As a singer/songwriter, I've spent a fair amount of time in professional recording studios and I've watched a lot of mixing go down. Twenty-four tracks, flying faders, amazing punches - shoot, we even did a genuine reverse cymbal crash on my album (nowadays I suppose it would all be done digitally; can you tell I'm practicing to get crotchedty? Give me another 30 years and I'll have it down--). But I've not done much mixing myself.
I've been working with Jeremy (young brilliant musician and computer wiz, on the worship team together) on mixing the live sound from the performance of House of Bread so that we can have a reasonably good sound recording (I don't anticipate a wide release but at least for the folks involved and other churches interested in it, etc.). We're working with the little eight-track hard drive recorder that Jeremy used to capture the performance.
First fun part: the grand piano had a problem with the sustain pedal; this wasn't particularly noticeable in the room and the dynamics of performance are such that folks don't really notice it - they're more caught up in the story and the singers and the faces and the moment rather than an occasional soft *clunk*. But despite our best efforts on the day to minimize the clunking sound, the recorded track is full of it. And, being the sustain pedal, it's not even "in time" with the music (!!). So I re-recorded all the piano. This wouldn't be so hard in a studio setting but with a live performance where I was "accompanying" singers (allowing them to shift timings, etc., rather than driving the songs and forcing them to fit with the piano) it was a bit of a challenge.
Complicated by the fact we had 7 open mikes picking up room sound. Fine, we shut down the mikes we don't need at any given moment but it still leaves the singer's microphone with the original piano track audible in the background. This means I have to try and play the replacement keyboard pretty much the same way I played it live. Ha! Actually, that wasn't nearly so hard as I expected - Jeremy would give me the sound of the (new) keyboard and the original tracks and sometimes I needed more vocal and sometimes I needed more of the original piano. A few of the tracks were particularly "floaty" but even those I was able to re-record with surprisingly little difficulty.
Sounds like fun! Really, I'd love to learn to do more sound mixing. Recently the Belles released a live album that they recoreded last year (before I was in the group). It took a year to mix becuase it was a live recording, with a group that had never really preformed with mics before (and there were 12 counting insturments), and one tiny little fact that the fans kept bringing them beverages durring the show. Did I mention this was a Pub set? You can imagine the fun that was to mix and Fix. I have the raw cut and the final cut, and the diffreance is kind of scary.
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