[playingdead]

I have to preface this by saying I have zero experience mixing, I'm just a guitar player.

I just bought the band a PreSonus StudioLive 16-channel Firewire desk a couple weeks ago so we could multitrack some gigs after a lot of frustration with soundboard recordings with flawed mixes and audience recordings with bad sound. I don't know from compression, highpass or gates, but I'm trying to learn. This is literally the first time I plugged it all in.

We never, ever rehearse, but I herded the cats to the space above my garage Monday night, where we were crammed into a 20X16 space, two drummers, keys, two guitars and bass.

One drummer played my Roland TD-12 electronic kit, the other a small conventional set. I took the bass and keys direct, lead guitar was direct off the AxeFX, rhythm a cheap MXL mic on a JBL K110, three vocal mics. I had an MXL 603 overhead on the regular kit, and SM57s on the two toms and snare, and a Beta kick mic. The Roland had separate outs for the kick and snare, the rest of the kit spread across two more inputs.

But I was impressed that an absolute total novice like me could set up 16 tracks, hit record on a MacPro and have it run perfectly for 2.5 hours.

This is Elmore James' "Hurts Me Too," which we'd never attempted to play before ... hence the flubbed lyrics. At the beginning of the track, you can hear the piano player sing the opening notes for me to play. What key is that one in again?

http://www.playingdead.net/070709rehear ... 9hurts.mp3

Keyboard player's mic was panned right for spread with the other two vocalists, but I should've moved it center when he sang lead as he does on this tune.

Oh, and I can't play slide worth a s--- ... and we didn't even know how to end the tune, either. LOL

We also brushed up on Crazy Fingers, which needed work, especially the vocals. I also tried to get a more 76-ish guitar tone happening through the AxeFX. Pardon the vocal work at the end.

http://www.playingdead.net/070709rehear ... 9crazy.mp3

The PreSonus board is pretty astounding for the money; you get 16 channels, 6 monitor mixes, four submixes and a two-track aux/tape in; each channel has a high pass, gate, compression, four-band parametric EQ. Every channel has individual phantom power. You also have two onboard effects and various reverbs and delays to choose from, plus inserts on each channel. You can also daisy chain two together for 32 channels. I paid about $1650 for it brand new. It will send 18 tracks straight to a Firewire hard drive as 16-bit WAV files. Runs about 2 gigabytes an hour for 16 tracks.

We're doing a real gig with it on Saturday. Can't wait!

[KCJones]

Awsome! Sounds like your going to get the hang of this in no time; heck you already have. Let me get this straight ... so now all you have to do is bring a computer/laptop to your gigs and fire wire to it from the board to capture individual tracks, then mix them at home on the computer. Simple. Looking forward to heaing some live mixes.

[RiverRat]

.

[playingdead]

KC: That's it ... hit record, you're done. Works perfectly. I'm amazed.

RR: We are going to be using the Presonus to replace the FOH desk at the venues, with their power amps, mains, monitors, etc. Alternatively, we have a 16-channel splitter snake and will run the Presonus right from the stage for recording only. The mic preamps sound remarkably transparent for such an inexpensive board. And it does have meter bridges for input, output, submixes, etc.

The only thing that it lacks, and for the money it's not a surprise, is motorized faders, so it's not an ideal control surface for DAW use, although it does work fine with Logic Pro on the Mac.

The other thing that is cool about the Presonus is you can save "scenes" from the various venues, where it saves all the pot, fader, EQ, compression, gates, high pass, etc. Will be a much quicker setup and soundcheck as we save scenes from the given venues. There is also a 31-band EQ for the main outputs.

[KCJones]

If you pull direct out of the FOH board, you haven't address the mix issue at all. You'll still have to contend with level changes as the FOH mix changes.

RiverRat, Playingdead can correct me if I'm wrong, but your not doing any live mixing of your signals being recorded. You're simply capturing individual tracks to be mixed later. And, you don't have to worry about FOH level changes because your capturing a pre-fader signal that your recording. Once your input levels are set on your board, you're good to go with feeding that signal to the computer via fire wire. Input levels don't change when adjusting FOH faders.

[playingdead]

Once the basic levels are set using the trim pots on either the Presonus or the house board, things will be stable unless someone turns up drastically -- at which point the FOH guy would likely trim it back anyway to not overload the input stage. Our goal is to do it with as little hassle as possible for everyone.

