andrew dodson

I’ve decided to start detailing my recordings through this blog. I get a lot of questions asking what I use and how I record. These posts will shed a little light on each of my recordings. For the occasion, I even purchased a nifty little notebook to take with me to recording gigs to detail my equipment, setup and more.

With that said, here’s my notes from today’s recording of the Central Kentucky Concert Band’s Triskaidekaphobia concert. First question - what is Triskaidekaphobia, you ask? Turns out, it’s the fear of the number thirteen. It was also the designation to celebrate Dr. Pete LaRue’s thirteenth year with the CKCB.

Location: Transylvania University’s Haggin Auditorium (Lexington, KY)

Setup: I used five microphones across the front of the stage. Two Shure KSM109’s were in an A-B stereo configuration on a 12′ tall studio boom (I nicknamed it “Behemoth” since it’s fairly bulky for mic stand). These mics were center stage, directly behind the conductor’s podium. Stage left and stage right were Shure PG81 mics on approx. 10′ tall stands. The fifth mic was an Oktava MK219 on a standard 6′ boom stand. This mic was positioned between the center mics and the stage right mic to pick up the guest soloist - soprano Janis Dellinger Bryant. Cables (50′ and 25′ lengths) were ran backstage to my recording rig.

For this occasion, I decided to use my Behringer Xenyx 2442FX for mic preamps. I came out of the channel inserts using a Jade Audio TRS snake, into an Edirol FA-101, which enabled me to multitrack the five channels. Multitracking enables me to mix and edit the audio after the concert to achieve a nice balance between the different mics. The Edirol FA-101 ran via FireWire into my 12″ Apple iBook G4, which is running Mackie Tracktion 2 software. I recorded the audio onto my new LaCie 250GB FireWire drive, which boasts 7200rpm and 8MB cache.

The concert lasted approximately an hour, and seemed to come off without a hitch. In an ideal world, I would’ve taken pictures of my setup to post here for you to see (point taken - I will do this from now on!). I hope to also provide audio samples very soon, as well. For now, you can be happy with a picture of my notes!