« Back to Recording Highlights
Les Finnigan Live
Les Finnigan, String-o-Vision, Live in Concert
String Plucker Records • 2005
Synopsis by Jay O’Keeffe
Artist Profile
Over the last decade, Les Finnigan has become an accomplished and well respected guitarist. His innovative approach of incorporating a three finger picking method simultaneously with a more conventional flat picking technique has helped Les to establish a style that is uniquely his own.
Session Notes
Having mixed live, literally thousands of shows and having recorded hundreds I knew all to well the pitfalls of live recording, how the demands and limitations of a live show can have great impact on a recording. Seldom does some one have a perfectly ideal recording environment in a live setting. Often equipment limitations, the aesthetic desires of the venue and promoter, the creative desires of the artist and the needs of the audience often negatively influence a recording. I also know from experience that mixing both a live show and a final product simultaneously would not be the best use of the resources at hand.
Originally Les did not want to go through the effort of multi-tracking the concert that would eventually become this DVD. Having had great success with our first live recording, “Live at the Cultch”, Les felt that the simple 2-track board feed would be more than adequate. It was at my insistence that we decided to record on multi track.
And it was a good thing that we did. During sound check we had problems with Les’s guitar rig being very noisy. After isolating the direct feeds from his guitar in all the usual manners (ground lifts, iso-transformers and so on) his guitar signal was still noisy; it had a hum that changed harmonic content as he moved around the stage. Not only was this audible on the recording, it was also very evident during the concert. We had to accept that the show would be a little noisy as Les felt that being saddled to a microphone would really hinder his performance and also obstruct the visuals for the DVD.
When Les viewed the first rough cut of the concert he was a little disappointed. From a sonic perspective the buzz from the guitar was very disruptive as was the random audience noise, the low end of the guitar sounded a little boxy and washed out and the over all level balance between the audience and direct mics was a little disproportional. When I talked to Les and his partner Valeria, I told them not to worry I could probably fix all of the problems.
We also ran into a couple of other difficulties which fortunately were merely an inconvenience and not a disaster. The direct audio feed to the master sync camera was overloading. Although it was okay during sound check, level adjustments to my board mix meant compression distortion at the cameras input. This was not discovered until intermission as the ambient levels in the concert venue made it impossible for the camera operator to hear the problem. Lucky we had the back-up DAT and the multi-track – if we had to rely on the camera feed alone the whole session would have been lost.
Because of the technical limitations of the venues console, I sent the DAT / Camera feed as a split of the main mix via the sub-groups, so in essence this feed mirrored the live mix except that the audience mics were bussed only to the sub-groups. Also as a function of economy I opted to use the direct channel outputs from the console to feed Protools, as opposed to having a splitter and separate series of mic. pre’s. This decision was made not only for financial reasons but because of space limitations within the extremely cramped VECC booth. Another rack of gear would have further obscured the direct sound from the speakers to my mix position, which would have been very undesirable.
Martin Elfert, the venue’s lighting operator and I bump elbows at the best of times and between the computer, screens, extra racks of my preferred outboard and the HD interface, I literally was packed in as tight as a sardine – Martin even needed to stand on occasion to see over my screen in order to change the lighting..
Having opted for the direct feed meant that I was limited to the gain structure that was established during sound check. I could only make limited and subtle adjustments. As the venue holds just over 400 people and has rather nice acoustics, I did not need to “pump” a huge amount of volume for Les’s voice through the PA as it naturally carries well in the space. So my level to tape was a little low on both DAT and multi-track.
As I have enjoyed a very long and mutually beneficial relationship with Les and his partner, it was very important to satisfy his and Valeria’s creative vision. Both have very refined hearing and reasonable expectations, Valeria is also a very accomplished musician having been the drummer in the 90’s cuddle–core innovators “Cub.”
To make the audio portion of the DVD as good as possible was a multi-step process: First I needed to isolate all of the desired portions of the various tracks, editing out the coughs and squeaky seat groans of the audience, muting the vocal mic when it was not needed and trimming the tops and tails of the various performances.
