Thread: Live Band Recording

Hi,

I am new to live sound recording. Now I am going to have a project which is a live recording session of Lead vocal with acoustic guitar and KB, Bass guitar and percussion on the side doing background vocals. I am concerning about the wiring issue: It contains Millennia HV-3D,Focusrite ISA430 MkII, an analog Studer mixer and a few mics in my gear list, so how do I get started?

I drew a chart of the signal flow but it's hard to deal with all the cables. Looking forward to any suggestions. Thank you.

M

Originally Posted by mittciao

Hi,

I am new to live sound recording. Now I am going to have a project which is a live recording session of Lead vocal with acoustic guitar and KB, Bass guitar and percussion on the side doing background vocals. I am concerning about the wiring issue: It contains Millennia HV-3D,Focusrite ISA430 MkII, an analog Studer mixer and a few mics in my gear list, so how do I get started?

I drew a chart of the signal flow but it's hard to deal with all the cables. Looking forward to any suggestions. Thank you.

M

You talk about "recording" but you don't say what you want to record on to, or whether you want to make a multitrack recording or direct-to-stereo. I assume you want multitrack, but if you have facilities for monitoring and balancing in real-time, you could use the Studer mixer to go direct to stereo.

If you have the 8-channel version of the Millennia HV-3D, that's enough microphone pre-amps for the project you outline, although I think I would use the ISA430 as a DI for the bass guitar. You wire the microphones to the Millennia inputs using XLR-XLR cables and the bass to the Hi-Z input of the Focusrite using a jack-jack cable.

Before doing that, you need to consider where to send the line-level outputs from the HV-3D and ISA430, and also what microphones you are going to use for which instruments.

There are two usual ways of doing the multitrack recording: to a computer via a multi-channel FireWire interface or to a hard disk recorder such as an Alesis HD24XR. Regular readers will know my preference for the second of these choices, but many engineers seem to operate successfully recording to a laptop or desktop computer.

Until you tell us a little more about what your recording intentions are, I won't go into the choice of interfaces. and, similarly, there's no point to recommending new microphones until we know what you have already.