The DijonStock Digital Home Recording Support Forum

Hi there. I'm doing live sound for an album release coming up and have offered to record the show, if the artists would like a copy of their performance, either for gauging their stage act or for release to the local radio station, or myspace, or whatever. The genre is, uh dubstep, or drum'n'bass (I'm not entirely sure of the difference) and the acts all include one DJ and up to two MC's.

I've never had much to do with this style and I'm wondering if anyone has any advice for getting a good recording. I'm expecting that the DJ channels will be a piece of cake to record, just needing a compressor/limiter in place to prevent any huge peaks from filters, or whatever, but I'm not so sure about the MC's. I'm going to give them an SM 58 each, but I expect lots of plosive puffs, a bit of handling noise, lots of boomy proximity effect and generally poor mic technique. That said, I'm not going to line them up at sound check and lecture them on proper use of a microphone - I don't want to get in the way of the performance at all.

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome!

No advice in a technical sense, but I think you're doing the right thing. A lot depends on how critical the recording is. Is this going to be THE recording or is this an event that happens to be recorded and the recording is nothing more than a pleasant side effect? Reading your post I assume it's more of the latter than of the former, but I may as well be wrong.

So, what I would do is, let them do their thing and let them learn what the consequences are of poor micing techniques and other concessions to a decent recording. I have no clue about their knowledge or experience obviously, but a "studio recording" and "live registration" are two totally different things which they may or may not have to learn.

To cut a short story even shorter: assuming the recording is not critical, allow them to learn.

In the meantime, apply a defensive recording style. Stay away from 0 dB, more than you would do in a studio environment.

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Don't judge the coffee by its cup.
The proof of the cheese is in the eating

Thanks Robbie! You're right, the recording isn't critical, but is just a nice extra.

I can see the benefit of keeping well clear of the 0dB mark ('defensive recording' as you put it - cracks me up), so as I understand it, this would be a good candidate for using 24 bit since it will be just a few tracks, and I want to keep the dynamic range as wide as I can but at the same time keep the levels reasonably low? I'm still a little scratchy on the interaction between bit depth and dynamic range.

Thanks!

At least you draw the right conclusions.

Every bit gives you 6 dB of dynamic range, so if you want to stay clear of the 0 dB mark, by all means record in 24 bit. In that case you can always lift your levels by normalizing without pulling up the quantization error noise floor, too.

This (<- clicky) might be a good read for you.

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Don't judge the coffee by its cup.
The proof of the cheese is in the eating

Thanks heaps!