There's three way that live concert recordings are made.

1) You can use the same mics as the live performance and use an analog split, like Thawntex mentioned on his gig, where the mics are sent to three separate places. So the FOH console for the live show, the monitor console for the band, and the recording console for the recording. In that case all you are sharing in the signal path is the actual mics themselves.

2) You can set up a whole separate set of mics for the recording, chose and placed specifically for the recording. You can see this in some old band footage from the 70's and 80s, where there might be two mics tapped together for the singers, etc.. This is also how we record totally acoustic groups such as symphony orchestras. Which is one of the things that I do.

3) You can use the exact same signal path and take a digital feed from the sound console and go straight to a computer or a hard disk recorder to capture the performance.

Depending on the intended use of the recording, there may be a few ambient mics placed in the room to capture the sound of the live concert and the audience for applause and mid song reactions, etc...

In all cases, the digital files for each of these methods is then edited and mixed in post-production to build the best recording possible.

I do a lot of recording work for live concerts, mostly symphony orchestras, and sometimes opera and chamber music performances. In those cases I use ambient mics or mics placed in front of various instruments or sections of instruments to capture the performance, along with mics placed further out to capture the natural sound of the performance hall. If I'm recording an opera, or musical theatre, or a pop group, then I usually just a feed from the console and multi track to my redundant Protools systems from that.

Weird question:
How long are you seeing instruments exposed to high or low temperatures?  I imagine sitting in the back of trucks on tour they can see some extremes.
Are they more or less safe as long as they are on cases? Have you seen any problems?
Reason I ask is I'm in Houston...

Instruments have to be transported from one venue to the next. Generally that occurs on semi trucks for large tours, buses and trailers on smaller tours.

Usually, for most A level bands they aren't taking their favorite and most sentimental instruments on tour. Maybe a few do, and they might travel with the artists themselves. But for the most part, they are packed into heavy duty touring level cases which are then packed into large road cases and then put in hampers, caddies, or in rolling work boxes to protect them. The multiple levels of protection and cases provide a decent amount of protection and often times they are only traveling over night, or for a day and a night before being unloaded at the next venue.

Also, often times the tour, or the company that the tour is incorporated under will pay a rental fee to the artist for the their personally owned instruments that are used as part of the tour for the wear and tear cause by being on the road. Sometimes the tour will buy instruments specifically for the tour. The instruments that were played by the band when I was on tour with Blue Man Group were bought by the tour, including the American made Fender Jazz Master that was the primary guitar for the guitar player. When I was out with the Jesus Christ Superstar tour, the guitar player and bass player played their own instruments, and traveled them themselves. The drums and keyboards were bought and owned by the tour.

Most large tours also carry a couple of instrument techs to handle maintenance and repairs. Usually a guitar tech and a drum tech, and maybe a keyboard or electronics tech if they have a lot of electronic instruments. Repairs on the road are a full time job, not just for instruments, but also the lighting gear, sound gear, sets, wardrobe, etc... There are spares of many things that are carried to use while other items are being repaired, including the instruments.

My advice is to start using IEM. When I switched, it was night and day difference. Be prepared to hear your mistakes plus your bandmates mistakes much more clearly. When our guitar player switched to IEMs, he stated afterwards that you can hear everything.... the good, the bad, and the ugly. We bring our own wireless IEM setup.

Pray for me.  I got a call from my oldest friend this week and got roped into running FOH and monitors for a charity event.

Shitty local cover bands, three hour sets.  The first is all country.  Fuck my life.

My first time running an M32 so we'll see how this goes.  I gotta pin the stage, too, which I haven't done in about ten years so we'll see.

I'll bring my thickest foamies, my heaviest isolation headphones, and a book so I can get them up and running and then ignore them.

Fuck cover bands.  Play real music.

/rant

Ouch. Hope you have an iPad and router to put on that M32.

The last time I saw my band, the opener was deafening.  It was Tosin Abasi's outift.  Holy shit wtf.  I get there's no bassist.  Soundman tried to make up for it.  It was unpleasant.

Nope, no tablet.  They do have it all running on some kind of network.  Biggest issue was the normal "here are the two extension cords for you" type stuff and a GFCI that kept popping.  Keyboards were giving off a ton of 60 cycle that we couldn't figure out, because it was only when he stepped away (like a break).  A few problems with things like EQ or Gates being engaged on channels and it just took time to figure out why the heck something sounded like garbage.  It was just a small Mackie rig, four subs two tops, so I was around 90dB at FOH which to me is at the edge of what I can stand in the midrange without earpro.  Luckily both bands used the same drum kit so that saved a bunch of time and effort.  Second drummer was crazy loud on the snare but only on certain songs, so I basically had to bring everything up to match that.  Normally I'd mix a small band like this around 85dB so normal folks can actually comfortably get up by the stage.  It was also really strong at 200Hz so I had to notch that out of all the vocal mics so it wasn't messing with the compressors and such.

Speaking of compressors, the second band had a talented female vocalist with waaaaaay too much dynamic range for a live show.  I had to compress the hell out of her vocal, and use a ton of makeup gain.  I was hitting -18dB at 4:1 just to keep her consistently on top of the mix.

First band had an acoustic guitar (a Martin with the Fishman Aura on it) and for whatever reason he was running the piezo raw into a shitty LR Baggs pedal setup which basically defeats the purpose of the Aura system.  So the quackiness moves around depending on what key or register he's playing in which meant I had to ride the high mid EQ from song to song. Otherwise no issues with feedback or anything because he liked a reasonable amount of monitor mix at least. I was wearing a Flogging Molly shirt and he started playing "If I Ever Leave This World Alive" for his line check.  I sang along through the talkback so that actually really got me in a better mood.  Good thing because two hours of country music covers was hard to handle.  They played them well enough, though.

