5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

For general questions or discussion of Auria.

Moderators: Corey W, Rim

Post Reply
brooks501
Expert
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu May 23, 2013 10:36 am

5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by brooks501 » Tue Aug 06, 2013 5:30 am

Hi All

Thought some of you might be interested in my experiences with recording 9 artists over 5 days for a local radio station, I'm using a iPad 2 64g, Focusrite 18i20 and Auria.
Each night this week between 6pm - 8pm UK time I'm recording and live mixing to air bands for a live music show, so far I have recorded 3 artists. The artists are also being filmed for the stations YouTube channel.

The work flow is mics plugged into Focusrite 18i20 which is then plugged into iPad, then I have a stereo feed from the Focusrite going to the live on air desk, when the session is finished I then spend about an hour mixing for each band, no time to do longer as I then upload each song to Dropbox for the guys to mulitcam edit the video to so they can have them uploaded to the YouTube channel next day.

So far all has been good with no problems at all, Auia has worked perfect. I'll try to update this week on the pro and cons of this set up but for now if anyone's interested ill leave a link to there YouTube channel which has the first artist Claire Hamill, I'll also give a link if any one wants to listen live.

Radio staion website: http://carnivalfm.co.uk/

YouTube channel: http://m.youtube.com/user/CarnivalFM

User avatar
Anthony Alves
Expert
Posts: 1444
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2012 9:52 am

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by Anthony Alves » Tue Aug 06, 2013 11:44 am

will check this out. love to have the live link. cheers

brooks501
Expert
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu May 23, 2013 10:36 am

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by brooks501 » Tue Aug 06, 2013 4:03 pm

The link for live stream is on the website.

Did the second show tonight and was a bit chaotic with the second band, the keyboard player came with wrong speaker so had to work out how to get his keyboard through the Focusrite into the ipad and then back out to his speaker, so I used a aux send and routed it back out of one of the 18i20 outputs.

I have to say Auria is a dream to use, all the bands are a little bemused when they see the setup but so far it's not let me down, I've been using it since it came out but one thing I have learnt is you really need a iPad 4, what I'm doing with it is pushing the iPad 2 to the edge, I close all apps, do a reset and turn on airplane mode and when I'm recording 4 tracks the CPU sits around 10%, I've got no FX on but I'm going to put some on tomorrows show and see what happens.

Rim
Site Admin
Posts: 8476
Joined: Fri Dec 23, 2005 11:08 pm

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by Rim » Wed Aug 07, 2013 5:53 am

Thanks for the post, glad to hear it's working well for you!

Rim

User avatar
trunkdog
Member
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Dec 07, 2012 10:49 pm
Location: Deep in the Heart of Dixie
Contact:

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by trunkdog » Sat Aug 10, 2013 12:12 am

Hi Brooks,

Amazing! Leave it to you Brits to push the envelope! Nice. I'm guessing that were my iPad FlashFriendly I could tune in at noon CDST here in Alabama and catch some of the show?!? Are you saying you are feeding the on air a dry live signal? I will peruse the vids and get back to you. Ah the future of audio is upon us!
Thx - td

brooks501
Expert
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu May 23, 2013 10:36 am

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by brooks501 » Sun Aug 11, 2013 12:34 pm

Hi All

Finished the last show Friday night I can report that Auria and the iPad served me well, I've found a couple of strange things with this set up, the first one is I was about 2 min of a recording and the disk space reading went from 4% to 107% in a few seconds even though I had about 10Gb of storage left and then it froze for a few seconds and the Auria stopped recording, later on I found it had lost the recording. The second one is some times when I have my headphones plugged into the iPad rather than the Focusrite, I can't adjust the volume on the iPad, the only way I found to getting working again is to unplug the headphone and then plug back in again.

The week has been challenging but that was mostly to do with only having ten minutes to set up and sound check the artists and in a room with lots of stuff going on, it was being filmed at the same time so I had the video guys wanting to move mics because they are in front of a singers face but we worked it out.

