Help on expanding mobile recording rig

[JayX]

In South Wales, there are lots of little studios open these days and I've a full time day job anyway so never really wanted to try compete in that market. I've shot video for years at gigs, and always wanted to get better audio (naturally) so have picked up bits and pieces of the years to build a rig that's portable and operational by one or two people. It's more of a hobby than anything, but be nice to get a bit of paid work once in a while.

I've put a bit of a hold on it for a while, but after doing a few gigs that I'm hoping should come out quite nicely when I've worked on the post element, I'm thinking of putting some more time (and money) into having a nice setup I can take to most small venues and have up and running without winding up the soundman.

So for the last two days, I've taken the following gear wise:

* Apple MacBooK Pro 15" running Logic
* Focusrite Saffire 26 connected to sounddesk via an 8 way TRS balanced snake
* RAID1 firewire external harddisk (to hook up to my iMac when I get home, big plus!)
* Borrowed condenser mic and mic stand
* Sony DSR-PD150 with Century Optics 16x9 anamorphic lens

It was painful, but I carried this all in one go from my flat to the venue in one go. I'm lucky I live central of town, and there's a few venues now popping up. I need to rackmount some of the gear so I'm not using a Doc Martens bag!

Anyway, I'm hitting limits and thinking about ways of overcoming them

* Need to upgrade to 16 channels at least. Yesterday's gig was an example where there were 4 vocal mics, 2 guitars, 1 bass and mics on the floor tom, rack tom and kick. No overheads as it was a smaller venue and I was still running out of space when combining with the condenser. Natural options are something like a Behringer ADA8000 or a similar interface that I can connect to the Focusrite via ADAT (which I've not tried before).

* Need my own condenser mic... intrigued as to whether a shotgun style mic is as effective for this as the usual 'chubby' style I borrowed which is presumably for cab micing most of the time. If I go shotgun, it means I can mount it to my camera (which has a shotgun mount and can supply the phantom power over XLR natively) which gives me a bit more versatility. Most of the time this will be static at the back of the venue by the sound desk however. I was thinking of something like a Rode NTG-1 which comes at about £150.

* I'm thinking of getting a 4U rack just to have a bit of space for cables when transporting. However, further down the line is there likely to be any further rack gear that would be beneficial for my rig? It wouldn't generally be set up at home, I just move the HDD to the desktop computer so would only need things that'd be useful for the recording stage.

Be interesting if anyone does anything similar and has any advice or ideas that I might not have considered. Thanks!

[Bankai]

I would recommend getting the focusrite saffire pro 40 and the focusrite octopre.
That'd give you 16 channels to play with all on one firewire connection.

As for condensor, a shotgun Mic will do you much much better than a normal style condenser microphone.

[WHUFC BASS]

Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 ? Surely you mean the Pro 24 ?

[JayX]

[quote name='Bankai' post='1206152' date='Apr 20 2011, 05:31 PM']I would recommend getting the focusrite saffire pro 40 and the focusrite octopre.
That'd give you 16 channels to play with all on one firewire connection.

As for condensor, a shotgun Mic will do you much much better than a normal style condenser microphone.[/quote]

Would be nice, but at the cost of a grand for the two units when the pro 40 would essentially cover what I have already, it's just too much money. The Octopre is a fantastic piece of kit, but I'm not too worried about having basic pres on the extra 8 channels going in which is why the £150~ Behringer is up my alley.

Thanks for the vote of confidence on the shotgun mic, appreciate it.

[quote name='WHUFC BASS' post='1206425' date='Apr 20 2011, 09:12 PM']Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 ? Surely you mean the Pro 24 ?[/quote]

The Pro 26 is an older model, Focusrite don't use a great naming structure!

It's this one - [url="http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec06/articles/saffire.htm"]http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec06/articles/saffire.htm[/url]