Record Live Event Sound from a Mixing Board

in this episode how to record a live event from a mixing board [Music] for those of us that record sound at some point we will be asked hey can you record this live event that's coming up we're going to have live sound and we need someone recorded how do you do that so if you show up at a live event and you go talk to the sound engineer at the mixing board and say hey can I record this I've got my recorder you need to understand you're asking a huge favor of this person this is something that is stressful for them because they got a lot of other stuff going on they are generally nervous about working with people who have never really done sound before or who have never recorded from a mixing board before they don't want you to mess up what they're being paid to do so you need to be super respectful and you need to come prepared to manage all the things that need to be managed and make their job as easy as possible so if you've been asked by the organizer of the event to do the recording ask the event organizer if they can also put you in touch with the mixer ahead of time so you can make arrangements ahead of time that'll make things a lot less stressful for the sound engineer who's going to be doing the live sound for that event because they'll know ahead of time what's coming and you can talk about what cables you need to get a feed from their board so of course you need to bring all the cables necessary to connect your recorder to their mixing board from a line out on the board you also need to make sure that you have ample power for your recording gear now another thing that can be very stressful for sound engineers is if someone comes up and wants to record on the spot and says hey can i plug in my recorder here somewhere and they have a power strip which has enough outlets for their own gear and they don't necessarily have room for your gear or even if they do have another outlet for your particular recorder they may not want you plugging into it because there's always a risk that when you're done you might pull out the wrong thing all sorts of stuff can go wrong so they get very very cagey about someone coming up to them and asking all these things so if you can stick to battery power and bring enough batteries supply so that you can make it through the entire part of the show or entire show that you're going to record ok now into the mechanics first of all you're going to need a recorder and you're going to need a recorder preferably that has an XLR or TRS quarter-inch input that can do line level now if you're not sure if yours can here's an example this is the tascam dr-60d mark 2 you can see it has two inputs on the side here that are XLR or quarter-inch TRS those cables look like this now it's also important that your recorder is capable of switching though inputs to be line level inputs as opposed to microphone level inputs now some recorders cannot do that now of course you also need cables to make this happen there are a variety of different types of outputs on different mixing boards so it's going to depend on the mixing board and that's where things start to get a little more complicated people start to get scared it's not that big of a deal let me explain the most common kind of cable that they're going to output from their board is a quarter inch TRS that looks like this so if you get a cable that has the quarter inch TRS on one side and whatever your recorder needs on the other side either XLR or TRS quarter-inch then you should be all set in some cases a mixer will have an XLR output so you're going to need an XLR cable that looks like this this is the same as a standard XLR microphone cable they're interchangeable you can use them no problem some recorders only have an XLR input and so in that case you're going to need cables that have quarter-inch TRS on one side for the mixer and XLR on the other for your recorder and then finally in some cases some boards have what are called RCA connectors for the output and those look like this so you'll need an RCA two quarter-inch set of cables as well now we also mentioned before you're going to need to power your recorder for the duration of the shoot however long that's going to be and I would recommend that you stick two batteries the reason for that is again it makes it a lot less stressful for the sound engineer at the mixing board because they don't have someone fumbling around with their power connectors which can put them out of business very quickly with the tascam dr-60d mark 2 for example you can power this with a USB input so I can use a USB battery bank to power the dr-60d for probably 15 hours now if you are going to be recording say for example all day and you don't have enough battery to supply you for that entire time bring your own extension cable and your own power strip so that you're not again stressing out the sound engineer at the mixing board now one issue that occurs from time to time in live sound settings is what is called a ground loop when there's a ground loop in the sound system you often hear an annoying buzz or hum in the loudspeakers or in your recording this is often caused by plugging some of the equipment into one electrical circuit and some of the other sound equipment into a separate circuit to address this you may want to add an isolating transformer to your kid this sounds all technical but basically it's just a box that you will insert between the mixer and your recorder and it eliminates or greatly reduces any hum you'll need an additional cable to make this work the input on one side will require a male XLR cable and on the outside a female XLR this is another reason why I recommend powering your recorder with batteries because using batteries greatly reduces the risk of this ever occurring in the first place once you have all this in place how do you connect it up first of all you need to find out whether or not the engineer was mixing in mono or stereo now for a lot of us for example if you're doing a wedding and you're just talking to the DJ and you're just mainly interested in recording perhaps a ceremony or the speeches at the reception or things of that nature you really only need a mono signal anyway and the reality is for most smaller shows they're only mixing in mono anyway so in that case you only need one cable if it is a bigger production and they are doing a stereo mix then you'll want to cables next up is to figure out the type of cable you need the sound engineer will tell you what type of connector they need on there and again the most common is going to be quarter-inch TRS so once they've identified the type of connector they need on there and you give that to them and let them do the configuration they get very cagey about you trying to touch their board generally so don't try to do it yourself then of course knowing your recorder you know what type of connector you need on the other end so you plug that into your recorder next you'll want to be there for sound checking as much as possible so you can set the levels on your recorder so you don't have to fiddle with that as much during the actual show itself then of course once the shows ready to start you hit record and you're on your way now one sort of intermediate note the first time you record a live event from a mixer you'll be a little surprised and maybe disappointed at the sound you get you'll think wow that sounds really dead like there's not a lot going on there and there you can't hear the crowd when they clap in between songs if it's a concert and things of that nature and what is how also happening is you're not capturing very much of the room so it sounds kind of lifeless what you can do in that case is you can also put up a couple of microphones in the room itself so you can capture all that or perhaps on your camera whatever it is you're doing and that way you can mix some of the room sound and the audience clapping and responding to the performance to make it a little bit more lifelike so these are the sort of basics under most circumstances this should be able get you where you need to go if not you have some sort of special circumstance go ahead and leave a question down below and we'll do our best to answer that if you have not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video and if you'd like to be notified each time a new video comes out go ahead and click that Bell icon we'll talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 196,579

Keywords: sound, audio, video, film, how to, mixer, mixing, mixing board, engineer, live, show, concert, record, recorder, event, live sound, event sound

Id: Tzm3G46ozxQ

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Sat May 05 2018