I recently had the opportunity to perform and capture a live performance of Human Target at St. Vitus on December 23rd, 2022. The concert was held during a polar vortex, and although the weather was harsh, the show was a great success. The goal of this project was to edit the audio of the performance and create a full-length video to distribute on YouTube and select clips through Vevo and other music video distribution platforms. In this post, I’ll walk you through the process I used and the tools I found most effective for capturing and editing the audio of this live performance.
The sound engineer at St. Vitus was very kind and offered to output the mix from the sound desk into a USB drive. This captured mostly drums, bass, and vocals. Additionally, I used two Tascam portable recorders to capture mostly the guitar parts. While the sound desk recording was of good quality, the recordings from the Tascam portable recorders were significantly degraded, with one being totally unusable, with a lot of noise and room sound.
To tackle this issue, I turned to Izotope’s RX 10 and its “Repair Assistant” feature. This tool helped me to reduce the noise and improve the overall sound quality of the recordings from the Tascam portable recorders. I had planned to use RX 10’s “Musical Balance” feature on the output of the sound desk to boost vocals, but it ended up producing too many artifacts and it wasn’t necessary anyway. I initially thought that splitting the stereo captured by the Tascam and processing each separately would yield a superior result, but it just caused odd phasing. I had to roll back RX 10’s “de-noise” far more substantially than the auto-assistant feature desired to get a pleasing result. I had to substantially high-pass and low-pass the processed Tascam audio to basically get a guitar fader, everything else captured by the Tascam was too boom-y or shrill.
Finally, I used Ozone 10 for mastering. This allowed me to keep the bass in mono while keeping everything above around 100k in stereo, and adjust the overall sound of the recording to be about as loud as a reference track. Using Ozone 10 for mastering on the 2 stereo tracks resulted in a polished and professional-sounding final product.
The final product will be a full-length video and select clips that will be distributed through YouTube, Vevo and other music video distribution platforms. I will be working with my friend Phil from Snacks That Last Productions, whom I recently collaborated with on Jaul Records’ other band, WolfoxNJ, on the “Wolfoxmas” music video.
I would also like to take a moment to thank the other bands that played the concert that night: Vixen Maw, Hexpyre, Manul. They all put on great shows and made for an unforgettable night.
Overall, editing audio from a concert can be a challenging task, but by using the right tools and techniques, it is possible to capture a live performance and create a polished and professional-sounding final product. If you’re interested in capturing and editing audio from a live performance, Jaul Records offers recording and mixing services, also on Fiverr, so feel free to contact us for more information.
Take a listen to the end result below and let me know what you think!
