummer.) All of the mics were right up on the instruments except the drum overheads. We ran through two songs then the band took a break and we checked everything in mono, then checked again, band came back and I hit record.

When it came to mixing time we built the drum sound around the overheads and the LDC mic then filled in from there. The album, as you can hear, was really pretty simple songs and sounds, and the mixing was a walk in the park. (to make things easier, they wanted a really old fashioned 1950's country sound)

I do not know if this helps or not. I guess my big points are that 1. We overdubbed vocals, and 2. we close miced everywhere we possibly could.

Under the heading of truth in advertizing, they came back and overdubbed a few extra guitar parts and also a banjo part.

[John Suitcase]

Yeah, the room mic is an important part of this approach. As I would generally be doing close micing on everything, it's good to have a few different room mics going on, with different balances that you can choose from.

As far as bass guitar goes, I'll sometimes have it DI, with no amps, and everyone in headphones. But a lot of the time, I forego the headphones altogether, and in that situation, I'll have the bass amp on, with a di, too, and a mic on the cabinet. I'll either turn it down to where the guys can hear it, but it's not really getting into the mics, or I'll have it up a bit, and close to the drums (for phase delay reasons).

I really like to record without headphones, the bands plays much better, things go faster, there's really no monitor mix to screw with until you get to vocals and overdubs, which is usually just stage 1 of my final mixdown.

You get a little snare rattle on bass notes, and all that, but hey, that's what a band sounds like, right?

[idaguide]

Thanks, John. Cool. Good info about the bass.

So I took a 'break' and went wandering around The Womb, and lo and behold, the Mixerman has a discussion of just this issue in Week 3 of his Read The Diaries section. Live/bleed stuff.

Discussion of bleed and editing practices.
Check it out.

http://www.mixerman.net/diaries3.php