I accidentally volunteered to make a 30 second audio promo for Lyric Theatre‘s production of ‘Carousel’. Oops.
So I dragged out my E-Mu Darwin 8-channel digital recorder (and a spare external 4GB SCSI drive) along with anything that looked like a microphone cable, connector, or something vaguely audio related and threw them in the car.
When I got to rehearsal, I had forgotten that the Darwin’s inputs are post-pre-amp (-10dBu, where my mics are -50dBu). Not that it would have made any difference—my mix desk is part of a rack that would need re-engineering to fit in my car.
Luckily, my Sony TCD-D7 tape recorder had also made it into my backpack; and with a large contingent of tiny connectors I managed to feed two mics through its pre-amps back to the Darwin. I pulled a 3rd channel from a Roland feedback eliminator which had a switchable 40dB gain. However, the sound was almost unusable from this processor (the bass had disappeared).
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that my dynamic vocal mics, with a tiny 2.7mV/Pa, and a 20m cable run, sounded great when recording a full orchestra in a smallish band room. Just goes to show.
And I got a fairly decent promo, with voiceover and a splice of “You’ll Never Walk Alone (finale)” in the background.
(Last week I picked up an inexpensive 8-channel microphone pre-amplifier so this set of mis-steps shouldn’t happen again.)
Here’s the result.
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