Live Sound - Jacaranda Sessions
During our live sound area of the module we have been working in the local music venue The Jacaranda with bands and in collaboration with the SAE film students to produce a live lounge set recordings on some of their tracks.
The first session we undertook featured Black Utah and Mike Blue, these were two bands with fairly similar stageplan setups including two guitarists each, bassist around a kit, with Mike Blue’s also having a saxophonist and Black Utah having synth backing through a tracks playback on laptop. The sound and genre of bands both however differed with Black Utah having a closer to hard rock style to their music in the live setting with a pop influence coming through the backing playback layers.
They were the first to take the stage, they’d been arranged to get going for 10:30, and with the recording team arriving at 9:30 we were under the guidance of lecturer Tom and got to work setting up the session. To begin with there were a number of preliminary setup to cover, we’d gone through the input plan and stage plot based off the technical rider provided by the band and with the venue specifications taken into account. We were recording with Waves, limited to the 16-track output on the digital live desk so we had to be efficient with the input spread. Once the band arrived we undertook the role of stagehands and helped bring equipment in and took out unneeded cases to not clutter the space and to provide the film students a clean set at a good level of professionalism to film. I’d coordinated the group in this effort, giving the team some pointers to ensure a speedy setup.
During this there was then also the process of getting the inputs set themselves, we knew the input plan and input points correlation to each stagebox and therefore the process went fairly quick, with the drum kit microphones being set up by Das, the guitar mics by Luke and myself covering the vocal mics, bass and backing DI inputs. We got the setup done in good time and once ready, the band underwent their set and did a great performance which was very enjoyable in the intimate gig setting.
They then finished and we went through the changeover preparing for the next band, the bands equipment was taken out and Mike Blue’s band arrived and brought in the gear, this was handled similarly to before, with equipment / microphones / inputs set and routed quickly into the desk for recording. During the recording of the sets Nzanzu was Daw Operator, tracking the desk input into the DAW, the second set went underway and again we enjoyed a fantastic intimate gig. Mike Blue was the artist who’s stems from this session I’d take forward into the EMP module, reworking and remixing their new song Sapphire.
