Creating the perfect mix at live gigs
This blog post was co-written by George Collins, a location recording engineer, broadcast engineer and a live sound engineer.
One of the incredible things about live music is the breadth and variety of venues available. They can range from headline stages to boutique cafes, backstreet bars to outdoor gatherings. But each has something unique to offer to both artist and audience.
Having said that, from the perspective of recording in such diverse spaces, and — in this case, mixing live, there are some challenges and some considerations.
Avoiding the dry tape
One of the best aspects of live recordings is the opportunity to capture and re-create the excitement and ambience of your concert for your fans who couldn’t make it or the ones that just want to relive it again and again. Therefore, achieving a “live” feel is an integral and challenging part of the task at hand and can require quite different approaches in the “classical” concert to the “pop” concert (everything bar classical).
When recording an orchestra or a choir you are more likely to use the acoustic space you have (unless its not a very nice one!) — main pairs of microphones capturing the whole ensemble, spot mics at a distance from instruments and room mics capturing the sound of the space being performed in. With these kinds of performances such techniques are more appropriate as the environment is more controlled — no loud PA system and no screaming audience (hopefully) to muddy the mix.
For pop gigs however it is a different story. Firstly, the acoustic of the room is rarely nice and something you actually want to capture! The audience screams and cheering that, whilst you want to capture the excitement so that you can throw your listener back into the gig, you want to be able to control it and add sparingly. These types of concerts are also nearly always amplified with a PA, meaning any spill from the speakers onto your mics is only going to muddy your mix. You are also likely to be sharing the microphones with the live sound crew on stage who will 99% of time have say over where these are placed, and who are not only concerned with creating a good sound but also avoiding feedback and hence will place their microphones as close to the source as they possibly can.
As a result, your starting point with recording and mixing a live pop concert is a bunch of closely spotted microphones, all very dry with no reverberation on them. You have two options to correct this: either rig your own microphones in the room to capture the reverberation — a rare option due to the often poor acoustic and added equipment and time cost. The second option is of course to add this in the mix artificially, allowing you to pick the exact space you want and even to apply multiple reverbs to different elements (e.g. a plate for the snare drum).
Whilst this has hopefully now turned your mix in from being a dry and dead recording into a beautiful sounding performance, you’re still missing a bit of the live action and excitement. What would a Justin Bieber concert be without all the screaming teenagers? The spot microphones on your instruments are not going to pick this up in your mix (nor do you want them to) and so you will need to rig your own microphones for this.
The technique of micing an audience largely comes down to the size and shape of your venue. However, generally the more you can put up and the more cover you can get, the thicker the audience sound you will achieve. Highly directional microphones, i.e. rifle mics, are common place as it can be tricky to get the mic close to the audience and using a more open polar pattern will pick up more reverb than audience. Obviously try to also mic in stereo pairs as a mono audience won’t sound very real at all.
Often the choice and position of audience microphones comes down to what you have left in the back of the van and where you can find somewhere to hang it off. Usually this turns out fine, you’re capturing a member of the public screaming their head off not a steinway piano, but that’s not to say it should be completely neglected.
Once you have the audience feeds coming into your desk, you can straight away take out some chunks from the frequency spectrum. Anything below 150Hz is likely to just be rumble that you don’t need and will muddy your mix. Each room has its resonant frequency — find that and take it out! Finally, I also often filter out some of the high frequencies too, to remove any shrill and ringing from the room reflections.
As one last note — use the audience mics sparingly. It’s very easy to ruin your mix by adding too much of them. It’s fine to push them up at the end of a song when the crowd applauds and cheers, however always remember to bring them down once the music kicks back in.
The Common mix mistakes
Recording and mixing is, let’s face it, quite stressful! With live mixing there can be a lot of time pressure, and you’re always conscious with how much depends on you. So, it’s natural that mistakes happen, and there are a few that happen time and time again:
Perfecting before balancing — too often engineers will sit down at the desk at the start of the balance and begin by fading up kick channel, apply EQ and Compression, move onto the snare and so on and before they know its 9 minutes into the 10 minute sound check and although they have got the ratio of their compressor on their snare channel absolutely perfect they haven’t even heard the lead singer yet. At the start of the sound check get your balance. Make sure you can hear every element in the mix, your singer isn’t being drowned out by the guitar and everything is well balanced and it sounds like something that is passable. Once you have that, then you can get down into your EQs and Dynamics! This is a practice I believe should be done whether time pressure or not, however its especially important in the broadcast and live recording industry where often your allotted time to sound check is extremely short.
Getting too carried away with the audience — it’s tempting once you have the mics for the audience set up to use them too much, but the listener is primarily wanting to listen to the music and not the crowd. This is where you really need to ride the fader, adjusting constantly throughout the concert. It’s fine to push it at the end of the track to hear the applause and any interaction between the band and the crowd but remember to pull it back down when the music kicks again otherwise you’re going to lose all the clarity to the mix.
Hitting the ceiling — always keep an eye on your master level and where your peaking. It’s all too easy to keep thinking you could do a bit more of that and a bit more of something else but before you know it you’re way into your headroom and your limiter is squashing down your mix.
Splitting tracks without splitting hairs
Having recorded your mix, it’s ideal to have the separate tracks ready as soon as possible, so you can upload them respectively.
Software-wise, there’s plenty of choice — from pro solutions like ProTools and Pyramix, to more simple solutions. Even Audacity or Garageband will do a job of splitting up a recording into tracks however, you’re likely to be able to do the job far quicker and more precisely using the more expensive industry standard options. But more importantly, for an efficient edit, make sure you know your shortcuts! Familiarise yourself, you won’t believe how much time keyboard shortcuts will save you.
The other factor to consider is how tightly you want to edit. This needs to be agreed with the artist or whoever is responsible for the creative control before the recording. You could fade out right after the last note, however you’ll be missing out on reaction from the crowd afterwards (unless there is no reaction in which case you might want to fade out quickly!). Decide also how much you want to crop in between tracks — some may like to hear the guitar being retuned, others may not — I personally think it can add a bit of intimacy to the recording however 30 seconds of it between each track would probably get boring quite quickly. Whatever edits you make, be sure to audition them to make sure they sound natural.
