RECORDING A LIVE SHOW / testing the Superlux S502

Hey there! Things are moving a lot faster lately so I don't really know where to start and what to write about first. The big news is - I went to my first ever proper job interview and survived. It's now fingers crossed and hoping for the best although at this point I'm not so sure what the best is - Is it ''best'' to have a steady income and a lot less time to do what you most enjoy doing like writing and recording music OR is it ''best'' to barely survive each month but to have all the time in the world to always come up with something new and exciting in terms of becoming a better musician? There's a lot to think about here and it's enough for an entire post so I'm just gonna leave it be for now and wait for the results. I'll know how I feel about it a lot better next week when the results get in. Anyway, I played a show last week in my hometown and it was a perfect opportunity to try and record it myself. I've mixed live shows before and even wrote about it here (https://steemit.com/music/@grobens/how-to-mix-a-live-concert-original-music) but I was never the one who decides what mics to use or where to put them in a live show. On top of that, I bought the Superlux S502 I was talking about in a post about essential microphones to have in your own studio (https://steemit.com/music/@grobens/essential-microphones-you-should-have-opening-my-own-studio) so the show was a perfect opportunity to test it in action and see if I got my money's worth. My man Bojan also bought a new mixer so we were, for the very first time ever, really actually equiped to do what we set out to do with no improvisation needed. It was truly a landmark in our DIY lives. Anyway, this post might turn out to be a bit more technical then usual so it might not be as interesting to everyone as I usually try to make it, but I'm so damn excited about everything I'm gonna write it anyway :D

So, here's what we were faced with: the venue was not really a club but a bar that converts into a club after 10PM. That means they only have a small 4 channel mixer hooked up to 4 active speakers, just enough for the DJ to have something to play music on. That also means the only thing we could really amplify through the ''PA'' were the vocals. The rest had to be turned up on the amps at a volume as equal to the volume of the drums as possible. When you have things cranked up to their max, it's really not that easy to set up the mics and avoid gain peak problems. And then there's also the dreaded ORGANA.

This thing here has NO OUTPUTS WHATSOEVER and it has a VENTILATOR pushing the air out to makeq sound. The problem is that the sound of the Organa goes out the same place the air from the ventilator does. That means you always have a humming noise in the sound of the instrument. The solution would probably be to have a microphone installed inside the instrument and to make one standard jack output so you could plug it into a DI box and get the sound from inside, rather then from the air hole. However, we don't have that so we needed to put a mic on it to record it and to put it through the PA. After carefull consideration, I decided to mic it with an SM57. The SM57 is one of the most famous mics in the world and it is also one of the best selling ones.

It's a mic you can use ANYTIME for just about ANYTHING and it will deliver. The reason I opted for the SM57 is a) it's a dynamic mic which means it handles the air pushed into the membrane a lot better than condenser mics and b) it's a low impedance mic which means it has a balanced output and that means it handles noise and interference much better than high impedance mics. In other words, this thing is built to handle pushed air and pushed air is the problem with the Organa. Also, the Organa is very poor in the low end and the only thing happening in the low end is the sound of the ventilator. So I COMPLETELY CUT the low end in the signal coming from the SM57 on the mixer and that way almost completely removed the humming. Pretty neat.

Next up was the SUPERLUX S502. It came with the mail two days before the show so I spent two long days just looking at it in my room before I could really test it out and hear what it does. The Superlux is a STEREO MIC which means the output of the mic split into TWO and you need 2 input channels on the mixer to record the stereo sound. Esentially, you have a 2 in 1 microphone. The problem was the drum set up my drummer Lucky has.

He uses an old vintage jazz drum set up which means he only has a kick drum, a snare drum, hi-hat, a crash cymbal and a ride cymbal. The ride cymbal is the only thing on the right side of his drum kit so we had to set up the mic in a position to capture both the left side and the right side equally. It's tricky because we had to turn the gain for the right mic output up much more than for the left in order to achieve an equal stereo sound and that took some time. I wasn't sure how it will work in the mix because the high gain on the right mic meant there will be a lot more BLEED or in other words, a lot more unwanted sounds the high gain will capture. Anyway, it was a compromise we had to make and then deal with it later in the editing stage.

The rest was a lot more easy. The vocals were recorded directly from the mixer and the bass amp has a DI so we only really needed one XLR cable to plug in in the mixer and get a clean recording signal. The only thing left to solve were the guitar amps. I mentioned before they had to be turned up really loud because they weren't going through the PA system so we were facing a bit of a gain peak issue. Luckily, Bojan brought his ZOOM recorder which handles these thing fairly well so we used it for my guitar. The plus side is that you don't need to hook it up to the mixer so you don't need to use extra cables (and I HATE CABLES). You just record it into the ZOOM and then put it in the computer and sync it with the rest of the tracks. The other guitar was not as loud as mine so a condenser mic worked well with that too.

To sum it up:

The results were better than expected, given the type of the venue. Bojan didn't really do a lot of mixing - he just leveled up the volumes. We got a really natural, organic sound, as close to the real feeling of the sound as you can get. We didn't add anything to the vocals and left them sounding dry, the bass sounds powerful, the ZOOM handled the gain of the guitar amp nicely as well as the condenser on the other guitar and even the Organa came out on all the right places with no unwanted noise. The real surprise were the drums. The Superlux did everything I expected it to, it delivered nicely, the drum sound is well leveled and natural and the mic captured the real dynamic of Lucky's playing which is the most important thing, at least for me. So here's a video Bojan shot of our song ''Honesty in Foreign Tongues'' so you can see and hear what it was like. I'm planning on mixing the rest of the show as well so I'll post it here when I get around to it. Enjoy!