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A live album is a recording consisting of material (usually music) recorded during stage performances, commonly contrasted with a studio album. Live albums may be recorded at a single concert, or combine recordings made at multiple concerts.
Live albums usually have a less "finished" character than a studio album, and are intended to reproduce some of the experience of attending a concert performance. As such, they may include applause and other noise from the audience, comments by the performers between pieces and so on. They often employ multitrack recording direct from the stage sound system (rather than microphones placed among the audience), and can employ additional manipulation and effects during post-production to enhance the quality of the recording. Live albums also sometimes contain an unreleased or never-before-heard studio track.
Additionally, several classical artists and ensembles use empty venues to record what would otherwise be termed studio recordings. An example of this is Walthamstow Town Hall in London.
In jam music, however, live recordings play a much larger role. Since, as in jazz, improvisation is such an important aspect of jam music, every performance is different and unique. Therefore, live albums from these artists offer not just the "concert experience", but new and unique musical ideas that cannot be experienced on studio albums. Many fans attempt to acquire as many live recordings from these bands as possible in order to have a complete musical collection. This leads many jam artists to release many more live albums than studio recordings. Notably, the band the Grateful Dead have released well over 100 different live albums documenting almost every part of their entire 30-year career, while only releasing 13 studio albums. Some bands, such as Show of Hands, prefer to release live albums as their debut albums.
In recent times, many live albums come with a live DVD. Examples include Green Day's Bullet in a Bible, Linkin Park's Road to Revolution, and Muse's HAARP amongst others.
Typical concert recordings are approached one of three ways: The “Stereo Pair” approach where two microphones are set up usually in or near the audience giving a result that is somewhat similar to what you would hear if you were in the crowd at that performance. This is a minimalist approach that sounds very authentic and will include the sounds of the environment and audience, for better or worse.
The “Board Feed” approach where the mix generated by the sound mixer is sent to a recorder. This is another quick and easy way to obtain a recording with minimal effort other than the permission of the band and venue, and a portable recorder. However, this recording would not include any instrumentation that did not require amplification (like a drum set in a small room) and probably would not include any natural nuance or audience reactions .
Then there is the “Multitrack Recording” approach that captures each microphone and instrument separately to be mixed later in a studio environment. Additional microphones are placed throughout the venue to capture not only the audience reactions but also to blend in the sound of the band in the space. This results in a cleaner sounding recording of the performance than either of the previous methods, but requires far more equipment and expertise.
Each approach has benefits and disadvantages. Multitrack Recording requires a lot more equipment and technical expertise but yields a much higher quality product. The stereo pair approach has a much smaller footprint and less impact on the band and venue but can be compromised by environmental conditions such as a rowdy crowd or a venue with acoustical anomalies. The board feed approach is also quite simple, but produces a less nuanced product than the other two methods.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
