Audacity Forum

Any ideas on how to make a better recording would be appriciated, either post production effects/EQ or better ways of actaully recording. You can hear a sample of my first run at it here:

http://www.puddlemountain.com/recording.html

I recorded this straight from our Mackie 1402-VLZ 3 14x2x1 Audio Mixer, the mixer has no controls for the tape out so I had to mess around with the input signal gain quite a bit to get it low enough to not completely distort, but it worked "decently" I will try recording stereo tracks coming from two Nady SM90's I have lying around next time running them and the board mix (total of 3 signals) through a A-D converter box our guitar player has lying around. I'm sure this will help, as well as give us some more flexibility ofr the mixdown of our live shows, I'll post a song after doing that as well, but in the meantime some bars do not really work for mic setups so any advice for the straight from the board mix would be great too. Anyways, any advice would be appriciated esspecially EQ and effects that may help to soften/mellow the harshness of this recording, really anything that could make this sound better post or pre production.

Thanks!

Beau

beautah wrote:You can hear a sample of my first run at it here:

The link is dead.

beautah wrote:I recorded this straight from our Mackie 1402-VLZ 3 14x2x1 Audio Mixer, the mixer has no controls for the tape out so I had to mess around with the input signal gain quite a bit to get it low enough to not completely distort,

It sounds like you are trying to record into a mic input and not a line level input. You should use record into a line level input.

Also, unless you are using the AUX sends for something else, you could record from those instead of the tape out - this allows you to adjust the levels of each input individually and independently from the main mix (useful if you have someone available to monitor the recording mix. Using 2 AUX sends you can also control the stereo position of each track (set one AUX send to record on the left channel, and the other AUX send to record on the right).

Try the link again, didn't expect a reply so soon and I was setting it up at the time.

Sadly both our AUX sends are used for monitors and therefore we can't use them.

The line level part is true, however, due to the nature of my set up (plugging into the mic input on my computer), there isn't much I can do about that either. However I will be using the Analog to Digital converter in the future so that should provide more options.

I posted the whole set (which sadly is pretty drunken and bad), nothing can be done about our poor performance, but it could at least be captured and edited to achieve a good representation of a drunken evening. Let me know what your thoughts on EQ and effects for post production would be.

Thanks!

I probably would not do very much. The overall level seems rather low, but regarding the Eq I don't think that you can enhance it much as adjusting the Eq to benefit one instrument is going to be detrimental to another.
If you are able to record an additional couple of channels with microphones then I think that will allow much improvement. I notice that the fiddle in particular has quite a nasty buzzy DI type of sound which I'm sure sounds much better live. Ideally it would be nice to be able to record each instrument on its own track but unfortunately the hardware for doing that is still quite expensive.