Mobile recording truck

Remote recording, also known as location recording, is the act of making a high-quality complex audio recording of a live concert performance, or any other location recording that uses multitrack recording techniques outside of a recording studio. The multitrack recording is then carefully mixed, and the finished result is called a remote recording or a live album. This is in contrast to a field recording which uses few microphones, recorded onto the same number of channels as the intended product. Remote recording is not the same as remote broadcast for which multiple microphones are mixed live and broadcast during the performance, typically to stereo. Remote recording and remote broadcast may be carried out simultaneously by the same crew using the same microphones.

One important benefit of a remote recording is that the performers will respond to the audience; they will not be as distracted by the recording process. Another reason for a remote recording is to capture an artist in a different acoustic space such as a church, ballroom or meeting hall.

To make a remote recording, studio-quality recording equipment is trucked to the concert venue and connected to the concert microphones with a bank of microphone splitters. Other microphones may be added. The individual microphone signals are routed to separate tracks.

A remote recording is often made using a specially built remote truck: a rolling recording studio carrying a mixing console, studio monitors and multitrack recorders. Beginning modestly in 1958, recording engineer Wally Heider developed and popularized the use of a remote truck in California in the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Remote recording developed out of the practice of making field recordings with high-quality equipment. The earliest such recordings were crude, undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with Ralph Peer in 1923. Peer carried a disc-cutting machine and recorded musicians directly to disc. From 1941 Alan Lomax became known for the field recordings he made of the various musical traditions carried to or created in the United States. In the 1950s, advances in microphones, mixers and tape recorders allowed more sophisticated equipment to be carried to a concert location, including more microphones, tape recorders with more tracks, and possibly a mixing console to mix multiple microphones down to fewer recorded tracks.

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Wikipedia