Recording Live…(problem solved)

Recording Live…(HELP)

My plan was to record the live show at “The RockCliffe” in Minden, Ontario Canada, this past weekend.

I was appointed FOH engineer as well as I was playing bass in one of the 5 bands performing. All of the band’s playing were pretty decent, heavy bands. The show went over pretty well. The owner of the club was giving me thumb’s up all night and band members were all happy.

Problem is I only recorded about two minutes of the set, then looked over at the laptop and 13 of my 15 inputs were overloading like crazy!

Simply, the a/d converters in the two interfaces I was using were clipping long before the pre’s at the board (Mackie VLZ Pro 32.4.)

I suppose the simple solution would have been to lower the trim on the Mackie so as to not overdrive the 003/presonus combination. Problem there was I needed all the gain I could get at the board due to feedback and headroom problems.

The Mackie has no “direct outs” so I just used the inserts on each channel. Minus the two main vocals as their inserts were needed for compression, I did however have 4 aux sends to use so I routed the vocals out that way into the digital environment. Those were great as I had control on the outputs of the two vocal channels now, separate from the trim knobs.


What is the solution for next show???????????

Thanks for your time!
Dustin

what do you mean by control room mix? we only had one shot.

yes i did want to record all the tracks. I was making a live mix of the show to go with some video footage.

Um, about all you can to do is to reduce the signal level hitting the converters.

You could do this by lowering the gain on the mixer channels but using a louder playback system, or attenuating the sends to the converters with pads or another mixer.

Sorry it's not more helpful, but in this case I think the solutions are, if not cheap or easy, at least fairly obvious...

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: dustin
...Why are these the standard btw, is there no 0dB?...

No, there is no 0dB. dB is only a relative measure and must be referenced to something else to be meaningful.

+4/-10 mismatch could certainly explain your metering discrepancies. The two standards came about I think because in the early days of audio the American phone company used one standard that referenced 0dB to 1V and European broadcast standards referenced 0dB to 1mA or some such (don't quote me on the details, I haven't looked them up). Anyway, these two "flavors" of VU meter were available, and the two standards became intermixed in cosmopolitan studios, and some makers began to create gear that is switchable between the two.

Sometimes one is called "pro" and one is called "consumer" but neither is inherently inferior to the other, they are just calibrated differently. Be aware that for sensitive studio recordings, some devices may be "intrinsically" one standard or the other, and the selector switch may simply engage a cheap gain or attenuation circuit, so it's worth testing to see if one or the other sounds better.

Cheers.