So as a professional, corporate film maker, I have a good sound setup. Well, good for corporates! The setup is also good enough to shoot a very frugal feature film (currently in production). And thanks to a certain MLesemann for feedback. She's amazing!
However, I have a crazy situation where I have some friends who might want to do a live take of their band singing. This is a group of friends, not very serious, so I'm happy to do them a favour. However, while I'm comfortable doing my corporate thing, I don't know how to do the music thing! I have a couple of mics (e.g. an Mkh416 etc...) and could probably borrow a really high end mic for the singer and am trying to avoid buying a proper mixer / soundboard thingy because it's not something I particularly use when doing corporates.
So could we get away with taking everything into a couple of Zoom recorders? Sure, I get that monitoring's an issue but my thoughts are that taking the sound into a load of different tracks, independently just means we'd be able to balance it a bit more in post.
Secondly, the the idea is to look as if they've just wandered into a bar and spontaneously started to make music so it's probably 'just' a singer and acoustic guitar and percussion might be a table as a drumkit. Might have keys as well so something like this:
Acoustic guitar: Straight into a sound board / mixer from a pickup. Secondary mic pointing at the strings. So two tracks, maybe taking that into a 2-track recorder through something like an SD Pre-D.
Keyboard (might not have one): XLR it straight into an F4N
Singer: Mic into the mixer. We'd borrow something super high end so there's a guy with a pretty expensive mic and again, take it into an F4N.
Drums: Maybe have them drum stuff in the bar. E.g. Use a table with a couple of beer mats and glasses as a percussion set so could point an Mkh416 in the general direction and again, feed it all into an F4N.
As a recorder, we have an F4N and an other zoom something-or-other with two tracks so can record six tracks independently. But do we absolutely need a proper mixer / soundboard thingy and if we absolutely do, what's a cheap one?
It's a bit ghetto but to start with, is this feasible, albeit with limitations?
However, I have a crazy situation where I have some friends who might want to do a live take of their band singing. This is a group of friends, not very serious, so I'm happy to do them a favour. However, while I'm comfortable doing my corporate thing, I don't know how to do the music thing! I have a couple of mics (e.g. an Mkh416 etc...) and could probably borrow a really high end mic for the singer and am trying to avoid buying a proper mixer / soundboard thingy because it's not something I particularly use when doing corporates.
So could we get away with taking everything into a couple of Zoom recorders? Sure, I get that monitoring's an issue but my thoughts are that taking the sound into a load of different tracks, independently just means we'd be able to balance it a bit more in post.
Secondly, the the idea is to look as if they've just wandered into a bar and spontaneously started to make music so it's probably 'just' a singer and acoustic guitar and percussion might be a table as a drumkit. Might have keys as well so something like this:
Acoustic guitar: Straight into a sound board / mixer from a pickup. Secondary mic pointing at the strings. So two tracks, maybe taking that into a 2-track recorder through something like an SD Pre-D.
Keyboard (might not have one): XLR it straight into an F4N
Singer: Mic into the mixer. We'd borrow something super high end so there's a guy with a pretty expensive mic and again, take it into an F4N.
Drums: Maybe have them drum stuff in the bar. E.g. Use a table with a couple of beer mats and glasses as a percussion set so could point an Mkh416 in the general direction and again, feed it all into an F4N.
As a recorder, we have an F4N and an other zoom something-or-other with two tracks so can record six tracks independently. But do we absolutely need a proper mixer / soundboard thingy and if we absolutely do, what's a cheap one?
It's a bit ghetto but to start with, is this feasible, albeit with limitations?
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