In early December, BAiT decided to embark on a live audio and video recording of a rehearsal. We thought this would serve a couple of purposes. Firstly, it would allow us a relatively quick means to create an honest audio demo of how we sound live. Secondly, it would give us an opportunity to hear and see ourselves properly and identify any areas for improvement.
Our main aim was to create an audio/visual montage of our songs, joining a short snippet from each of the songs together.
We booked a few hours in Hartshill Community Centre, Nuneaton, took along our standard stage equipment, some cameras, and some headphones (for monitoring purposes). Chris brought along his portable recording desk and we set everything up and then ran through the set a couple of times. The first run through gave us a chance to get used to the monitor mix and get into our stride with our singing and playing.
By the second run through we were more relaxed and just enjoyed the performance. We were finished by the mid afternoon, having recorded nine songs.
Over the following days, Chris worked on the audio while I worked on the video side of things. We also met up to discuss the mixes and tweak these as necessary. Once Chris had mixes of all the songs, he sent me the mixes and I did the video syncing. However, over Christmas, Chris invested in some mastering plugins for Cubase (on which we mixed the tracks) and had a play with these. The results were very pleasing and really lifted the sound of the recordings, transforming them and making us far happier about the sound (even if we do still beat ourselves up about the mistakes we hear). By the time we had synced the newly mastered audio tracks to the video and viewed these, we decided to let them stand in their own right as individual tracks, rather than the montage we originally intended.
The videos can be viewed above and also from the Media / Videos page on the BAiT website.
Yes, we could perform better, but we feel the videos give a very fair and accurate representation of how we perform live at the current time. We have already identified areas for improvement and will be working on these in upcoming rehearsals.