Recording Al Green

The Sydney Festival is on at the moment.  I recorded Al Green at the state theatre in Sydney.  That was a pretty exciting gig to do.
We set up in the dressing room under the stage and were able to drop the cables through a hole in the floor.  We used the Sadie LRX.  It was a pretty big lineup - 40 channels in all.  Drums, bass, guitar, 2 keyboard players, trumpet, trombone, saxaphone, 4 backing singers.

Here's some pics of the sound check.

I went for the 2 performances which was lucky because the first night he was in a bit of a bad mood.  But night 2 was great. I was able to go and watch bits of the show from side stage.  And on the second night, because I already had the levels set from the first night I was able to nick out the front for a bit to watch the show.  The only problems i had was a badly distorted vocoder on the first night because I didn't get a level check of it, but Al hated it so much he banned it from the show.  Then on the second night I had a bit of a scare when the show started and it appeared like we didn't have Al's mic coming through.  When I investigated I found out that his radio mic had had it's output level switched lower and no one had told me so the level coming into my recorder was way too low. 

Here's the channel list with mic choice and inserts.

AL GREEN INPUT LIST


1 KICK BETA 52 GATE 1

2 SNARE TOP BETA 57 COMP 1

3 SNARE BOT SM 57 GATE 2

4 HAT SM 81

5 RACK 1 BETA 98 GATE 3

6 RACK 2 BETA 98 GATE 4

7 FLR 1 BETA 98 GATE 5

8 FLR 2 BETA 98 GATE 6

9 OH SR SM 81

10 OH SL SM 81

11 CONGA 1 BETA 98 SUB GROUP 1&2 COMP 3-4

12 CONGA 2 BETA 98

13 BONGOS BETA 98

14 TIMBALES SM 57

15 CHIMES SM 81

16 TOYS SM 81 SUB GROUP !&2 COMP 3-4

17 BASS ACTIVE DI COMP 2

18 GTR SENN 609

19 GTR SENN 609

20 LESLIE L 57

21 LESLIE R 57

22 LESLIE LOW 421

23 PNO L AKG 414 OR DI

24 PNO R AKG 414 OR DI

25 MOTIF 8 ES L DI

26 MOTIF 8 ES R DI

27 TRITON L DI

28 TRITON R DI

29 MOTIF 8 L DI

30 MOTIF 8 R DI

31 RHOADES DI

32 VOCODER 58

33 SAX 421 COMP 5

34 TRUMPET 421 COMP 6

35 TROMBONE RE 20 COMP 7

36 COOP KSM 9 COMP 8

37 DEBRA KSM 9 COMP 9

38 RUBY KSM 9 COMP 10

39 AL GREEN WIRELESS KSM 9 COMP 11

40 AL GREEN SPARE WIRELESS KSM 9 COMP 12

Mixing Garage Hymnal

Last week I had a very short amount of time to mix the Garage Hymnal sessions for the broadcast on ABC.  Yes I was recording them for work purposes, not just for fun.  They'll be broadcast on our religious music program this Friday night at 2105.  Radio people always talk in 24hr time.  We are clever in that way.  Click here to find your fequency to listen to them.

Anyway, because we are churning out so much stuff all the time we don't spend heaps of time doing stuff.  If I was mixing this session for an album release or something, I would have spent up to a day per song for mixing.  Not because I'm slow, it just takes that long to get all the details right.  But for this radio broadcast, I spent a day and a half on 7 songs.  Then I spent a couple of hours mastering it.  So it's a little rough, but it's meant to sound live anyway, otherwise you might as well just stick on the album.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out considering the time limitations.  I would like to go back in sometime and do a bit of polishing, just for my own satisfaction.

So, some tricks in the mix.  Don't tell the drummer, but I replaced the kick drum with a sample, thanks to the Drumagog plugin.  It's really good because it replaces things sentitively and takes into account changes in dynamics, so it's not all the same level hits.  It follows how the player played it.

Reverbs I used were the M6000 - 4 different engines going at once, plus the Lexicon 224.  It is a bit of a luxury having so much expensive reverb to choose from.

The SSL automation is really nice and easy to use.  And because the desk is fully digital I can go abck and recall all my mixes and tweak them anytime.  The only problem is finding studio availability.

I had a bit of trouble getting the bottom end right becasue this was the first time I've mixed on the new speakers we have in the studio.  they are Dynaudio Acoustics Airs.  These are really nice speakers, but I just wasn't used to them so the bass is a bit out of whack.  I really want to go back and fix that especially.

Here's some more photos from the session on the GH facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Garage-Hymnal/9949777114?ref=mf#/album.php?aid=133102&id=9949777114

kora 2

I found some proper photos of a kora from a different gig I did. This was the Blue Mountains Music Festival in 2008. I took these photos with a Canon 400d with 50mm 1.8 lens.

