PREFACE: I’m not pretending to actually know anything about the topic of audio engineering. There, I said it.

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Live performances vs. professionally recorded music. Which is more genuine and true to its form?

There’s a guy that I’ve run into three times now at the post office. He only hangs around inside where the P.O. boxes are when the rest of the post office is closed. He stands in the corner, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing folk songs. He’s not bad. He’s actually pretty damn good. I have thought to bring my recorder with me to the post office in hopes to see him there again. If I do happen to achieve this (and am lucky to run into him) it will be much more than just the music that I capture – it’ll be the performance that will shine through. The experience itself will present itself on the sonic image. The walls will bleed a perspective otherwise nonexistent in any other scenario.

Professionally recorded songs are usually high quality, mixed and mastered individual tracks that are layered on top of each other to present the most accurate aspects of a collective musical piece. This usually throws in the dynamic of a studio engineer that inevitably influences the final product. The engineer’s knowledge, ability and personal style play big roles in how a song ultimately sounds regardless of how the musicians themselves perform. This is obviously a factor of live recordings as well, but mainly if you work on it in post.

Live performances are difficult to mix if you are streaming live to listeners. You must be either very quick at adjusting levels or set up in a way that will not drastically change (such as room mics). Either way presents benefits and drawbacks. Any FOH sound engineer will know what I’m talking about.

I personally believe that room mics provide a fundamentalist’s ideal “honest sound” to any live performance as they capture not only the music but, if placed correctly, the audience (if there is one), the true sound coming from the players’ instruments and amplifiers and the resonance of the space they are playing in. There is no track separation so you are getting all of the sounds, intermingling and flirting with each other in the same space. You can’t get much more honest with this method because it’s literally what what your own ears would hear if you were there in person.

If you are good enough, you can mix individual sounds of a live performance through a mixing board and make it sound much better overall than simply with room mics. This doesn’t mean just hooking into a console’s outputs during a live show, though. You must understand that live sound mixing for the house / space you are performing in for an audience and mixing for a recording which will be played later are two completely separate things. I learned this the hard way – by listening to really bad live streams and recordings that were made this way. No – what you need to do is take (and I know I’m going to get some of the terminology wrong) the signals *before* they are mixed for FOH and bus them to a matrix tape. Here you have an alternate (but duplicate) set of individual signals that you can mix together for recording/streaming. Why is this necessary? An example I always hear is mixing drums. Pretend a small rock show is happening at your favorite downtown pub. Are you going to mic the drumset, let alone amplify them enough to be at the same levels as guitar, vocals, bass? Depending on the place, drums are loud enough to not be amplified at all. If they are, they are usually amplified at lower levels than the other instruments as they are already naturally so loud. If you recorded this specific house mix and listened to it later, you’d hear really loud vocals, guitars and bass…and very faint drums (possibly only what gets picked up by the other mics).

Combining the two (and doing it well) will give you a sort of nirvana of sound – an orgasm of the ears by combining the definitions of both true and honest sound.

For a long time I thought that using room mics are the best way to capture live performance…but balance, grasshopper, balance is key.

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