Thank you everyone, so much, for the suggestions. I really appreciate it.
We need this mainly for self-critiquing, if a good recording comes out of it for a demo (i.e. potential customers or gigs), then that's icing on the cake. We're trying to save as much money as possible and use the equipment we already have until we have the funds to acquire more gear. In the event that we're going to actually cut a record, we'd definitely pay to do it professionally in the studio.
From what I gather, it seems like my challenge here is going to be mic placement in the room that will successfully record the following sounds evenly and balanced with as little audience clutter as possible:
- Voices out of the mains
- Guitar out of the mains
- Ukulele out of the mains
- Grand piano acoustically
Based on the gear that I already have, I think I'm going to use my AKG Perception 220 (which is what I use for recording in my home studio) and Logic Pro through a macbook. There's a small corner in the design of the building that is fairly equidistant between the left mains (all signals are mono, no stereo) and the open-lid-side of the piano. When I set the levels of the mix during sound check, the main goal is to level every other input to the acoustic level of the grand piano so that the audience hears everything in a perfect balance. So, I'm hoping that if I set the AKG in the corner, the reflections of the small corner will help to maintain a balanced recording between the mains and the piano. The audience chatter is not something we can control, but then again, this is not primarily intended for a cut recording, so we should be good.
Thanks everyone, really appreciate this and if I'm successful, I'll see if I can post something for you all to hear. I just didn't know if it would be better/easier/sufficient to recording directly out of the mixer board or do a mic in the audience. For our purposes, we really want to hear what the audience hears to fine-tune as best as we can. I know this will probably take 3 or 4 gigs of trial and prayer with the mic placement so we'll see how it goes, we could get luck in the first shot!
Cheers everyone, thanks again!
PS...Now I'm GAS'in for one of those Tascam recorders, haha!
...
Joe
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