Here's a close up shot. See the nice detail on the back of the gourd and the many strings.


A shot of the guy performing. Sorry I really can't remember his name, but he comes from Mali in west Africa. Don't you love the silver curtain?


And here he is pre-performance, tuning up. Those viney looking rings on the pole looking thing get pushed up and down to tune the strings. Very difficult process.

And here you can see his thumb work. That's how they play, plucking with both extremly strong thumbnails. They are probably reinforced, like flamenco guitarists nails.

kora

I was looking through some old pics I took on my dodgy phone camera and found this photo of a kora player Ba Cissiko, from Guinea in west Africa. I recorded his band at the Opera House a few years ago.  The kora is that thing the guy is holding in front of him.  It's made from a gourd and plucked really quickly with both thumb nails.

I wish I still had the rider for that gig as it was something else. In Guinea they speak French, and whoever had translated the rider into English must have just used an online translater, because there was some really weird stuff going on.   The technical requirements included requests for the facade and ring roads.   Not normally the language of tech specs.  One assumes the facade was meant to refer to front of house and ring roads was referring to auxiliaries.

But the best bit was the request for 8 foot baths on stage.  Martin audio foot baths even.  Fold back, foot baths, they're all the same!

Vic Simms

Last week Vic Simms' recording of "The Loner" was added to the National Film and Sound Archives Sounds of Australia. I personally find this significant because I recorded Vic in 2007, for a special recording of some the Loner tracks which he has hardly revisited in the last 30 years. Vic is an indigenous Australian who became a recording artist at 15 years of age. In 1973 he found himself in jail and RCA took a mobile recording unit in and he recorded "The Loner" album. Click here for more info on Vic.

And to hear the program we made about the ABC recording sessions with Vic talking about his experiences and bits of the recordings I made click here. Unfortunately the online audio is a bit distorted, not my fault.

Cooking With Sound Part 2

Today's lesson - mud.

Cooking with Sound

Earlier this year I posted some behind the scene pics of making a short film which I did the filming of. Well it's finally up on youtube. Pick the shot where we forgot to turn the lights on. What a bunch of amateurs! And spot my cameo appearance at the end.

sonny rollins

And on that note, have realised I haven't posted about the Sonny concert last year.  This was the one and only time he has been to Australia and only played in Sydney.  Pretty crazy coming all that way and only playing one show.  He could easily have sold out a show in Melbourne.  Anyway, I was privileged enough to see him.

Sonny Rollins is one of the most influential jazz sax players ever and hit the big time as a soloist back in the 50s.  So he's getting on a bit now.  Last year he was 78.

I was sitting up in one of the side boxes just in front of the stage, but up high, so soundwise it was great because a lot of the acoustic sound from stage came up.  A friend who was sitting on the floor in the 6th row said it was really loud, whereas where I was it was a pleasant level, not too amplified.

He waddled on stage and proceeded to play with his back towards me and I was worried he was going to play like that all night, but he did turn around.  

Here's a review from the SIMA website.

The set list as listed on his website was...

Sydney Opera House
Sydney Australia
June 1, 2008

1. They Say It's Wonderful
2. Someday I'll Find You
3. In A Sentimental Mood
4. St. Thomas
5. Half As Much
6. Sonny, Please
7. As Long As There's Music

Encore: 
Why Was I Born

funky fred 2

I've decided I need to say more about fred.

He used to be music director for James Brown and also played in Funkadelic.  And for lots of other cool people.

Seeing a gig like that really makes me appreciate living in Sydney.  I complain a lot about it being too big and busy, but for that reason, we get artists playing here who would never go to Brisbane.  Fred didn't play Brisbane. I've seen other artists who didn't go to Brisbane too - Sonny Rollins for example.

I loved the syncronised movement of Fred with his trumpet player - it looked cool.

At one stage everyone had their hands in the air.  I was wondering if we were in church all of a sudden.

The bass player had knobs on his bass that glowed.

funky fred

The other night, with blocked ears I went and saw Fred Wesley play at the basement. That dodgy picture was taken with my phone.  What a great show.  They pulled out the tables from the floor in front of the stage and packed out the venue.  We got a good posy up the back on the steps leading up the back door so we had a full view.  I hate not being able to see so this was good and we weren't really packed in back there so plenty of room to move and not feel claustrophobic.

Fred plays trombone and had a band consisting of trumpet, bass, guitar and drums.  Plus a local girl got up and played trombone on a couple of tunes.  She was great.

So it was a full on funk show.  But they started of with a couple of jazz numbers in a chill out mood and then got stuck into chameleon, before playing Fred's own tunes.

Lines to remember were - "bop till you boogie boogie till you bop bop till you boogie bop bop",

"breakin bread with my momma breakin bread with my momma breakin bread",

"same beat"  which sounded like "saint pete".

