Music: OrECon concert tech

[mdlbear]

Yesterday's concert involved a lot of firsts, and not nearly enough preliminary testing; I was impressed if I get a recording that's as much as halfway decent. I'd hoped to have audio to post today, but that's not going to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

This was the band's first Zoom concert, and the first concert where I used the Allen & Heath ZEDi-10 mixer/USB interface. Results were mixed. And, fortunately, also unmixed. Because I got two sets of recordings. Let me back up a bit.

Note: the rest of this post can safely be skipped if you're not interested in home recording.

The A&H (henceforth "mixer") outputs four channels of audio over USB (Linux spuriously exposes the first channel as stereo -- weird) and has both balanced XLR outputs for the main mix, and unbalanced RCA outputs for the monitors and headphones. Since Zoom only supports two channels, I ran the main mix from the XLR outputs into my old Edirol UA-25 interface. The UA-25 has both balanced and unbalanced outputs -- I ran the outputs to my old pair of studio monitors, which I set up so that we could all hear the other side of the zoom meeting.

On a second laptop (Panther, which normally lives in my studio EDU) I set up Audacity to record the four channels of USB audio from the mixer. The default is for these to be the four microphone inputs, and by a happy non-coincidence we had four microphones set up: for me, Naomi, Magpie, and (guitar) Plink. N and m had various percussion instruments, which were not separately mic'ed. I ran the mixer's monitor outputs (set up to mirror the main mix) into the little hardware!Zoom (no relation to the video conferencing software!Zoom) H2 that I use for recording concerts.

We had determined during our rehearsal on Saturday that when you record a meeting using software!Zoom you get 32kHz mono. Yuck! We also re-arranged the living room so that we were all facing the monitors (both the speakers and the LCD) instead of clustered around the keyboard. This made a horrible tangle out of the cables, but fortunately I'd used velcro strips to color-code them, so untangling them this evening was comparatively easy.

The recording of the mix from the H2 ended up being pretty noisy, with a noticable amount of hum, poor balance on a couple of songs, and a few bad noise spikes that I wasted a lot of time this afternoon trying to fix. A lot of the noise was probably due to the crappy cable I used. I'd considered running Audacity on same machine that was running software!Zoom, but I hadn't tested that configuration and didn't trust it.

The 4-channel direct recording is much cleaner, (there were noise spikes, but all in the intros rather than the songs -- weird) but since I decided to work with the 2-channel version first, you'll have to wait until tomorrow (or later) to hear something decent enough to publish.

Comments

[acelightning73]

I love Audacity! (There seems to be a new version out - there was a YouTube video about it.)Three of the guys from Bruce Springsteens's "E Street Band" sometimes play as a trio in local bars sometimes, calling themselves the Billy Walton Band. I got to chatting with Billy Walton, who plays electric bass and does lead vocals, and he does all of his home recording with Audacity. I have also used ProTools once or twice, and Audacity can do whatever ProTools does, except you don't need t spend &700 on software and some other amount on a dedicated computer built into a mixing board.

[mdlbear]

I'm still trying to decide whether the mixer I bought is what I want to use going forward (and I have until the end of January to return it if it isn't). But it worked pretty well for this gig and may well be the best thing for zoom concerts.

I keep thinking I should learn Ardour.

[acelightning73]

I don't get very deeply into the software of audio production. I'm just an old-fashioned knob-twiddler who's good at editing sound.