Good room, good mics, what more do you need?

Just got back from recording two live band sessions for BBC Introducing. Sounding pretty good considering... Considering that is the whole evening takes four hours and in that time me and my colleague take all the gear to the venue we use (a church building) setup record two bands and then pack up and put it all away.

We're getting pretty good results too. Often as good as those from much higher profile and better equipped studio facilities on big bucks network radio. Partly that's down to our extreme skill (we're modest too) but mainly it's about the space.

Half decent instruments in a good space with some reasonable mics are going to sound good. Get the space wrong and you spend an age messing about trying polish that particular turd.

We're lucky in that the mics we have are good ones. So even though the mixing desk is cheap and the compressors are Behringer (shudder) the results are still pretty good.

Roland Digital Snake - a thing of wonder

Anyone who's done a significant amount of live sound or location recording will be familiar with the joys of lugging around huge heavy multicore cables. This is the way of getting the signals from the stage to the mixing desk. Good quality cable is expensive and cable of any quality is heavy. Then you have the interference and loss problems of long cable runs, especially when lighting's involved.

Bring on the (relatively) affordable Roland Digital Snake. It uses gigabit ethernet to link the stage and front of house boxes. The stage box contains mic preamps, so low level mic signals don't have very far to go. Then it's all converted to digital at 96k 24-bit. Nice.

At the other end there's a front of house box that brings it back out in analogue. There's a simple controller that lets you set the channel gain, pad and switch phantom power. The base system is 16 channels with eight returns. At approaching £2000 it's considerably more expensive than a long piece of cable, but far more flexible.

For example if you're working in a building with structured cabling installed, you can run the digital snake through that (although don't plug it into a network or you'll upset people as it all stops working). You can have the boxes 100m apart, but if you fancy going further, just stick a gigabit ethernet switch in the middle and go another 100m.

Having played with one of these for a few jobs it just works. Roland have kept it simple and done a great job of building something that's really as easy as it could be.

The only criticisms I have are: the controller isn't always as reponsive as I'd like. When you switch channels it takes about a second before you can change the gain. Not a problem really, but slightly irritating. I'd really like the FOH box to have ADAT outputs. Digital desks are very common these days so by breaking out in analogue there's another unneccessary digital conversion.

These are small gripes however, it works, it's light, and... well, that's enough.