Recording in Dukes Corner

Recently I carried out a recording of a DJ set in the venue Dukes Corner in Dundee. The DJ set was for a 90's event and a variety of music from different genres was played. This was ideal for my project as it allowed me to record an event that is not concerned with only one genre. It enabled me to gather surround sound recordings of many different styles of music with different instrumentation and musical characteristics and see how they react with the recording techniques without having to locate and record a number of different bands/artists. Although these are not live performances of the artists it still reflects how the genre and characteristic of the music reacts to being played through a PA system at a live event  and then recording utilising the two techniques in this project.

Recording Equipment:

• Digidesign 003 rack plus
• Macbook pro with pro tools le 8
• 2 x Earthworks DK25/L microphones
• 2 x Neumann KM 184 microphones 
• Sony MDR-V500 headphones 
• Appropriate cabling and stands

Track List: 

1. Line out left
2. Line out right
3. Front left
4. Front right
5. Back left
6. Back right

Unfortunately because of a lack of outputs on the mixing desk at Dukes Corner and not a long enough  cable to reach from the DJ decks to the back of the venue, the microphone placement was compromised and i could not place the microphone array where it needed to be (closest to the crowd as possible in order to record the event from the point of view of the crowd). To compensate for this i decided to take the recordings from the perspective of the DJ and placed the microphone array behind him, this also enabled me to get the line outputs from the decks which was causing the problems for microphone placement. The following pictures shows the recording set up on stage:

Evaluation:

The recording process went well and i made sure that there was an optimum gain structure throughout the whole event. One thing i observed while recording was that the gain structure of the microphone array changed through out different genres of music even though the gain on the output from the decks and PA system stayed the same. I believe this is due to the difference in instrumentation, musical character and how different frequencies reverberate differently within a space and may sometimes cause resonant frequencies which can be problematic.
When recording in future one thing that i would improve is the preparation. Next time i need to make sure that i thoroughly check the venue before hand to ensure that everything that is needed to create the best recording possible is available to me.