Compression on cell phone recordings.

DrumDoug

DrumDoug

Senior Member
I had a gig last Friday is a smallish, really bright room. I’ve played there before and knew what to expect. I took small, thin cymbals to help control the volume. During the gig I could barely hear the ride and hats. I was wishing I had brought heavier stuff. The next day I see some posts on Facebook where people had taken videos of the band and posted them. The ride and hats and the snare were really loud in the mix. Too loud really. The thing is, I could barely hear them on stage. Only the kick was mic’d. I’ve heard a lot of cell phone videos where my hats and ride seem too loud. I know cell phones use a lot compression to even out speech and make conversations clearer. Could the phone mics be boosting the frequencies of the hats and ride and make them seem louder in the recording than they were in the room? If not, then I have no idea how loud to play on stage. I felt I was totally buried during the gig.
 
I’m going to follow this with interest. Similar thing happened to me a week ago. During sound check I asked the bloke who was doing some mixing, how’s the snare and cymbals sound? Too loud? He said all was ok. When I heard a phone recording of a couple of our songs the ride cymbal really stood out .
 
Phone recordings from the crowd often don't paint an accurate picture. It depends where they are standing from the stage and what kind of phone it is.. some have better audio than others. It might give you a rough idea of the overall sound if they are standing fixed 'in the zone' of audio coming out of the PA..
.. but it's better to record yourself using fixed mics.. either 2 phones on either side or a Zoom recorder placed on a mic in the middle of the stage picks up everything surprisingly well.
 
What you hear onstage and what is heard out in the room, even unmiked, can be two entirely different things. I've played back videos for people who attended shows and most times, people said, "Yes, it pretty much sounded like that." Now, smartphones are generally not lauded for their fidelity, but they can represent an approximation of what it sounds like, imo.



Dan
 
Interesting observations, @DrumDoug. Not sure if this video sheds any new light on things, but it’s pretty crazy how significantly the sound changes as the person filming moves around the venue. It was the venue manager filming and she was using a cellphone. I was playing at a level that sounded and felt good to me from the cockpit, but was of course at the mercy of the FOH guy as to what the crowd was hearing.

Kick, snare and floor tom were mic’d and the only monitor onstage was the singer/keys, and all he had in his fill was vox and keys.

 
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