Thought I'd drop in a few words about this amazing event I worked at/attended in January this year. Formerly under the name ForWatt, Fledge is a group of talented and kind-hearted folks that have been making music, encouraging musicians and creating art over the last few years, and I'm lucky to have been involved with helping them to capture and mix a whole heap of musical magic along the way. The last even I helped out on was at Birdlings Flat - which was my first blog on this website.
So this one was situated near Lake Hawea at the beautiful Te Awa Lodge. Promising to be better and bigger than ever, the technical side of it also was more fiendy than ever. Working with fellow audio geek, king fiend and masterchef value adder David McKinnon, we set up a recording system and PA to accommodate everyone and all their instruments (while mastering the perfect stove top espresso extraction along the way)
It was a fantastic 9 days, both for the creative aspect of the trip, but also as a technical challenge to go to a place and set up a 28 channel recording studio with PA and monitors!
For those interested, here's how we did it:
Recorded to Pro Tools, with the main recording interface being a MOTU 828Mk2
This thing has got 28 possible inputs, and we used them all!
2 Mic/Instrument inputs
8 Line inputs
2 ADAT inputs (so 16 channels)
2 SPDIF digital inputs
The mic and line inputs were fed by external pre amps and DI boxes.
The ADAT inputs were fed from a Presonus Digimax for the first 8, and then a Focusrite Octopre for the second.
The SPDIF inputs were fed through my Focusrite Sapphire Pro24 DSP in standalone mode.
Because of the use of all these different bits of gear, and using digital ins and outs, I had to be very aware of word clock issues too, so I ran BNC cables, using the MOTU as the master clock, down to the Digimax, and through to the Octopre. The Sapphire was also clocked to the MOTU using SPDIF.
Sending to the PA was a challenge also, because I couldn't/didn't want to run all the channels through the Allen and Heath desk we had before recording. Basically I could send 16 channels back out to the desk and then PA by using...
A: the Octopre, which cleverly has direct outs of each channel in a multi pin connector. And...
B: using the CueMix software that comes with the MOTU.
To explain this, the MOTU also has 8 analogue outputs, and using the software you can route any of the inputs straight to the analogue outputs before it goes to pro tools. So there's no latency. You can also compress and EQ using the DSP on board the unit. Pretty cunning. So once I had the channels I wanted hitting the Allen and Heath, we could create a mix and send to monitors in a pretty standard live front of house scenario.
It was certainly a challenge getting my head around a lot of gear and software I hadn't used before, but the results were great, it proved to be a pretty stable set up, and most importantly we captured some great music!