This April, Warner affiliate About Records (www.aboutrecords.com) set out to track their flagship artist, Tim Hockenberry, who writes, arranges, plays terrific keys, doubles on trombone, and sings like a hybrid of Joe Cocker and Ray Charles. Tim’s a total pro in front of the mic onstage and in the booth, but producer George Daly wasn’t happy with the results they were getting from the Nashville studio they had used for demos. The band array wasn’t unusual: bass, guitar, drums, vocals, and Tim’s Yamaha P120 digital piano. They, like you, were after the best of both worlds: the feel of a live concert and the audio quality of a studio recording.

Enter Skywalker Sound, George Lucas’ state-of-the-galaxy post-production facility in the verdant hills of Marin County, 45 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The virtual tours at www.skysound.com will hint at why the record company decided to pony up for a recorded live concert on the facility’s main scoring stage. Just the band, 100 lucky guests, and the hors d’oeuvres. The force was definitely with them.

Tim and his crew were lucky to secure Skywalker’s director of music and scoring, Leslie Ann Jones, as their recording engineer for the session. Much of America’s musical zeitgeist in the last 25 years has flowed through the faders under the talented fingers of Ms. Jones, who’s worked with everyone from Herbie Hancock to Miles Davis to Carlos Santana. As a teenage musician in Los Angeles, she got her industry start renting out her PA to other acts and doing sound for their gigs and sessions. So the live music ethic is in her blood — and she generously gave us unfettered access to her process.

THE GEAR

Every note came through high-end mics and direct boxes into an assortment of preamps, a Neve 88R mixing console, then Digidesign Pro Tools. During tracking, Jones employed minimal EQ, and no compression or limiting. Boutique preamps included Neve model 1081s and an Avalon VT-737SP on Tim’s lead vocal.

From the analog outputs on the Pro Tools interfaces, raw signal was routed to a 56-channel Clark sound reinforcement board at the rear of the room. So there were two completely independent mixing consoles — one for recording and one for live sound.

In addition to each instrument having its own track in ProTools, Leslie also tracked a pair of Neumann TLM-170 mics that were hung relatively close to the PA speakers, and a classic and coveted AKG stereo mic, the C24, in the back of the theater to capture audience sound. She also ran a live stereo mix into a 1/2" analog tape recorder and a CD recorder to give the artists and producers a rough mix to listen to on their drive home.

What didn’t Leslie use? A high sample rate, for starters — the Pro Tools session ran at 24 bits and 44.1kHz. Her only significant compromise was to swap out her prized (and enormous) Telefunken vocal mic for a small but high-quality Neumann KMS-105 that let the audience see Tim’s face. Since the usual tools of acoustic isolation — gobos, baffles, putting guitar amps in an isolation booth, and so on — would have interfered with the musicians’ eye contact, not to mention a concert-like stage presentation, the production team didn’t use them. As it turned out, separation between tracks was greater than expected because of the sheer size of the scoring stage: A rule of thumb is that the bigger the room, the less of a problem reflections pose to close-miked instruments.

THE TECHNIQUES

Bummed that your band can’t afford a musical Valhalla? Don’t be. Here are some tips for getting a strong recording when you can’t show up on George Lucas’ doorstep.

If at all possible, don’t try to engineer and play at the same time. If you have a recording rig that’s independent of the live mixing console, hire, beg, or blackmail someone to run it while you perform, give them an accurate set list with song descriptions, and make sure to flag who takes what solos in what order. Even better, have them rehearse with the band at least for one set, so they can better anticipate dynamic shifts and instrument changes. If the live console is part of your recording chain, give the live engineer a well-annotated set list, 50 bucks, and buy his or her drinks for the night. It can’t hurt.

What about overloads? In a real-world situation, you probably won’t have enough compressors for every channel in a multitrack recording. But you can put one trusty compressor/limiter on the lead vocal. Set it for a fast attack to catch the occasional spike. (See “Compressor Crash Course” and “Dynamic Priorities” at www.keyboardmag.com/0707110 for more on compression during live recording.) You can also put an extra mic on the vocalist, at a lower gain, and not assign it to the main live mix. The sound tech can ignore this track, but if you find places in the primary track with digital distortion when you play back the raw take, you’ve got a backup track to mix forward.