Syncing Budget Live Recoding

[rdc]

So this might be slightly off topic but anyway....

So I'm helping out at a small college live music venue and they are trying to record the shows that they have for later broadcast on the college radio station. Its all rather low budget/low tech. Basicially we are recoding two channels of room mikes and some combination of direct outs and sub mixes from the board.

Our problem comes from the fact that the pro tools rig that we are going to be mixing on only has 2 channels in so we need some way of syncing all the tracks once we have them in protools.

Is there any way to get a mixer to send a click or a pop or something to all of its channels as a wat to sync all the tracks? I know that it'll be weird for the people in the audience but we've decided that they can deal and the pop on the mics will be delayed but we can figure out what that delay will be.

Also I'm trying to get them to get a used ADAT to record on but we might end up with some sort of combination of 4-tracks and cassette players. I'm assuming that if they go that way they are going to have to use the same machine to play the tapes that we record with due to speed variations from machine to machine. But even then are they going to have syncing issues over the course of a 30-45 min set even on the same machine...I have no idea how consistant tape palyers are.

[BJohnston]

Sounds to me like with only 2 Pro Tools inputs your really going to be limited. Trying to record a click and then later syncing it up would really be more a pain than just simply mixing it on the fly down to 2 tracks. I'd use a blend of the Sub Mix's, and Audiance mics and mix those down to the 2 inputs of the Pro Tools tracks. It's not gonna be perfect, but you can still accomplish the task at hand. Don't overcomplicate it for yourselves.
That's my suggestion.

BJohnston

[NeglectedFred]

Dude, get everyone to pitch in $25 or so and buy a Behringer ADA8000. It would make life a whole lot easier..

If you do use a click, here's what I do, and it works very effectively. Create a file that is just 4-16 beats of the metronone and loop duplicate it until it equals the song length. Then enable 'snap to wave blocks' in your pro-tools rig, it's probably worded a little differently, I don't use protools. This makes editing and syncing a LIFESAVER!! Regardless of where you click and where you move things, it's on beat.. Maybe not the right beat, but you'll find it so much quicker. I've also tapped into some great background vocal chasers by sheer accident when using this handy method - on several occasions.