Re:live Recordings owner Rob Baldock spends his time travelling around the UK recording live performances and interviews by acts such as One Direction, Foo Fighters, Kasabian and Labrinth for video production company, LiveFi. Lately, he has been perfecting his gear set-up and is currently testing six Audient ASP880 eight-channel mic preamplifiers.
‘It’s based around two RME FireFace UFX and a MacBook Pro running Reaper for recording,’ he says of his set-up. ‘The Audients fit in great – D-Sub out of the first one to analogue in on the FireFace and then Adat out for the other two… repeat for the second rack/FireFace.
‘I did a live EP with The Shires at The Green Note in Camden,’ he continues. ‘This was the first time I decided to go out with just the Audients and the RME. The brilliant thing for me was that it ended up being such a portable rack that I could take the train down to London and not have to drive.’
Happy not to have to find parking in Camden, Baldock also appreciated the smaller footprint of the equipment, as each ASP880 takes up 1U of rack space. ‘I covered one of the stages for the BBC at 6Music Festival in Newcastle for Mark Radcliffe’s folk show on Radio 2. We didn’t have much room in the venue, so I just went with the Audients and RME and it worked flawlessly.
‘I love how clean the ASP880 pres are,’ he adds. ‘When you’re recording loud bands they sound superb, but also, if you need loads of gain – like for recording interviews with lapel mics – they continue to sound really clean all the way up to the top.’
Baldock and his kit recently spent a weekend at Nottingham’s Splendour festival, where for the past three years Re:live Recordings has been hired by local TV station, Notts TV to multitrack all artists on the main stage. ‘We mix one or two songs from each act for their Splendour Specials, which air on the channel. This year we had James and The Specials as the two main headliners,’ he says. ‘I have had 24 channels of Audient ASP008s for a few years now, along with 24 channels of another brand of mic pre. Splendour main stage is usually a 48-way patch, but more often than not you can fit most bands into 24-32 channels and so I can usually work around making sure the most important bits go through the best sounding pres,’ he explains. ‘This year, with The Specials headlining – such a big band with strings and brass added to the usual drums, bass, two guitar, keys and vocal line up – it was around 46 channels in all and I wanted to make sure all the pre-amps matched.
‘I did wonder with the combination of the RME doing some conversion and the ASP880s doing some too, that it might sound different to what I’m used to or there may be clocking issues, but it all sounded really great,’ he reports.
He is now scheduled to finish off a DVD for the latest Ginger Wildheart PledgeMusic campaign, ‘...his story-telling show talking about 20 years as a songwriter’, and a variety of other plans that he ‘can’t talk about’.
More: www.audient.com
