Recording Live--WWYD?

[guitargurumike]

Hello TAXI friends,

I just got a new gig (my first REAL job!) as the technical director at a small (119 seat) venue that features live music, plays, lectures, private events, and films.

SO, they have asked me to do live recordings of the music shows and are willing to pay for some equipment to enable me to do this, and I would be thrilled to get anyone's input--especially if you have experience in live recording.

We are using a 16 channel Mackie mixer, sending from the channels into a Focusrite Saphirre pro 40 (8 channel cap), and then out to….nothing, so far. BUT, I was going to recommend a small refurbed MAC, Ableton, and a big external hard drive to contain 1-2 shows (3-4 hours each) per week.

So, geniuses, I thank you profusely in advance for the premier advice I expect to receive,

Michael

BTW if any of you are actively touring with a fan base, HMU, we might have a gig for you.

[lesmac]

A mac running the DAW of your choice sounds good to me.
If the Mackie desk has ADAT out that might be handy. The Saphire pro looks like a nice piece of gear.
Get 2 drives if you want to be professional about it and keep the backup off site.
An external large size visual monitor could be handy to view the routing through the interface into your DAW but with some familiarity a laptop screen should be fine.
It sounds like a great gig to get valuable experience in.
Best of luck.
Les

[guitargurumike]

thanks lesmac! the two hard drive (keep one off site) advice is gold.
M

[elser]

What is the purpose of the recordings? If it's just to evaluate the performance you could use any stereo recording device, hard disk recorder, laptop, even a phone, and take a stereo out from the board and you'll get a good representation of the show. If you want to make a recording for resale you are still limited by the number of outputs on the board but you would have a little more flexibility for mixing.

[mojobone]

I usually don't bring my fanbase on tour with me, but thanks.

For critical live work, I'd suggest a refurb Mac Pro with an internal RAID array; you only need to buy and configure a couple of mirrored hard drives, besides the one that hosts the OS, which for the sake of speed could be solid state; the other two could be 7200RPM or better magnetics, for the sake of economy, since 3TB drives can now be had for less than a song. My mantra? Fewer cables=fewer failures.