Mixing a live show?

[Sounds Expensive]

Anyone have any general suggestions for mixing a recording of a live show?

piano (keyboard), ld vox, bk vox, acoustic guitar, and room mic--all mono.

How do you guys approach the mix?

[kwiksilver]

Your question is better suited for "The Live Music Experience" forum.

You may want to ask one of the moderators to move it there.

kwiksilver.

[Brendo]

I don't know that it is - it is about a live RECORDING, after all.

Thread title misleading.

[6x2]

Yes, the title is misleading.

But the topic is good.

Because somehow magically, this has become something of a lost art. Kids can't deal with bleed these days.

Whatever.

So basically, your task is to mix the songs while managing the bleed. This is something that would start at the venue, but as your gig's recorded already, you have to deal with it now. HPF's, gates and heavy automation are your best friends. C1sc/C4/Spectral gate sort of things can help in tricky bits, but if they're misused, they'll really rape your sound. Only ever take out what you really need to take out, not all bleed is bad.

Heavy compression will surely bring out the bleed, but if you play your cards right, you may be able to compress as much as required and still maintain a somewhat sane sound.

As said, not all bleed is bad, but a lot of it onstage is pretty bad. Hihat at full blast in the vocal mic can sound ugly. Bass amplifiers tend to bleed in every mic on stage. Loud wedges and sidefills can give you a hard time. But I repeat: only take out what you need to. It's easy to overprocess things and that can fuck your mixes up.

Back to your case: the situation isn't too bad, as you don't have drums or bass to deal with. Actually, your job sounds pretty easy.

Are those DI'd guitar and keys?

If yes, then the only things that pick up bleed are the vocal mics. That makes your life very easy. You can muck around with those DI'd things as much as you like, as they don't affect your other channels.

DI acoustic can sound pretty brutal so you have to work on that a lot, but apart from that it's a question of getting a great vocal sound, which can take a bit of fiddling if it's recorded with a 58. However, you can do quite a lot to it as you have had no drumkit behind the singer.

You may or may not want to use the room mic. I often find that the sound isn't flattering and you get the FOH engineers effects as a dodgy bonus if the room's too loud. However, the room mic can give a nice "live" feeling to the songs so you may want to try it. For audience reaction and applause, room mics aren't the best thing around. Audience mics pointing from the stage, away from the PA would be the best thing for that. Between the songs, keep the room mics up.

Get a few good live CDs or DVDs, where you're sure no overdubs or fixing was done for reference. (BTW, I strongly suggest Alison Krauss and Union Station's live CD or DVD, for anybody for any purpose. It's phenomenal. It also sounds perfect.)

Hope this gave you some sort of a direction.

Good luck!

6x2

[pounce]

i did just the thing you are talking about last week, and clicktrack does live show mixing for broadcast and so forth for a living and is well suited to talk about what he has to do to mixes based on what he gets from the FOH guys.

in my case, i had a modest amount of tracks recorded 24 bit 44.1 into digital performer. brought the whole thing back home to mix it.

tons of bleed was my biggest mix issue. also, a little bit of hum in the recordings coming from something in the orchestra pit. so some basic things i did..

i did use a little bit of waves xnoise to minimize some of the extraneous noise in the source tracks. i did use metric halo channelstrip on most of the tracks. some low cuts or little high shelving eq applied helped reduce the effects of the bleed (like getting a little bit of the bass tracks reduced from the sax mics). this slightly aggressive eq'ing is something that might not happen or be needed in a studio setting, but the live source tracks did need to be tweaked. so i did. the cuts and bossts always served a purpose. and i broke a mixing "rule" of mine and really had to solo things up more than usual to see what good and bad things found their way into the live tracks. eq'ing extra noises and such out and using eq to reduce bleed issues made mixing a lot better. a slightly greater than usual amount of time was spent on eqing and compression on this live show multi track recording used for a cast vanity cd.

you'll have to look carefully at mutes and volume automation. i couldn't do much in terms of having tracks mute and unmute during a mix because of the bleed. you'd here the other instruments and atmosphere come in and out too much with mutes. but i hand automated volume a lot to attenuate some tracks to minimize unwanted noise. not an issue with any DI tracks, but you'll have a ton of open mics everywhere else, and the sheer stage volume means bleed bleed bleed. which means way more than usual, everything you do on any channel more greatly effects the rest of the mix. plus, you pretty much can forget about beat detective and so forth. you may or may not be able to use autotune depending on bleed. probably that would work if needed on LV. singers are more likely to be out of tune and out of breath on a live recording than in a studio, so use this at your discretion. you can get away with any of the standard studio tricks for thickening up vox, and that's great.

depending on the tracks you have, if you have room mics, you may or may not want to use tracks with the room ambience. certainly it's a great way to get a little bit of the actual room tone into the recording, and get the crowd noise. those tracks can be great, and can be iffy. obviously it's the same concept as using distant mics to record a drummer, but watch for phasing if the board tracks and the room mics get you tracks that don't line up. you might have to nudge things around a little. and of course if by chance the audience mics get too much distinct chatter from any audience members near them.

