recording acid mothers temple live - what to bring?

[nag hammadi]

i have been tapped to do a live recording of acid mothers temple in a month or so.

as impractical as it might be, i am doing it with one of my trusty fostex e-16 machines.

the venue has one of the nicer soundcraft consoles, i forget which one. i know the house guys at the club very well, so i should be able to patch into their board without much fuss.

the layout of the club does facilitate me setting up separately from FOH, even to the extent that i could be in a room off to the side.

i guess i am wondering which way i should go with this. it would no doubt be much easier to take direct outs from each channel from FOH, but then i would probably still have to bring some sort of console to place between their levels and mine so to speak. of course the huge advantage there would be using the existing mics.

if i set up on my own, i can use my own mics and (perhaps more importantly) my own pre's. this would give me more control, but the potential for more headaches.

the console i would be using is a 32 ch soundcraft spirit lx7, which is by no means huge. i can bring it if i have to.

barring any crazy travel related delays, there should be ample time to set up and sound check, so that helps.

so if anybody wants to weigh in and vote for option one or option two, i sure would be thankful.

or maybe some magical option three?

[kingtoad]

Make sure you speak to the band's FOH engineer, assuming they have one. It is a courtesy that will win you a lot of karma on the night.

[nag hammadi]

they aren't touring with their own guy, and i know all of the guys at the venue, as well as the owner - which makes things SO much nicer.

i am thinking i am actually leaning towards bringing all of my own stuff and miking them myself. they have super loud guitars, so i doubt foh will even have them in the mix.

would it be bad to run a y cable off of, say, the bass drum and snare mics and run one side to my stuff?

[goose42]

In my experience, getting some kind of preamp-level control over the vocals at least is important; it doesn't really matter much if a vocal craps out a little in the house, but it always sucks if it gets fuzzy in your feed, especially from board pres.

If it's possible to rent or borrow a splitter, that's my favorite way. My local rental place in Nashville has the 4-channel EWI isolated splitter for $25 a day (a little steep perhaps since it's only $100 to buy one, but reasonable if you only need it once).

I also like a stereo pair to get a little room and audience reaction, if there's a place to put it close to FOH where no one's going to be standing right under it the whole time. I sometimes have to nudge it in my DAW when I mix to not have an audible slapback, depending on the size of the room. Bass often sounds the mushiest in these, so I end up rolling a lot of low out of any rooms I do.

[nag hammadi]

room mics for sure.

splitter is the right idea. this club has pretty nice mics, so the more of theirs that can pull double duty, the better. and i guess the whole deal is that isolated is necessary as opposed to y cables. wasnt thinking.

[nag hammadi]

mostly because i want to have my gear have the smallest footprint on stage as possible...

the more i think about it, the more i realize one of my main challenges will be volume. there will be an aweful lot of it.

[drumsound]

You might be able to rent a splitter snake, and have transformer isolated feeds of each mic to you and to FOH.

[nag hammadi]

i would like to do more live stuff, so i wouldnt mind purchasing something,

what do you think of this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/130645109895?ss ... 826wt_1270

[elbows]

earplugs.

[drumsound]

i would like to do more live stuff, so i wouldnt mind purchasing something,

what do you think of this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/130645109895?ss ... 826wt_1270

That would be super useful. Run the long end to somewhere backstage with your gear and the shorter end to the house snake. I BELIEVE that only one place ( you OR FOH) should apply phantom power.

[nag hammadi]

Hmmm. Didn't think about phantom power.

I have some friends at a local sound company that are going torrent me a snake with a set of isolated outputs. That should help things a good bit.

Anticipating a VERY loud show, I may not use condensers anywhere, so the 48v thing shouldn't affect me now that I think about it.

I will probably use a pair of cheap ribbons for the room. The cheap ones seem to be able to take a pretty good pounding...

[inasilentway]

I've mixed them live once, and it was unbelievably loud, but in a way that put a smile on my face. can't remember exactly how he put it, but their TM/translator gave me the advice that the lead guitar should be the loudest guitar that I've ever heard in my life. he was right.

You should definitely bring that splitter, since the levels you'll need will be way different than what will need to be in the FOH mix. also bring a couple of compressors/peak limiters if you can, they are known for surprises and at the show I mixed one member played soprano sax into his vocal mic much louder than he sang.

[Neal]

+1 on the split snake and earplugs. Phantom power should indeed only come from one end. Sounds like a very cool gig. Let us know how it goes. The live recordings I've done have mostly been a lot of fun, even with the occasional pain in the ass.