Mostly Harmless

The MN State Fair is in full swing, or so I assume. Traffic sucks in the general vicinity of the fairgrounds so that’s usually a good indication.

Sunday night “Weird Al” Yankovic will take to the newly remodeled stage at the Grandstand for the latest stop in the “Poodle Hat” tour. I presume he’ll be selling a live DVD of the tour eventually, like last time, but I’ll get wired for sound anyway and practice my concert taping skills.

A couple of weeks ago I drove to La Crosse, WI for the opening date of “a tour to be named later.” Strapped to my left leg and tucked into my sock was Stealth Cam, v2. Taped inside my right pant leg was a single-point stereo microphone with a 3 ft cable. Stashed in a hard-shell glasses case was a 9-volt battery pack (for the mic). Ensconced within a gutted Palm III case was a RipFlash Trio.

I could have gotten that stuff past a metal detector so long as nobody asked me to power up the PDA. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more security — I could have smuggled a small SUV into that place if it had been Winter and I had been wearing my big coat.
Once past “security” — with the camera in my hand, at this point, since small cameras were OK — I found my seat and then made a trip to the bathroom to get “wired up.” MP3 player in one pocket, battery box in another, wires running behind belt, microphone taped to the bottom of the cell phone… check!

Foolishly I didn’t use the opening act as a sound check, which is the only thing they were good for, and I got loads of distortion even though I should have been able to deal with 120db — I was in the third row, 15 feet from the speaker stacks, with my pants fluttering in the breeze from the sound waves. I thought “I’m going to get a lot of distortion,” and I was right. The biggest problem was that I didn’t set my bass roll-off correctly, but I think I may have been screwed anyway being that close to the speakers.

Additional issues: the right channel of the mic developed a noise problem during the testing phase (movie theater), so there’s a “ffft, ffft” in the right channel, and the left channel was mostly static after the 25 minute mark, don’t know if that was a cable issue or what. Final tally: somewhat distorted, mostly mono, with irritating mic noise… but I got the whole thing and it sounds worlds better, over all, than other people’s recordings from other concerts.

So, recording session #2 will be Sunday. This time I’ll have the roll-off set to something useful and have the inline volume control at the ready in case I’m close to some speakers. I have a theory about the mic noise but I’m not terribly concerned about taping this concert, even though the last Weird Al concert pretty much rocked… it is still just Weird Al, ya know; this is more of an extended recording test under loud concert conditions. (My feeble car stereo is not manly enough to get the SPL levels that I need.)