Setting Up Recording Equipment and Editing It For Public Showing
For The Beano comeback in October we had to record the show to be made into a radio that was to be broadcasted on Miskin Radio. For the show I had to set up the recording equipment to enable me to record the show and then edit it to make it sound good.
Tech Rider
To set up the equipment I first had to create a tech rider of all the equipment that I was going to use. In my tech rider I had the following 4 Sennheiser e835s, 4 condenser microphones 4 microphone clips, 4 microphone stands and 10 XLRs. Once I had collated this tech rider together I was ready to start setting up the microphones and connecting them to the desk.
Here is a picture of my tech rider;Â
Set Up
When I set up the microphones I did something called spot micing, which is typical of most radio plays and where you place microphones on certain parts of the set in order to pick up what is going on on the stage. When placing my microphones I dropped three from the rig upstage, in order to pick up scenes being carried out in the upstage area and on the pier. The microphones I dropped from the rig were condenser microphones. In order to ensure these had power I ran three long XLRs from the microphone down the set, ensuring that the cable was as hidden as possible and into the wall boxes on centre stage left and right. Once I had placed these microphones I then put three microphones down stage all of which were on stands. The microphones on stage right and left were on smaller microphone stands whilst the one in the middle was on a larger microphone stand. I put these microphones here to pick up all of the acting that was happening on the front of the stage as well as the back. I then ran XLRs for all of these microphones into the wall boxes on stages left and right. I finally placed two microphones on the far of stages left and right to pick up the scene that took place on the side platforms. Again I plugged these into the wall boxes in centre stage left and right. Once all of the microphones had been place and plugged in I then tapped all of the lose cables down to prevent any actors from tripping over during the show. Once everything had been made safe I then moved up onto the desk to plug all of the microphones into the desk. To do this I had to match up each microphone that I had plugged into the wall boxes into the patch bay. The patch bay allows us to run microphones into the desk without having to run loads of cables. Each of the ports in the patch bay match up to the ports on the wall boxes, so to plug everything into the desk I ran XLRs out of the patch bay and into the back of the desk. Once all of the microphones were plugged into the back of the desk the condenser microphones had been given phantom power and they had been line checked I then set about connecting the microphones to Logic Pro 9. This can be done though the use of a MADI cable which comes out the desk into a Mac. The MADI cable copies the channel inputs on the desk (so in my case it copies all 8 of my microphone channels) which are direct outs into the Mac which then allows you to create outputs on Logic. The outputs are direct copies and will not be effected if the channels are EQ or compression or gating is added on the desk.
Here is the set up with the soundcraft and the computer set up with logic;Â
Here is the set with the microphones set up;
Recording and Editing
With all of the microphones set up and linked into Logic I was ready to start recording the show. To record the show on Logic all you do is click the little R button on the output display on Logic. This will then record all of the show. Once the show had recorded I was able to edit the recording within Logic. I edited the recording by adding compression and gating to the recording to make it more clear and sounding more like a radio play. Once the recording had been edited it to as ready to be broadcast over Miskin Radio to the public.
