Yesterday evening we (the musical group) were sent a link to an online
directory holding several video files. These are of much better quality than
the ones sent previously: they appear to have been filmed from a camera
standing on a tripod, so there's no jerking around of the video. Not only
that, the sound apparently was taken directly from the soundboard so it's also
better quality.
Whilst theoretically this should be good, the sound exposes problems with the
mix. For most of the songs, the keyboard is too loud and unfortunately the
keyboardist made several mistakes, making listening to the songs painful. At
one stage echo was added to the vocals; this was fine during the reggae song
when they were added, but no one thought to remove them afterwards so they
also detract from the otherwise excellent vocals - I had never heard the vocal
harmonies previously. Fortunately there were alterations; in one of the later
songs, I can hear my guitar suddenly being raised in the mix to an almost
reasonable level.
I suggested that we make a 'proper' recording: if output can be taken directly from the mixing desk then we can record a song, listen to it then improve the mix. Without having external ears, most of us are going to want their own part louder, leading once again to imbalance. No one has responded yet to this suggestion. Members of the audience say that the balance was fine, but there's no recorded evidence of this.
The videos are contiguous; as opposed to music tracks that I make where the
song will start a fraction of a second into the track and will end a fraction
of a second before the end of the track, these videos simply run back to back,
so a song might start in the middle of one video and finish in the middle of
the next. This actually is advantageous: I put all of the clips in the movie
maker program without the need for transitions. The result appears to be very
good (I haven't watched it all the way through yet). Apart from the singers
who move about, the musicians are extremely static. This was because we barely
had any room in which to move due to the smallish stage. That said, the
bassist and I managed to pull off a few synchronised - and spontaneous - neck
moves at the end of some songs.
I was thinking yesterday evening about the weedy/thin sound that my guitar
makes; I initially considered buying an
equaliser pedal
that should improve the sound. These pedals are less expensive than I thought
they would be so buying one won't be a problem (although where to put it on
the pedalboard is a thornier problem). But before I do so, I want to check
some of the possibilities offered by my
multi-effects pedal
that I have so far ignored: specifically the pre-amp stage.
I
