A few weekends ago, I found myself, just like many of my classmates, having the time of my life at the infamous dreamville festival held here in Raleigh NC. This festival was put on by North Carolina’s own J Cole and brought in an astounding 40,000 people per day during this two day festival. The days were full of live performances from noon till 11 at night and varied in terms of intensity, musicality, and accompaniment. All the while, if you didn’t have the ability to make it to the festival, they were putting in the work to allow anybody to stream it on amazon prime or watch performances, like the one linked above, on youtube at a later time. The most impressive part in all of this to me though was their ability to keep everything sounding great.
In the heat of the moment I never wondered how they pulled off a feat such as this. It already seems like enough of a headache pulling off the event itself but then taking the time to make sure all inputs are coming throguh good enough to then live stream and record sounds like a migraine. After some research though, I found some resources that helped dumb down some of the equipment needed. Take this article from vimeo for example…
https://vimeo.com/blog/post/live-streaming-music-concerts/
this bit especially about midway down helped a lot:
“Quality aux-send and video mixer
You’ll want to use an audio mixer with an auxiliary send. An audio mixer will allow you to mix together all of your audio sources – both instrumental and vocal. Typically a mixer will then feed its main outputs to an in-room PA system. The function of the auxiliary bus will allow you to send another mixed feed to your webcast.
A video mixer allows you to cut together multiple cameras, graphics, and other media. If you’re researching options, Livestream Studio is a great example of a multi camera switcher and encoder.
Multiple microphones
The frequency response of your microphones should be 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. This refers to the range of voice frequencies your microphone can pick up. You also want to check your microphone polar pattern, the ability to pick up your voice from different angles. A cardioid pattern microphone is most common and blocks surrounding unwanted noise from the back of the microphone. They also isolate the clatter of instruments and any other unwanted ambient sounds.”
There are still of course so many layers that I do not understand and probably never will but if any of you have any insight, I would love to hear it!