Anyway, good times.  And I didn't need ear plugs because I couldn't hear properly anyway.  I wonder if fluid in your middle ear offers the same ear protection as earplugs in the outer ear do?

Oud

Last week I went to St Stephen's Newtown to record oud with jazz piano. Jo Tawadros was playing with Matt McMahon on piano, plus some percussion and clarinet.
We had our new Sadie LRX to record with. It's great because it's tiny and lets us record 48 channels via USB to a laptop. No more lugging around huge mixing desks or racks of preamps and huge hard disk recorder.

On the oud I had a Schoeps CMC5-U cardioid mic.

Piano had DPA 4021 piano kit mics.

Percussion and clarinet had Sennheiser MKH40s.

No free food.


That's the oud with the percussionist behind.

Sydney Writer's Festival

I know this is a bit behind time, but I thought I’d write a little bit about the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May. This was a really big event for me because I had to co-ordinate 24 recordings, plus organize 2 live to air broadcasts.
Most of the recordings happened over a 4 day period and involved 7 different engineers, 4 PA companies, 9 venues, and it all took quite a bit of work ensuring everything was going to be OK.
The big thing with my network, Radio National is we don’t like to just take splits from the front of house mix. Sometimes it can be hard to convince PA companies that this isn’t good enough for us, because it seems to be good enough for every other media network. But we at RN are more interested in top audio quality than anywhere else, so we don’t just do what everyone else does. So why is a split from front of house not good enough? Often the mix that sounds ok in the room on the sound system does not sound good as a recording, for these reasons -
1. The balance between different mics may sound fine in the room, but record it and the levels are often all over the place.
2. If the room is not very big, you hear a lot acoustically anyway, so the PA levels can be a little bit wonky without affecting how well people can hear what’s going on on stage, but recordings can be really rotten.
3. PA operators often love to mix with mute buttons – this sounds awful on a recording – we like smooth fade ins and outs.
4. PA operators cut everything as soon as the last words are spoken, so you don’t get any applause or ambience for your recording – things which make for a nice radio program.
5. If the room acoustics are out of control, you get PA operators doing harsh EQs on voices to try and stop feedback, so you get thin, awful sounding voices on your recording.
6. If you have several mics open at once you can get a very echoey recording. This might be fine through the PA but not for us. We like to mix out any mics which aren’t being used at the time. PA operators often just turn everything up and leave them up.

So therefore, what we need to do is put splitters in so that we have control over the level of every mic coming off stage, independent of what the PA mixer is doing. We split all channels and then have our own mixer and mix our own wonderful recordings and then it doesn’t matter how bad the front of house mix is, ours will still be OK. That’s as long as they don’t have heaps of feedback and crazy noises as they will still go on our recording.

So I had lots of equipment to organize, lots of PA companies to liaise with, lots of discussions with Festival people etc. I was flat out for over 3 weeks on this. You wouldn’t think there was that much to do but there was. Plus I had to look after all the risk assessments for OH&S and this took ages with all the site inspections and paperwork.

I’ll talk about the live to airs in another post.

Mixing the Messiah

I had 2 days in P63, so I loaded all the files up on Pro tools and had a listen. (for the report on the recording process seee this post...click here

Here was my dilemma - the spaced omnis sounded better in stereo and MS pair sounded better in mono. And we broadcast in mono, but will podcast in stereo, and when we go to digital radio soon we will be stereo. So which do I use?
I ended up using the MS pair and lushing it up as much as possible. It was a lot drier than the omnis, so I added some Lexicon 224 rich chamber. I boosted a bit of top end around 5k upwards. And added a bit of bass.
The only spot mic I used in the mix was the double bass.
And then I mixed in the choir mics, which doubled as soloists mics. These had to be mixed in to varying degrees as the different soloists were not all the same loudness. It was interesting how little of the vocals came through the main stereo pair. They were there, but nowhere near enough clarity and level, so it was good to have the vocal mics there.
I listened to several different recordings of the messiah. I heard one really awfull one where they mixed the vocals so up front it sounded like they were in a small studio. I wanted mine to still sound like they were part of the same acoustic space as the orchestra, so i turned up the mics, but no so much that they took over.
I put some light compression of the vocal mics, just to keep a bit of control, but apart from that, being a classical recording, I let the dynamics of the music do their thing.
The only other adjustments i needed to make were the few sections the timpani played in. I had flatten the bottom end out because it was too full on with the timpani. Oh actually i did compress the orchestra little bit in these sections too.
I recorded the stereo mix back onto protools. Basically I just let it run once i got my balance right, stopping occasionally to fix levels if needed.


