Couple of weeks back i had to record very loud drums for a documentary.I was carrying a SHURE two track mixer wired to a TASCAM two track recorder.I gave one output to the camera and one to the recorder.I gave a 1kHz tone from the mixer and aligned to -12dB in the recorder.I was recording almost 10 loud drums simultaneously and was monitoring from 20 feet away.The needle in the mixer (it was a VU meter and i could hardly handle the rotary knob of the mixer since for a small opening of the fader the level in the recorder was very high) was hardly fluctuating and it was showing more than -12dB in the recorder.I could hardly hear anything in the headphone due to near field monitoring.Finally the recording sounded just fine except at few places where it clipped.There was no gain cut in the mixer and i engaged the limiter in the recorder ( even though there was one in the output of the mixer also).
How could have i dealt the situation better ?