Live At The Golden Nugget, Las Vegas

[Bob L]

Here's a fun story I thought I would share.

The Lon Bronson All Star Horn Band has been in Vegas for as long as I can remember. Used to be one of my favorite late night escapades out into the Las Vegas music scene. Tower Of Power, Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears... this was the kind of music they energized the room with.

Lon called me a few weeks ago to discuss the possibilities of doing a live CD with the band at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas, where they are now performing. Their bass player, Keith Nelson, my good friend from the Steven Lee Group, offered up his new ProStar laptop and rack of Behringer ADA-8000s for a test run to see what we could do without any complex arrangements of recording trucks, crews, snake runs, power distro, etc.

Curtain time was 12 midnight on a saturday night... I showed up at 10:45 pm and walked onto the stage for the first time. Unpacked the laptop, which I had setup a few months back for Keith.
We found a road case in a backstage corner and two chairs. Lon had arranged with the house sound, to have a mic split backstage. This way, I would get straight mic signals without depending on console inserts and trims and without having to interfere in any way with the house mix and normal sound operations.

I took the first 24 lines of a normal 30+ inputs. I gave up individual conga and perccussion mics and went with one overhead. When we do the gig for real, I will use 2 laptops and about 40 inputs, counting audience mics.

I had never used the Behringers on a gig and had no idea what the mic sensitivity was like and whether the pres could take the power of a Tower Of Power punching horn section without splatting... but we were about to find out.

If you have been like many of us, wondering how good could this stuff be for $230 US for 8 phantom powered mic/line inputs to ADAT lightpipe, stay tuned for some enlightening results.

The laptop was using an RME CardBus into a DigiFace... hooked to the 3 Behringers for 24 i/o. I used the RME as the master clock and had all the Behringers chase the optical.

The mic cables fed directly to the Behringer pres right from the mic split backstage. No input console... fun stuff for me.

I used the RME TotalMix for monitoring, direct to the headphone out jack on the DigiFace. Believe it or not, I was sitting just offstage to this T of P horn band and still had enough output without even a headphone distro unit... I was amazed... although, next time I think I will bring one for a bit more gain and the ability to share the mix with others without having to pass my headphones around.
I set all Behringer mic trims to 12 oclock, having no idea what would happen. No sound check... in fact I never set foot onstage... never adjusted one mic... what we got is the stright live room micing and positioning from the mic split... and we are not talking studio quality mics here... we are talking hotel showroom Shure 58s and the typical compliment of stage mics.

I setup a session folder and lined up my 24 record meters... created a template in case of a crash and the need for a quick recovery and waited for the downbeat.... the whole setup was just a little over an hour.

The downbeat came and my meters all lit up to the max... whoa... we are talking some nice gain on these things... by the end of the first song, trims have all been adjusted and I just let it rip.

Recorded 24 mono files at 44100, 16 bit... about 1 hour and 10 mins worth... took a total of only about 8 gigs... that was nice.

Within minutes of the end of the set, I had a basic mix with some panning, eq, compression and some reverb sends for the vocals and horns (gotta love that virtual console ) and started passing the headphones around to the band members. Needless to say, we were all pretty happy with the test results.

I extracted a few of the songs from the hour long session and then spent about 2 hours setting up a decent mix of one of my favorite old Tower Of Power tunes that the band does really well. I placed an mp3 link here to share the experience with you. This mix has not been cleaned as far as taking out background open mics and ambience noise... this is straight solid 24 tracks... 6 open horn mics and 5 open vocal mics leakinmg away through the whole mix... but it is quite fun to hear what can be done with a laptop and a few Behringers and of course, the RME card.

Can't wait for the real deal with a few good solo and vocal mics and the chance to spend some time editing, cleaning and mixing this stuff. This is good, fun music that I don't get to hear much of any more these days... I'm excited to be part of the project.

http://www.sawstudio.com/what_is_hip.htm

Have fun listening, and for more info on the band, and for some nice pictures check out www.LonBronson.com
Enjoy,

Bob L

[Naturally Digital]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for sharing this great story! Great to hear you were able to setup and record in such a short time... Awesome really!

That's one of my favorite T of P tunes also and... you're right: We don't get to hear this kind of stuff much anymore.

I'm downloading now... off to the studio to listen!
Thanks,
Dave.

[Craig Allen]

Impressive, and interesting story. I have one of those Behringer units, and I feel the gain is a little on the low side, but for the money, it's an unbelievable steal.

One question - were you recording to a secondary drive on board the laptop or to an external USB or Firewire drive?

[AudioAstronomer]

Haha, 16bit 44.1


Just makes me laugh when it still sounds good


Sounds like it was mixed on headphones too I love the stereo image... I love that whole wide "spread" feel.

[Bob L]

Buck,

I used an internal drive in the laptop... the laptop has two drive bays at 60 gigs each. We will probably do the same thing for the real gig on each laptop, then dump the stuff across to one external drive to actually edit and mix the project.

I have since written some code to extract the sessions from the long 1 hour wav files into separate folder and song edls... this is an awesome time saver... coming in the next Lite and Full versions, this allows me to mark a song section on the timeline, and then it extracts all the data in the marked section, re-writes clean new files to a destination folder and session edl. It names each track with the session name and the track label... so in the end I have clean 24 track sessions for each song with the wav files created and labeled the songname_Kick... etc. all neatly tucked away in their own folders on the external (or wherever) drive.

Bob L

[Bob L]

Robert,

I was very pleased with the clarity and punch of the units.... there was a lot of signal on that stage... and the little mic pres handled it all very well indeed.

Will they match some $3000 tube mic pre... probably not... but do they have their place for doing just what I was doing... you bet... you really have to stretch pretty far to find something to complain about for that performance for that cost.

And I'm not so sure they wouldn't sound great for any use... a little turn of the eq and you'll not miss that $3000 unit.

We now built all three into a small rack case and I want to put some small snake pigtails looped back under each unit to feed them out the back of the rack case... then the large stage snake hookup will stay on the floor behind the gear.

Bob L

[Alex_G]

Bob,

Do not forget to take some photos and share them with us here at the forum...

Congratulations !!!

Alex

[Bob L]

There's lots of nice band photos on the band link I put in my message.

When we do the gig for real, I'll definitely try to get some video footage of everything going on.

Bob L

[Oz Nimbus]

Wow Bob, I'm blown away! That sounds fabulous.


The fact that it's 16 bit thru some Berhinger pres makes it even more impressive. I've read alot of trash talk about the Berhinger gear on the net, and this just proves how full of B.S. alot of the "gearslut" types are.

-0z-

[Perry]

I have since written some code to extract the sessions from the long 1 hour wav files into separate folder and song edls... this is an awesome time saver... coming in the next Lite and Full versions, this allows me to mark a song section on the timeline, and then it extracts all the data in the marked section, re-writes clean new files to a destination folder and session edl. It names each track with the session name and the track label... so in the end I have clean 24 track sessions for each song with the wav files created and labeled the songname_Kick... etc. all neatly tucked away in their own folders on the external (or wherever) drive.

Bob L

Whooa!!! This sounds really useful! Looking forward to this!