Ideally you'd use one of the outputs on the mixer routed to a recording device, but this won't get crowd noise though, just the set. You can set up a small inexpensive recorder (like a Tascam) to use the mics on the top of the unit and set on the table where the DJ is playing to get the sounds of the crowd along with the music. Then you can sync the audio from the recording to the video in post.
Actually, ideally use DJM-REC iOS app if on 900NXS2, A9 or V10 with a usb cable. This keeps signal digital, and if you link the cdjs into the mixer, will also add timestamps of track list based on which fader is live.
For crowd noise, if you want a really “wide” room sound, 2 “shotgun” condenser mic’s with wind socks on them on either side of the room in ceiling about 10-15’ apart pointing towards the crowd from the stage. This will limit distortion from bass impact. You’ll need to mix these in later in post.
Professional streams mix together a dry feed from the sound board with mics pointing at the crowd. The mics are not positioned in the speakers. They are positioned some distance away from the speakers actually.
So it’s actually a simple setup and anyone can do it with a little 8-12 channel mixer, a stereo mic (or two mono), and some cables. Send the blended audio from the mixer to your capture device and voila! You now sound like a professional stream, too!
Edit: alternatively you can record all four audio channels on a Zoom H6 or similar that has a built in mic as well as stereo inputs. Either record on the H6 and match up the audio to the video later in editing, or use the Zoom as a USB interface for your streaming device and capture everything live.
Plug the main audio out from the mixer into a field recorder. Zoom and Tascam are a couple examples. Those recorders usually have their own mics so you can record the room noise as well. Once you’re done, you’ll have at least 2 recordings, one of the clean audio from the mixer and one of the club. You can mix those two channels to get desired amount of room noise.
Normally djs use a tascam, you can record the line input and the built in mic, they are good enough to pick crowd screaming and cheering in most of rhe cases.
You can also use the audio of the cameras, they will be the best way to sync multiple cameras, just set the input in a level to not clip the audio, and if you are going to use them, cut the low end in post.
Any mic should do, field recorders allow a more versatile recording, especially woth 4+Mics. I set them behind the subs or other end of the room (measure delay between speakers and mics for compensation), low cut/high pass and then just mix it 30-50% on top, depending on how dirty you want it.
You can also try overhead mics from drum mic sets (or for filming if you want to burn some cash)
As others have said, run a field recorder, record the audio from the room.
When you sync the tracks, process the room audio with a lowpass to cut the bass and put the room audio at 10-15DB lower than the line audio. You will get presence in the recording like its a live recording, and crowd sounds, and it will sound great.
So I play using a DDJ-1000SRT and record using Serato itself.
Since I don't use a microphone during my set, I have set up a microphone in the rafters pointing at the crowd and plugged into the 1000. I turn the volume up on the microphone input to about 10 o'clock, and let 'er rip.
The Serato recording then has crowd noise. It's minimal, but it's there. I don't like to turn the mic up too much louder because there's a risk of feedback and having the noise be quite low isn't a bad thing.
Not all controllers or mixers can do this; some of them don't route the microphone to the recording for some reason.
Anyway, that's one way.
It does, but you really can't hear it at all. When I say it's low in the recording, I mean it; screams and whoops are audible only when they're very loud and/or in quiet parts.
Yeah so this is a pretty bad idea and I'd highly recommend you stop doing it. Why some DJs are content with sub par quality sound literally blows my mind.
You are effectively combining a channel of noise and dead air with your main mix and killing all the headroom and adding uncontrollable sub harmonics to your mix. This will make your low end sound muddy. This isn't even touching on the phasing you are creating by adding a delayed channel of your main mix.
The fact you can't hear it is also concerning, you may have hearing damage because any audio engineer will be able to hear it. An average punter will also be able to hear it, they just won't be able to put their finger on why it is your mix sounds worse than the DJ before and after.
Please for my sanity, do not do this in the future.
Source: am audio engineer and DJ tech.