The radio station is really a busmans holiday for us all as every one involved are volunteers, there BBC engineers doing the tech and transmitter stuff, voice over artists , radio students from local University, this year was the first year I got involved, apart from the fun side it was a good way for test the Auria iPad set up.

The mics I used are some of my own which included a couple do SE2000 which are good mid price condenser mics, a Akai ACM-300 which is not the best but has a interesting sound to it and a bunch of NJD mics, there cheap but again give a unique sound, the rest are mics that the other tech guys had, AKG's, SM 58's. I eq'd nothing for the live on air sound but that was done over the mix with bit of compression before going to transmitter.

For the mixes that I gave to the video guys that are used on the YouTube channel I added a little bit of eq on the acoustic gtr's, the vocals and the box drums and if needed a bit of compression, I then added the Micro Warmer plugin to the overall mix, I'm not one for putting on to much stuff or eq when I record, I like to get the best sound at source. After looking back at the videos I think a couple of the songs are sounding a bit over compressed but for one of them it was done to try and keep everything together.

So to sum up I really do think this is the future, I'm and old school type of engineer but I found this very liberating, I'm impressed with the results and today one of the bands Dorey The Wise emailed me to say its the best acoustic recording they have had, although I was reluctant to do so the files I sent to the video guys are MP3's at 320kbps, I couldn't do WAV's as my uploads are to big. I'm ok with the result on YouTube but I'm not sure i would notice the difference if they had been WAV's.

Anyway a long enough post I think, if any one has any questions then ill gladly try to answer them, one more thing, thanks to Rim and the team, I can't even think how much work went into this and for such a bargain price, Auria goes from strength to strength and I keep thinking what else I can do with it.

syrupcore
Expert
Posts: 158
Joined: Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:08 pm

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by syrupcore » Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:22 pm

Thanks for sharing Brooks. Great write up.

brooks501
Expert
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu May 23, 2013 10:36 am

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by brooks501 » Sat Aug 17, 2013 1:40 pm

Hi All

As an update to the weeks recording I did, there are a bunch more videos uploaded with more to come on the CarnivalFM YouTube channel.

http://m.youtube.com/user/CarnivalFM

I'm also going to take the recordings to a engineer friend who has a good mix studio to see what they sound like on a decent system. He produced/engineered a couple of Keane albums and a couple albums by british band Scouting for girls recently, Hopefully this will give me a good reference, I'm also going to do better mixes for a couple of the bands as they want to put them on sound cloud.

When I told my friend he was very interested in this, if not a bit worried.

User avatar
martygras
Expert
Posts: 709
Joined: Wed Aug 28, 2013 11:03 am

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by martygras » Fri Aug 30, 2013 4:40 pm

What are NJD mics Brooks?
Marty Schulte [I'm a drummer. So, there's that.]
iPad AIR(128), Akai EIE, Akai EWI USB, illudium q-36 explosive space modulator
Head First Audio (live sound for Southern Oregon, USA)

G-master G
Expert
Posts: 65
Joined: Fri Aug 16, 2013 2:04 am

Re: 5 nights, 9 artists all recorded with Auria.

Post by G-master G » Tue Sep 10, 2013 11:43 pm

G'day Brooks

This is an interesting post especially because I have been contemplating doing something similar for my band's live performances and I have a very similar setup to yours: iPad 4 plus Scarlett 18i6.

One question for you: in your initial description of the configuration you mentioned that you had a number of microphones plugged into your interface. I take it that with the 18i20 you just plug them into any combination of the 6 combo jacks to the rear and the 2 combo jacks to the front.

With an 18i6 I have 2 combos at the front and then the ability to connect a preamp such as the Octopre which would accommodate another 8 microphones. Is this the way that I would achieve the same outcome?

Cheers

Grant

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 131 guests