I also had to emulate the room tone of the venue so that the edited transitions between audience to spoken word to music appeared seamless and transparent. Sounds like an easy task but in reality it is very difficult. Recreating a 3 dimensional sense of space is hard to accomplish in the seemingly two dimensional world of stereo recording.
As I have done in past recordings I used several reverbs and delays to emulate the natural acoustics of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, of course it is not an exact replica – nor would I want it to be – but as they say in the world of clipped coupons, “a reasonable facsimile.”
One of the greatest challenges was noise removal. There are several tremendous tools that allow for noise reduction in the digital domain. These tools usually function best when applied globally to the compromised audio track and each of these tools is not with out its drawbacks. Usually the negative impact of such tools can be overcome with selective EQ, compression and a lot of critical listening, once a decision is reached it is applied to the entire file and the job is done.
As each movement on stage resulted in a change to the noise structure in both volume and harmonic content, this meant that Les’s DVD would require that I apply the noise reduction tools several times and make numerous adjustments throughout a single piece of music. This was a very labour intensive process, more in the realm of audio forensics than mixing . The end result was fantastic, although still faintly audible, the buzz and hum is not detrimental to the final product. And I was able to overcome the destruction to the upper harmonics through the use of harmonic emulation.
There were minimal edits applied to the actual performances, probably less than a couple of dozen. Those that did occur were mostly in the form of editing out clunks, scrapes and fret noise. I did make numerous edits beyond what Les originally indicated, all of which he was pleased with.
To illustrate the challenges and compromises that can occur while recording a live performance, when listening to all of the tracks the music sounded boxy in the low end. When summed together a minor time differential occurs between the direct source from the DI’s, the reflected source from within the room and the omni-spherical polarity patterns of the Main PA speakers below 250 Hz, creating a comb filter effect that degrades the clarity of the lower register of the guitar. This filter effect was only audible when the direct sources were coupled with the audience mics.
The audience mics were located about 3 feet from the wall, flanking the stage. In this position they offered the maximum isolation from the main stack, were out of the direct field of the stage monitors and the close proximity reflection from the wall behind them would create the illusion of an audience larger than a few hundred people. We did not have time during set-up to worry about the phase co-herency of the audience mics due to time constraints brought on by trying to reduce the noise in the guitar rig. Hence the need to reduce or eliminate all of the unnecessary sources during the final mix.
One of the funny ironies in reducing and controlling the undesirable sources while reconciling the live with the recorded needs was on occasion during the final fades of sustain notes you can hear the tonal centre of the dying notes pitch up. Only when the audience mics are faded in during long sustains could you hear the shift. Fortunately in conjunction with the visuals, this is not overly disruptive as it is only audible on a few tracks – and mixed in such away as to sound like a string bend – but I did need to run it past Les and Valeria to see if it bothered them.
When my first mix was complete, Marcus rendered it with the video so we could all be assured that the final mix worked well with the visuals. It became immediately apparent to all that I would need to re-adjust all of the audio portions.
I had originally intended to attempt to allow all of Les’s dynamic range in his playing to remain intact. Overall the mix needed a better cohesion between all of the spoken word and audience elements on the disc. In essence I needed to squash the dynamic range significantly. Not a big issue as I suspected that we might need to do so in order to make the final product more consistent with other commercially available music DVDs
The final product turned out really well, the sound and video look great. Everyone involved did a tremendous job and Les is very pleased with the final result.
Album Credits
Music Produced by Jay O’Keeffe
Engineered, Mixed and Edited by Jay O'Keeffe
Recorded Live at The Vancouver East Cultural Centre
Mixed and Mastered at Profile Studios
Video Production By Marcus Rogers
Video Post at Cinestir
Recording Format: Protools HD 24/48
Musicians
Les Finnigan: Guitar
Les Finnigan
This is the first project that Les and Jay worked on. Recorded Live to DAT on September 22nd 1999 at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre during the second annual West Coast Guitar Night.
Back to jayokeeffe.ca homepage
Text © 2005 Jay O’Keeffe