At rehearsal, I had to tweak a few things for the first tune or two to keep the meter bridge from hitting the reds, but otherwise it was fairly stable. I just left the meter bridge set to monitor inputs, and dialed the trim pot back a little when I saw a red signal.

It's much simpler to use the Presonus as the main board. We can just get by live with the 18 channels, using an outboard little mixer for the drum overheads into the two-track in.

And we are now using a dedicated sound man to mix us FOH at all our venues, so he will keep an eye on the levels.



It's definitely a very simple entry level desk ... but for the money, it's powerful and just perfect for this kind of thing.

[1960strat]

Wow, this answers my question if the AxeFX is a good direct recording tool. It sounds great! Can you get a wide variety of sounds out of it (etc Marshally high gain) in addition to the clean fenderish sounds?

[playingdead]

It does, doesn't it? I rolled off all those extra high frequencies above a normal E120 speaker response curve with the onboard amp simulation parameters. Made a huge difference.

What you're hearing in the mp3 as far as the lead guitar is just straight AxeFX signal, no post-processing, EQ or compression, etc.

The AxeFX is total nirvana for those mid and high gain tones. Remarkable. Early Van Halen Brown sound, any kind of Marshall, Bogner, Diezel, Cornford, Engl, Dumble, ... it's all in there. The Boogie tones are really amazing.

[1960strat]

I have been completely reluctant to go this route because my collection of vintage amps and mics will start collecting dust. However, i cant really do any recording after about 9 at night, without crushing my neighbors. How does the AxeFX compare to plug-in types of systems such as GuitarRig , etc? Vic, do you have a setting list to get some of your jerry sounds?

[playingdead]

I can't really compare it to the plug-ins, except to say that I think the AxeFX is pretty unique in its approach, and you often encounter problems with latency and other weirdness with plug-ins. I have a heck of a time just using piano and organ plug-ins within Logic Studio on my Mac.

That being said, Cliff is working on something called the AxePC which is going to be a software version of the AxeFX.

The preset I designed for the Garcia stuff is extremely complicated and memory intensive ... but if you do get an AxeFX, I'd be happy to share it and the necessary impulse response file for the JBLs.

Note also that I wasn't playing my Tiger guitar at this rehearsal (it's with Gary Brawer right now), I was using a PRS Custom 22 with stock Dragon 2 pickups, bridge as a single coil in the Crazy Fingers, and I think bridge and neck as single coils during the slide parts on It Hurts Me Too. It sounds rather Travis Bean like to my ears during Crazy Fingers.

At our show on Saturday, I will probably use my backup Strat with the DiMarzios and the PRS, depending on the tunes we are playing. The nice thing is I can use the AxeFX to set up the typical effects loop scenario for the Strat and then a different preset for the non-effects loop PRS guitar.

[mkaufman]

What's Gary doing to your guitar?

mk

[playingdead]

Repositioning the bridge slightly (intonation was never right from the start), rewiring it soup to nuts (I'll keep Waldo's buffer in there), and fixing the truss rod, which probably means a refret and PLEK job. The truss rod has been rattling in the neck for a while. The guitar was still playable, but I wanted to have Gary rewire it correctly anyway, so off it went.

I miss it ... but it's in good hands ... LOL

[SarnoMusicSolutions]

The stuff sounds pretty darn good. Here are some mix adjustments that I would consider the Healy thing to do.

All vocals dead center, not spread or panned.
Lead guitar centered and in mono - mono reverb and delay.
Bass centered.
Rhythm guitar a bit to the left of center, but in stereo preferably (stereo chorus and/or delay).
Hi-hats hard panned L/R
Snares fairly centered.
Kicks panned pretty far (at least certain era's of Dead had this wide kick thing)
More hi-pass EQ on the kick drums to take out their deep sub bass frequencies.
Keyboards a bit to the right, but not too far.


Brad

[hogan]

Repositioning the bridge slightly (intonation was never right from the start), rewiring it soup to nuts (I'll keep Waldo's buffer in there), and fixing the truss rod, which probably means a refret and PLEK job. The truss rod has been rattling in the neck for a while. The guitar was still playable, but I wanted to have Gary rewire it correctly anyway, so off it went.

I miss it ... but it's in good hands ... LOL

Not to start a pissing contest, but is that a ressurection? Shouldn't that all have been taken care of prior to you receiving it. Not exactly a ringing endorement for their build quality.

~MJH