PreSonus Blog

Hey PreSonus, I hope all is going well!!  We have just released out latest live video “Celtic Rainbow,” all recorded at the Aeolian Hall, in London Canada, June 8, 2012. on Studio One and the StudioLive 24.4.2.

Here is some insight as to how we recorded our show, “Live at the Aeolian Hall.”

We multi-tracked the entire show via the Studio Live 24.4.2 into Capture.  Great care was taken on ensure that the instrument sources all sounded top notch (drums, bass, guitar, keys) and appropriate mics and DIs were used to capture the sounds of the instruments.

Drum mics were as follows:

• AKG D112—kick
• Shure SM 57s—snare top and bottom
• Shure KSM 32’s—toms
• Shure KSM 137—hi-hat and ride
• AKG 414s—overheads

For post-production (mixing and mastering) we used Studio One, and things were kept pretty simple as the performances and sounds were good at the source.  I’m not a “fix it in the mix” type of engineer, so the sounds have to be great to begin with. Also we didn’t use any drum samples whatsoever. The drums sounded great and basic EQing (cut some of the boxey mids) and slight compression (just a hint, 2:1 with slow attack to keep the bass response) were used on the drums, and that’s it. Guitars were plugged straight into the Fractal AXE FX2, bass and keys ran DI.  The XMAX preamps on the StudioLive are so good that it helped the mix come together pretty quick!

Guitar Manifesto can be purchased by clicking here.