DACS General Meeting
Meeting Review:
December 2011: Meeting Review: Recording and Editing Live Audio Performances

By Bruce Preston

“Back in the day” if you were interested in making a recording of a musical performance it typically required signing up for plenty of rehearsal time, and then after many rehearsals going into the studio and making take after take until you got it right.  If you had multiple performers you had scheduling problems, and although there were some rather expensive multi-track tape recorders that could be used, for a large group you couldn’t dedicate one track per artist.  Limitations on tape recording would introduce hiss if you tried to over-dub (add another track) too many times.

Digital recording has not only greatly reduced the complexity of live recording, it has also made it something that is financially well within the reach of all.  Amateur, semi-professional and even professionals make use of home studios with no apparent loss of aural quality.

At the DACS General Meeting for December, our own Andy Woodruff and Sean Nick teamed together to demonstrate two distinct ways of making excellent recordings of a live performance.

Sean started with a description of a basic setup consisting of an electronic keyboard capable of synthesizing various instruments, an M-Audio MobilePre USB 2-channel audio interface, and a notebook computer.  The software on the computer was Audacity – a free cross-platform audio recording and editing package available from audacity.sourceforge.net.  With this combination he laid down a multi-track performance where he essentially performed as a jazz quartet! 

The first pass was to record a “click track” which is an electronic metronome.  He set it to the desired tempo and beats per measure and let if fill out 38 bars.  The 1st bar is the count-off.  He then played this back as he recorded 12 bars of bass, which he cut and pasted twice to lengthen the bass track to 37 bars, according to the click track.  (Audacity does not work in “bars” like a music sequencer, but rather like a tape recorder.)  Then, he recorded 37 bars of each of these instruments: brush-style drum set, Rhodes electronic piano, and finally a trumpet.  He easily changed the last bar of the bass track to show how things could be altered, then suppressed the playback of the click track resulting in his quartet performance.  He demonstrated that he could have adjusted the individual loudness of the tracks, such as lowering the loudness of the drum track.  He mentioned that Audacity has dozens of filters and effects that could be applied.  The last step would be to generate the finished piece creating a suitable audio file, such as WAV (easily converted to CD-audio) or MP3, leaving out the “click track”.

Andy then described his configuration, which consists of three primary components: an M-Audio “Fast Track Ultra 8R” which is an 8-channel interface which can take feeds from any combination of 8 sources - instruments or vocals, Cakewalk’s SONAR software which permits simultaneous recording the individual channels, and a notebook computer.  His requirement is capturing live performances where he has need to preserve the individual tracks such that he can perform post recording editing and/or add additional tracks.  For example, he could bring in an additional artist to add to the recording. 

For me the highlight of the presentation was Andy on his cello and Sean on piano demonstrated live recording by playing a superb rendition of Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell” which you may recognize as the repeating motif used in Ken Burn’s “The Civil War” series on PBS.  So as to demonstrate the editing capabilities of SONAR Andy then worked with a recording project consisting of vocal soloist, guitar, fiddle, mandolin and bass.  The SONAR software supports more than two-channel stereo; it can handle 5.1 surround sound which includes dynamic positioning of a channel.  To demonstrate this he had set up several speakers in the auditorium.  With this he was able to make it appear that his mandolin player was at different locations in the auditorium.  SONAR also supports automation, where it will remember manual changes such as gain control and apply them at playback.  Thus in post-production he can decide to raise or lower the volume on any track, even to the point of dropping it out entirely if desired.  The changes are not made to the ‘raw’ recording; they are applied when the recording is played back or finalized.  SONAR also provides a large library of filters and effects.

The session concluded with questions and answers discussing such points as processor requirements, the merits of USB-2 versys Firewire versus USB-3 for interfacing, microphones, and output formats.