Novice in Wonderland – Live Recordings @ Sur Swaranjali

I and my friends are passionate about listening to music and singing. I wrote this series of posts to share my experiences with singing and sound recording. Over the years the technology revolution has made it affordable for an enthusiast like me to do quality recordings at home with music tracks. I have also constantly learned several ways to improve the quality of my recorded songs. This field has now become so vast that I feel more like a novice who is groping his way around and discovering new stuff regularly.

My previous posts were about how I discovered the secrets of doing recordings at home with Karaoke tracks. This is very controlled environment in which the music track is already perfectly produced and you use headphones to listen to the music as you sing, hence the recorded vocals are ‘clean’ without any background sounds. Working with two clean tracks, you mix them and process them to create the final song.

However, the situation changes completely for live performances with a band for multiple reasons.
You need to record the live music from the band as well, which is coming from multiple instruments.
Also, the loud sound from the speakers, and the audience noise makes it difficult to capture ‘clean’ vocals and music tracks. My experience of the recording quality of my own live performances and live stage performances by Synopsys music band, Enchanting Engineers confirmed this belief that it is not possible to do a good recording of live singing.

Last year I joined a music group named Sur Swaranjali, which meets every month and arranges singing sessions with a live band. We are twelve singers who sing two songs each in every session. The live band comprises of expert musicians on two keyboards, guitar, two Drumpads, and a Dholak. The band plays outstanding music and it is an exciting feeling to sing live with it, very different from singing with Karaoke tracks. We use a professional sound mixer equipment to get a great live sound. 

At Sur Swaranjali, we wanted to record our performances, however the recording quality was a problem. During the course of these sessions over past several months, I experimented with different ideas and managed to find a way to get a decent enough quality. In this post, I will tell you the final solution I arrived at, but also narrate the journey in this wonderland, which in some ways is more interesting than the destination.

Recording With Phones
In the beginning, people started recording the videos on phone. This gave a reasonable video of the performance, but the quality was not really good, and it was difficult to hold the phone to capture the video for the whole two hour session. We needed something better than it.

Recording With Camcorder
In August last year, the theme of Sur Swaranjali was Disco. I tried to use Sony HDR-CX150 Camcorder on a tripod to record the video of the performances. This is a high definition video camera that records great videos. The tripod made it easy to capture the videos, and the video quality came out so good that I started to share them on YouTube. However, there were a couple of problems:

• The battery of the camera ran out during the session and the memory also became full. As a result, I could record only half the performances. It was easy to tackle these battery and storage issues. I added a 32GB compact flash card in the camera to increase its capacity and connected the power adapter during the recordings to address the battery life problem.

• The sound quality had several issues – there was too much audience noise, the music was too loud, and the vocals were not clearly audible. Overall, it did not sound too great as a song. This started me thinking about the next idea to try. 

Direct from Mixer
September’s theme was R D Burman’s songs. In this session, I found that the sound mixing operator was recording a direct feed from the mixer on his computer. I took these audio recordings from him and the sound clarity was much better in these, free of audience noise. However, it had the challenge of replacing the sound in the video with this recording, particularly to get perfect sync of audio and video is tricky. I was happy with the improvement in the songs, but the sound now lacked life, and the mix of music and vocals continued to be poor. 

A Small Step Forward
October’s theme was Chand Taro Ki Mehfil, and I was looking for ideas for improvement. The sound from Camcorder was full of ambient sounds while the one from the mixer was missing it completely. What I needed was a little bit of both. Hence, I tried to mix the two sounds together and this gave me the lively sound I was looking for. However, it also meant that I had a three-step process now – record the video, extract sound from it and mix it with the directly recorded sound, and finally insert this finished sound in the video. I used Reaper Digital Audio Workstation for sound editing, and VSDC for video editing. The results were better than past, but still, the vocals were not as prominent as music.



Help from Collar Mic
November had Antakshari as its theme, and I was thinking of ways to raise the vocals in the mix. What I needed was separately recorded vocals track that I could use to raise the vocal’s ratio in the mix. I tried to use a collar mic given to the singer to capture vocals sound on Garageband running on an iPad. The idea worked nicely at home, but did not work in live music sessions. The sensitive condenser mic used in the collar mic picked up so much of music that it did not help at all.


Clean Vocals from Mixer
December was the New Year party, and my search for a clean vocal track was still not complete. I was already out of my wits, about to give up. However, my Sur Swaranjali friends were really keen to have a solution in place, even if we have to get some equipment for it. I studied the mixer we were using, and found out that it has a provision of routing selected channels to Aux outputs. I tried taking all singer mic channels this way and recorded it separately on a laptop. I was apprehensive that even this may have a lot of music in it. However the sound came really clean, which gave me an important clue. Dynamic microphone is more selective and captures the singer’s voice cleanly, while rejecting other sounds in the room. The clean vocal track gave me what I was looking for, I could correct the sound mix and the results were great.

Multi-Channel Recording
January’s theme was ‘Dil’, and encouraged by results of last month, I decided to bring in M-Audio equipment to take music and vocals on two Aux channels from the mixer and record them on the laptop on separate tracks. This gave me complete freedom of mixing the sound to get the best results. I boosted the vocals and lowered the music, and this resulted in great sounding songs.

Recipe for Live Recordings
My recipe for Live Recordings had three steps - recording the performance, and post processing that involves Sound Mixing, and Video Editing.



Setup for Live Recordings
The setup for live recordings is shown in the picture on the right. The video is captured by Camcorder on tripod. And the mixer sends two channel outputs with music and vocals on them. These channels are fed to the computer through M-Track audio interface, where they are recorded as audio tracks.







Post Processing - Sound Mixing
The sound mixing is done on Reaper, which is a Digital Audio Workstation. It includes syncing up the two tracks, and process them with sound effects, mix them, and master the final track. This is a topic that has many details that you can find in my blog at the following link:
My Recipe for Home Recordings 

Post Processing - Video Editing
The video editing involves syncing processed sound with video, cutting out unwanted parts, adding zoom, pan, and fade effects, enhance picture quality, edit interludes, add header, logos, titles, credits.
The sound mixing and video editing takes a lot of time for every song, but I really enjoy the whole process, and the good results act as a motivation for me to take up this effort.


So, here is the story of my journey so far. I now know that it is possible to do a good recording of live singing. However, the journey continues and I hope to learn more things in the months to come. I am truly a novice in this wonderland.

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Music Series - My Experiences

If you are reading beyond this point, you are likely to be interested in finding out more about this topic. Some time back I wrote a series of posts on how I went about learning about digital recording process at home. You can read these posts here. These posts also include samples from the recordings I made on the way.

1. Life before Digital Revolution

2. The Dawn of Digital Era 

3. Fun with Digital Recording 

4. Enchanting Engineers - A Musical Journey 
5. My Recipe for Home Recordings 
6. Tear-down of a Music Band Performance 
7. from Audio to Music
8. A Recipe for Karaoke Recordings
9.  Live Recordings at Sur Swaranjali