compressing the shit out of things was the next key. the live tracks didn't "gel" for me as easily as a studio recording would. of course the micing and gain staging and so forth was all originally geared for the live mix, so i got what i got in the recording. it wasn't terrible, but wasn't ideal.

so i definately put things into the kinds of subgroups i normally would and hit em pretty hard. in fact, the vox group and the instrument groups went into tube compressors which seemed to help smooth things out. also, the whole mix went through an alan smart c1 to tighten it all up.

another thing i just thought of is that i had to find some reverb that simulated the room sound, actually i used two different primary reverbs, one for the orchestra pit and another primary for the lead vox. the lead vox was a little bit of a bigger verb from a pcm90, but a pretty realistic hall from a sony v77 went on the orchestra tracks. that really helped them. making the whole recording sound nice and clean, but also still very much really "live" was part of my goal. i wanted it to seem realistically live while still having a better tone and control so it was more of the perfect show without any of the mistakes as apparent.

the biggest thing i found is that i wanted to run things through 2 to 4 levels of compression to make the very dynamic live performances sound more like "the radio" or whatnot. a plug in compressor, buss compression, 2 buss compression. all tracks had at least those three levels of compression.

so that's what comes to mind so far. hoping to hear from clicktrack on this since he regularly gets things from the live stage and has to make it work as a real mix for broadcast or cd release etc.

ps: yes, allison krause live or otherwise sounds about perfect all of the time. it's a great reference. a great goal to shoot for.

[Sounds Expensive]

Thanks so much guys.

I thought my question was appropriate for MiLaR simply because it had to do with mixing the tracks from a live show for CD release . . . but, I'm not sure if one applies MiLaR philosophies to the live record realm.

Great help 6x2 and pounce, thanks!!!

Are you guys just shooting for what the performers sound like in the venue (panning, comp, EQ, verb, vol. rides)?, or do/can you add anything more to it (chorus, flange, delays, tape or tube sim? etc. Or, is it even advisable?

All the tracks were close mic'ed. It was an acoustic-type thing so the bleed is preety min. since everyone was preety quiet on stage to begin with.

[pounce]

in my case, i knew my task was to present a cd that presented the sound of the live show (in a best case scenario). i actually recorded 4 shows and used performances from 3 different shows to put together a "best of" single show. i had more bleed than it sounds like you did, i just had -so many- open mics to deal with. the electric bass being so near the sax and drum mics was something that really got me. it was a very crowded orchestra pit.

in your case, my default position would be to make it sound like the live show. what would make me produce it further is having the band or a producer in the studio to help with those decisions. unless i'm asked to take those liberties i set my expectations at delivering a recording that will make a fan (or band member) hear the concert like they were there again, but in the best seat in the house on the best show of the tour. then again, if the band is into you producing it, then you can do a little more with it. that is a question to ask the band i'd say.

[clicktrack]

Sorry..I may be a little late to the party...

Its already been mentioned but yes, bleed can be your friend...maybe your only friend. :)

One of my big tenements that I go by is to resist the urge to over process. I'm big on reverbs that suit the room or the sound I'm going for, and compression is used more as a light control tool as opposed to an effect. Contrary to my own advice, I am big on timed delays to match a song. Apart from that, though, use the KISS rule and keep it simple.

I tend to pan the stage to the way I either saw it or envision it based on the bleed I hear from the raw tracks. (if you didn't see the show, you can get a good idea, for example if the bass was to the right or to the left of the kit by listening to the positioning and the level of bleed of the cabinet in the OH's). Panning based on stage appropriate-ness also allows you to work the bleed into the mix without fighting it. If you pan opposite to where the instrument is, you may run into phase issues.

This next idea is going to be hard for me to put into words, so bear with me...

Of course, you need to tame bleed as much as you can, but you also need to have some definition on each instrument. One thing you'll notice is the "bleed floor"...from track to track, there'll be a point where the bleed seems fairly..."consistant".

One trick you can do is use this as your threshold at which you can "mask" unwanted sounds and bring forward wanted sounds. However, be careful of this threshold...sudden changes of level above or below it can be EXTREMELY apparent, and can take away from your mix.

ONe other thing to keep in mind is to keep as few channels in the forefront as you can while preserving a consistant mix...open channels that aren't actually contributing to the mix just add more noise and bleed floor, making your job that much harder.


I'll probably find a way to word this better when I get some sleep in me.

[pounce]

just thought i'd echo a point 6x2 brought up. more singers and other instruments on 58's or other dynamics than you'd see in a studio. a little bit of a mid emphasis as a result of that. so when i mentioned a little more eq'ing than usual, part of the goal was to get the 58's and the like to sound a -little- more like what you might use in a studio instead. so for me, some low cuts and high shelving were pretty much a given. what i did with the low mids changed from singer to singer depending on their tone. it seemed to work out ok. but live micing is more, shall we say "practical" than what you can do in a studio. in this case if your only source is the live mics, you may well find a number of tracks you want to brighten up a litte bit to counteract their likely mid emphasis based on thier mics.