Pete Moulinari

Live Recording of Pete Moulanari at Bushall in Shepards Bush.

This recording was a performance by Pete Moulanari and his seven piece rockabilly band in the beautiful venue of Bush Hall. The band consisted of double bass, drums, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, pedal/lap steel, lead vocals and a pair of backing singers. For the recording setup a feed was taken from the live console (Midas Venice 320 console) into an Alesis HD24 multitrack recorder which was delivered onsite by FX rentals.

The kick was spotted with a Sure Beta 52, the toms with a Shure beta 98 D/S, the hats with an AKG SE300B, the top snare with a Sure SM57 and bottom snare with a Sennheiser e604.The double bass was DI’d as well as amped this having a Sure SM57 placed on it. The guitars and the pedal steel both had Sure SM57’s on them, while the vocals were all Sure SM58’s.

An ORTF array was also set up at the back of the hall in order to capture the room ambience, this was recored with a pair of Shuniyin Cy90s which as it turned out was a remarkably ‘nice’ signal that made the mix stage a lot easier.

Although nice, the PA was not set up to best optimise the sound quality. This is because it’s best to ‘fly’ a PA so as to obtain the maximum angle of incidence into the thermal layer created by human body heat in the room [1]. The bass bins were stacked above the ground and although Martin Audio say their PAs are for either being ‘ground stacked or flown’, it would transmit low end better placed on the ground [2].

Also analysing at the room dimensions provided it can be seen that the typical build up of modes happen from about 51hz upwards meaning frequencies below this would not be the most stable (and proved messy live) but because this was happening at a reasonably low frequency, it was not a big problem in the mix.

The venue was running a Midas Venice 320 console of which we took the direct outs straight into the multitrack recorder. Unfortunately signal had to go to the multitrack recorder post fade. This meant the recording had effects such as compression, gating and level rides on every track the engineer used them on. Luckily he was reasonably good and so the effect of gating the toms and bottom snare caused little difficulty in the mix; Pete’s rhythm guitar was compressed beyond recognition and was practically useless though. The engineers level rides were generally pretty smooth; though there were still a good few of them that had to be fixed in the mix with automation.

In my opinion the kick drum and double bass were the worst of the signals apart from Pete’s guitar; which was destroyed by the compressor. This wasn’t as big an issue as it sounds considering this guitar was more of ‘an extra thing onstage’ and could be pushed into the background without a noticeable effect, not to mention the Fender Pro Junior amplifier he had brought sounded awful.

The Double bass amp was spot miked which was pretty useless in the mix though it was also DI’d and this gave a much better sound once after some heavy handed compression and equalisation was applied. The kick sound was incredibly boxy but with equalisation and compression it sounded a lot better and was useable.

The pedal steel sound was excellent as was the lead guitar. Though the best bit of the recording was still probably the ambience microphones which allowed me to only use one reverb for the vocals at mix stage, simply pushing up the ambience for everything else. The ORTF setup gave a very nice stereo image of both the crowd and the on stage sound which helped to naturally position the musicians. *An edited example of important parts of the gig with just this ambience mic set up can be heard here.

The backing vocals proved a bit problematic as some of the vocals were out of tune and sung early. If I had to guess; I would say the singers couldn’t hear themselves in their monitor properly. Also directly behind them were two guitar amps and a drummer who was slightly off to the side but unfortunately this still meant that there was a lot of spill coming through on these tracksand had to be gated with quite a fine threshold during the mix. Looking at the setup it would have been nice if some super cardioids could have been used on the backing vocals reducing off axis spill which was abundant especially considering how full the stage actually was.

Another consideration during mixing was that there were a lot of the similar microphones on stage; these were predominantly Sm57s and Sm58s and looking at the frequency response curves of these microphones you’ll notice that both have a significant presence boost from around 2k. This was starting to pile up so depending on the instrument I tried to reduce this presence boost where possible (if it wasn’t a critical frequency band).

Sure Sm57

Sure Sm58

References [1] Rat, D. (2009) The Thermodynamics of a Rock Show [Online] http://en.audiofanzine.com/articles/a.print,The-Thermodynamics-of-a-Rock-Show.html [2] Martin Audio (2009) Martin audio ltd. [Online] http://www.martin-audio.com/products/WMX.asp