The second band's guitar player was running a fancy modeler which sounded awful raw.  Whenever these aren't running through a cabinet my experience is you always need to cut a bunch with a high shelf and notch in the vocal range to make it listenable through a PA.  Low end on it sounded good.  I normally would never compress an already compressed signal like an electric guitar, but his volume pedal control or balancing within the modeler was a little off, so again, I had to toss a 4:1 on it and keep him on or about the knee and ride the fader.

Overall the bands were fine to work with.  I only had to mean-mug one lady who approached me right after soundcheck to tell me her opinion of what needed to be louder (the right mains were out due to the GFCI at this time, BTW), and tell another lady that wanted me to move my car from behind the stage so she could take pictures that "I don't accept requests or suggestions from anyone but a band member asking me to adjust monitor levels."

Ended up there from 0830-0930 for a quick setup so they could play music and do announcements, then 1300-2300 for the bands and teardown.  Got about an hour of reading in between bands.  I'm re-reading one of Frank Turner's books.

I haven't done a teardown with my buddy in years.  It was refreshingly entertaining.  They killed the lights on us (of course) so most of the teardown was in the dark.  Just like old times! LOL

I got like five pounds of smoked pulled pork in a sealed bag that they couldn't refreeze so camaraderie and meat as payment works for me.

For anyone who missed this video...
I enjoyed this one more than I thought I would.

My absolute favorite part of that is the "post credits" scene.  I laughed so hard at his EQ technique.

Fucking legend.

Combine that with what he said earlier about spending a minute max on eq..."legend" indeed.
His mantra is K.I.S.S., and I love it.

We actually have one of those Yamaha 4XXX series boards ready for reassembly at my buddy's shop.  They are nice clean sounding boards and we're probably going to assemble it in our other friend's studio.

@thawntex Cool! Just saw this.

My question: For the bigger shows, how much do their riders spec audience facing audio, if any?

I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by audience facing audio.

I think he just means house sound.  

For instance, did the band I referenced earlier request it to be as ungodly loud as it was?

Probably yes. For most people, they think if it’s louder, then that means it better. Of course, most people are stupid, so there’s that.

Bands will typically spec what they want in a PA and lighting and video systems, if they aren’t carrying their own. There may be some acceptable alternatives. Otherwise the local presenter has to rent in what they want. There’s usually some artist manager, or tech person who decides what it should sound like if the band isn’t traveling with their own engineer.

Artist managers are generally the stupidest people of all.

Yeah, sorry, house sound, as opposed to say monitors. Specifically if they spec the quality of equipment. And I guess that leads into- what happens if a group comes through and has d&b level audio stuff on their rider, but the space has 1990s Peavy quality stuff? Who negotiates who pays for what?

I gotcha. No prob.

Well, things happen, but it's usually not as radical as having d&b on your rider and getting 90s Peavy. One time our old sound system provider (the owner of the system who rented it out to our venue, he's since been fired) swapped our L-Acoustics mains for a PK rig. We had one band whose sound engineer walked in and said that he had seen the L-Acoustics system in photographs. I had to tell him well, this is what we have now.

It's more about performance and what the rig can deliver. The PK rig was loud, provided good coverage, and sounded pretty good (I actually kinda miss it at times), so the aforementioned guy went with it and all was well. But yeah, if we had had a few groundstacked Peavy SP-3s sitting there as our PA, we'd have problems.

None of this is to mention the production advance that should happen between the venue's Production Manager and the band's. There should really be no suprises like the above one at all. At there very least there should be an updated tech pack that the venue can send to the band's people, but there are almost always weeks if not months worth of conversations and negotiations between venue and band in addition to that.

As far as who controls the purse strings regarding production expeditures, it varies. There's always a budget for that and it depends on a lot of things. I can say that the main thing is the band's pull. Obviously a band that really turns it out will have more sway when it comes to getting venues and promoters to spend money producing their show. We'll rent different audio consoles or whatever for a popular touring act that sells out, but there's no way we're doing it for a local tribute band that sells 50 tickets.

Can you please describe the different roles between the FOH engineer and the system engineer for large venues? I’m curious about where they overlap and how the coordination works.

The FOH engineer mixes the show. The System engineer will usually patch and tune the PA and assist the FOH engineer if there are issues with the PA or the console or system patching etc...

Think of the FOH engineer as the artist, much like the band is. And the system engineer is the technician, much like the guitar or drum techs for the band.

On some shows and in some venues the FOH engineer and the system engineer are the same person. When I was on tour, I was the FOH engineer and the system engineer. I would work with the house engineer to get our system patched in to house feeds for program and back sage feeds or balcony delay, etc... But I was responsible for patching and tuning our PA as well as mixing the show.

This exactly, we are going to attempt to record the main tracks for a live album on 10/4 at the St. Augustine Amphitheater. It will be an interesting experience, hopefully it don’t sound like sheeeeit!

Anyone do livestream sync between a video camera and audio feed from the board?  I'm actually playing a show coming up and we are looking at doing this.  We really don't want to just use a phone or something like that.

Yeah, I've done this. You're going to need to sync to time code and gen lock for video. Probably need to build in some delay as the video will take longer to process than the audio.

It's not hard, but you have to have the right pieces in place to make everything sync up.

I travel. Let me know if you need a live recording engineer.

I think we can pull the multitrack off the Midas M32 for use later not that we need it for anything.  Maybe I could do a delayed webcast the next day or something instead.  It isn't like we have someone to sit there and interact with live chat which we could do the next day.