Hi everyone,
I'm brand new to this forum after stumbling upon it during a routine Google search.
I have been using Pro Tools for about 5 years, pretty much self taught with some guidance from friends who attended Full Sail and whom I went to music school with. The internet has also been a great resource.
Anyway, over the last 3 years or so I've built a home studio in my basement that has pretty much anything you want with the exception of (unfortunately) very quality mics, my best being a Rhode NT2. I have a couple of 57s and some Shure drum mics that came in a kit.
But enough about my history….here's my question!
My friends and I are transforming the studio a little bit so we can do live performances in the vein of MTV Unplugged from the early 90s. The idea is to video the live performance while running mics into my Pro Tools rig and then syncing the footage with the Pro Tools mix.
Last night we went ahead and did a dry run of the performance (which for 2 of the songs will be vocals, an acoustic guitar, and a harmonica.
I'm using my NT2 for vocals, Samson C02s for the guitar in an XY (as well as a direct line from the piezo to an audio track), and a 57 on the harp amp. We then have an Electro-Voice Cardinal set up as a Room Mic.
This set up actually sounds pretty good, but as I'm sure many of you have figured out by this point there is some serious bleed from the acoustic guitar into the vocal mic.
I've tried various things to mitigate this bleed such as using my reflector filter (cupping it up toward the NT2 hoping it'd block out the acoustic…it didn't), I flipped the NT2 so it hung upside down (I knew it wouldn't work but whatever), I even then switched to my live Electro-Voice 767a hoping it'd be more directional but there was still various bleed making the mixing of the live track kind of a pain.
What, if anything, might you all suggest I try to get rid of that bleed? I understand that I will, to some extent, have to live with the bleed, the question is how large of an extent?
Perhaps my problem is how I'm mixing everything?
Lemme know what your thoughts are because I am pretty much stumped!
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Live recording is a challenge and also give good rewards because
Live recording is a challenge and also give good rewards because the music stay alive.
When I need to record a signer that plays acoustic guitar, I use 2 mics in figure of 8 and make use of the side rejection
Since you might not have that, there's a few things you can do:
1- choose a mic that makes the bleeding sound good and that does'nt need much of EQ : you can have a perfect guitar track alone but if the guitar sound crap on the vocal mic it won't work when you put the vocal track with it. If the guitar sound fine in the vocal mic but you need to EQ a lot of the vocal, you can easily ruin the guitar sound as well
2- Check polarity on one of the mics.. sometimes it can help the sound of both instruments to flip one off
3- Hold yourself from using hard compression and even don't use any compression.. it will only make the bleeding worst.
Post a sample, we'll get a better idea of the problem, if any ;)