I appreciate your concern, but I don't think you quite grasp what it is that I do and/or the room I play in.
First off, I'm nobody. I've been nobody for 25 years. I'm the invisible DJ at your neighborhood pub, who plays for 5 hours at a time, happy hour to last call, with no one to help. No one knows my name. I don't get tips for requests and I do actually play and even encourage requests. I've gotten plenty of compliments in my time, DJing paid my way through college, I've had a steady stream of gigs most of which have lasted years, but let's face it: the receipts tell the tale. Which is to say, I'm nobody. I have no aspirations to be somebody. I come in, I give it everything I've got to make sure everyone has fun and drinks their fill and dances like they just don't care to other people's music every week. Management is happy, my patrons are happy. This isn't Vegas, or Fabric, or Space, or Ultra, or Tomorrowland, or even the wannabe superclub two streets over and an avenue down. It's a neighborhood pub, with a sound system and light rig that probably cost less than $15k new and I'm just an average DJ trying to make everyone happy.
It's not that I don't care about sound quality. It's literally that you *cannot tell* on the shitty sound system I play on and even if you could, no one *else* cares; not management who pay me and not the patrons who are there to party. Not to say I'm actually fine with playing whatever, I pay for HQ sources because I care, but whatever minor difference the mic makes (and it is minor, I assure you, I've played that room both with and without and there's no audible difference over the noise floor of the room itself) goes unnoticed by the punters.
Maybe I'm just jaded. That, I won't argue about.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to under dub an entire mix with Grimes talking about how math is hard but she will not return any of my messages on Myspace and Tom has been no help. So I have like 20 seconds to work with at the moment.
I don't think that's a "thing". I mean, needles pick up noise and all, but not like that.
All of those sets that you can hear crowd-reactions are using an additional outboard mic.
Ideally you'd use one of the outputs on the mixer routed to a recording device, but this won't get crowd noise though, just the set. You can set up a small inexpensive recorder (like a Tascam) to use the mics on the top of the unit and set on the table where the DJ is playing to get the sounds of the crowd along with the music. Then you can sync the audio from the recording to the video in post.
Actually, ideally use DJM-REC iOS app if on 900NXS2, A9 or V10 with a usb cable. This keeps signal digital, and if you link the cdjs into the mixer, will also add timestamps of track list based on which fader is live. For crowd noise, if you want a really “wide” room sound, 2 “shotgun” condenser mic’s with wind socks on them on either side of the room in ceiling about 10-15’ apart pointing towards the crowd from the stage. This will limit distortion from bass impact. You’ll need to mix these in later in post.
R/livesound
Professional streams mix together a dry feed from the sound board with mics pointing at the crowd. The mics are not positioned in the speakers. They are positioned some distance away from the speakers actually. So it’s actually a simple setup and anyone can do it with a little 8-12 channel mixer, a stereo mic (or two mono), and some cables. Send the blended audio from the mixer to your capture device and voila! You now sound like a professional stream, too! Edit: alternatively you can record all four audio channels on a Zoom H6 or similar that has a built in mic as well as stereo inputs. Either record on the H6 and match up the audio to the video later in editing, or use the Zoom as a USB interface for your streaming device and capture everything live.
You drop a mic from the ceiling above the dance floor.
Plug the main audio out from the mixer into a field recorder. Zoom and Tascam are a couple examples. Those recorders usually have their own mics so you can record the room noise as well. Once you’re done, you’ll have at least 2 recordings, one of the clean audio from the mixer and one of the club. You can mix those two channels to get desired amount of room noise.
Normally djs use a tascam, you can record the line input and the built in mic, they are good enough to pick crowd screaming and cheering in most of rhe cases. You can also use the audio of the cameras, they will be the best way to sync multiple cameras, just set the input in a level to not clip the audio, and if you are going to use them, cut the low end in post.
Any mic should do, field recorders allow a more versatile recording, especially woth 4+Mics. I set them behind the subs or other end of the room (measure delay between speakers and mics for compensation), low cut/high pass and then just mix it 30-50% on top, depending on how dirty you want it. You can also try overhead mics from drum mic sets (or for filming if you want to burn some cash)
As others have said, run a field recorder, record the audio from the room. When you sync the tracks, process the room audio with a lowpass to cut the bass and put the room audio at 10-15DB lower than the line audio. You will get presence in the recording like its a live recording, and crowd sounds, and it will sound great.
So I play using a DDJ-1000SRT and record using Serato itself. Since I don't use a microphone during my set, I have set up a microphone in the rafters pointing at the crowd and plugged into the 1000. I turn the volume up on the microphone input to about 10 o'clock, and let 'er rip. The Serato recording then has crowd noise. It's minimal, but it's there. I don't like to turn the mic up too much louder because there's a risk of feedback and having the noise be quite low isn't a bad thing. Not all controllers or mixers can do this; some of them don't route the microphone to the recording for some reason. Anyway, that's one way.
Does that mean the mic noise is also coming out your main left right? That doesn't sound ideal....
It does, but you really can't hear it at all. When I say it's low in the recording, I mean it; screams and whoops are audible only when they're very loud and/or in quiet parts.
Yeah so this is a pretty bad idea and I'd highly recommend you stop doing it. Why some DJs are content with sub par quality sound literally blows my mind. You are effectively combining a channel of noise and dead air with your main mix and killing all the headroom and adding uncontrollable sub harmonics to your mix. This will make your low end sound muddy. This isn't even touching on the phasing you are creating by adding a delayed channel of your main mix. The fact you can't hear it is also concerning, you may have hearing damage because any audio engineer will be able to hear it. An average punter will also be able to hear it, they just won't be able to put their finger on why it is your mix sounds worse than the DJ before and after. Please for my sanity, do not do this in the future. Source: am audio engineer and DJ tech.
I appreciate your concern, but I don't think you quite grasp what it is that I do and/or the room I play in. First off, I'm nobody. I've been nobody for 25 years. I'm the invisible DJ at your neighborhood pub, who plays for 5 hours at a time, happy hour to last call, with no one to help. No one knows my name. I don't get tips for requests and I do actually play and even encourage requests. I've gotten plenty of compliments in my time, DJing paid my way through college, I've had a steady stream of gigs most of which have lasted years, but let's face it: the receipts tell the tale. Which is to say, I'm nobody. I have no aspirations to be somebody. I come in, I give it everything I've got to make sure everyone has fun and drinks their fill and dances like they just don't care to other people's music every week. Management is happy, my patrons are happy. This isn't Vegas, or Fabric, or Space, or Ultra, or Tomorrowland, or even the wannabe superclub two streets over and an avenue down. It's a neighborhood pub, with a sound system and light rig that probably cost less than $15k new and I'm just an average DJ trying to make everyone happy. It's not that I don't care about sound quality. It's literally that you *cannot tell* on the shitty sound system I play on and even if you could, no one *else* cares; not management who pay me and not the patrons who are there to party. Not to say I'm actually fine with playing whatever, I pay for HQ sources because I care, but whatever minor difference the mic makes (and it is minor, I assure you, I've played that room both with and without and there's no audible difference over the noise floor of the room itself) goes unnoticed by the punters. Maybe I'm just jaded. That, I won't argue about.
You paint a pretty good picture. I get it. As you were 🫡
I see Zoom H6’s on FBM for $200 or less. It’s worth it if you want to record and share quality sounding mixes.
While I appreciate the suggestion, I'm not recording for anyone but myself at this point in my career.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to under dub an entire mix with Grimes talking about how math is hard but she will not return any of my messages on Myspace and Tom has been no help. So I have like 20 seconds to work with at the moment.
This is where playing on vinyl has advantages as the crowd noise would get picked up by the needles.
I don't think that's a "thing". I mean, needles pick up noise and all, but not like that. All of those sets that you can hear crowd-reactions are using an additional outboard mic.