Piccies below - this first one is the stereo bar.
The 2 outer mics are the MKH20 omnis.
Working your way inwards, the next 2 are the MKH40 cardioids. See how their capsules touch the omnis so that you could wind some of these signals in with the omnis and not have any phase problems. This could give you some more directivity if the omnis were sounding too washed out. But I didn't end up using these at all. If I had gone with the omnis, I wouldn't have used any of the cardioid, because the room was surprisingly dry for a big old church.
Then in the middle, you can't see so well, there is MKH30 fig8 sitting on top of MKH40 making the MS pair.




You can see the 4 mics across the choir. That's not all of the choir members. The spacing looks a bit strange from this angle.
That's the harpsichord in the middle infront of the conductor.


You can see the chamber orchestra in this one in front of the choir.

James Hunter

The night after doing the Messiah recording LM and I had to set up in 227 for a live recording with an audience of a british git called James Hunter. I'd never heard of him but apparently he is quite popular, doing 60's style blues/rock.

I was mixing the PA and LM was mixing the recording. So we had to set up a PA. Dig were also there with 3 cameras to film the event.

James was just doing a solo act with his Electric guitar, singing and stomping his foot.

The audience came in at 6:30 and he started playing at about 6:40. All was going along nicely and then a bit before 7:00 he says "thanks for coming this is my last one". And it was all over. Everyone was looking a bit surprised when he walked out. He came back for an encore, but yep the whole thing was over by about 7. That was really the shortest gig I have ever seen. It was completely bizarre. Not much of a night out for the audience.

We ate the leftovers from the green room afterwards.

Recording Handel's Messiah

This has to be one of the highlights of my career.  The performance took place at St James Anglican Church, King St Sydney.  This is a very traditional old church with a paid church choir.  They augmented the choir with some extra singers and hired a bunch of Baroque musicians.  I didn't know that the Messiah has been performed with lots of different size ensembles.  The original performance took place in Dublin with a small baroque ensemble in something like 1742.  This performance was a similar version, with only about 6 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, 1 bass, 2 trumpets, timpani, organ and harpsicord.  There were only about 20 people in the choir.  Some recordings have hundreds of voices and a huge orchestra.

So after chatting to Classic FM engineers it became evident that this was a much bigger job than i expected.  A stereo pair just wasn't going to cut it.  I multitracked it so it gave me a chance to experiment with several different mic techniques.

So here's what I had - 

On a stereo bar just behind the conductor were a pair of spaced omnis -  MKH20's

Plus a pair or ORTF cardioids - MKH 40's

Plus an ms pair - MKG 30 fig 8 and and MKH 40 cardiod.

This gave a choice between the spaced omnis and the ms pair as my main stereo pair.  The cardiods were there to wind into the mix if I went with the spaced omnis.  The purpose being to give a bit more direct sound if needed.  The capsules were as close to the omnis as possible in order to keep good phase.

Then I had 4 MKH40s spaced across in front of the choir, one in front of each section of the choir.  The 2 middle ones were angled to pick up the soloists who moved into position in front of these mics.

I tried putting 2 outriggers as suggested, position out wide in front of the orchestra but found that these didn't really add much except noise.

I put a spot mic on the organ, timpani, and double bass.

we set up out the back in the vestry with a 16 channel Allen and Heath desk recording onto a Mackie HDR and monitoring with a little set of Genelecs.

The performance wasn't perfect but it was really good.  The musicians were spot on.  The only thing that let it down were some of the soloists.  But they are really difficult pieces to sing.

And most importantly, did we get a free feed?  Yes!  We got soup under the church.  There was a choice of chicken or fish soup.  I chose chicken and it definitely had pieces of chicken in it, but it tasted like fish.  I think whoever made the soup got them a bit mixed up.

In the studio last week

First I had the stomping banjo player. Old man luedeke.
His banjo didn’t have a resonator, it was just an open backed thing. He had his own mic installed inside. It sounded quite good, but I mixed in a bit of My microtech geffel from in front about a foot away just to add a bit of air. He was also stomping his foot as part of the sound, but on our parquetry floor just sounded like a bit of a slap, so I pointed a mic at his foot and wound out the top end, so it sounded like more of a thud than a slap.

Then I had Jenny Lewis. She turned up with her acoustic guitar, and another acoustic guitar player and a lap steel player. This is how you trick the engineer – sound check the song with 2 acoustic guitars, both with a blend of pickup and mic. Then when you go live to air, only have one guitar and don’t plug in the pickup. So I went from 4 channels of acoustic in sound check, down to 1 channel on air, without any warning. Yep thanks for that one. She has a great voice.

Blue mountains music festival

2 weekends ago DB and I went up the Blue Mountains music Festival to do a live to air broadcast. The plan was to record a duo from England, While and Matthews, at 7. Then at 8:05pm go live with and Australian Folk/rock group called Bluehouse. Then at 8:30 ish we would playback some of the recording of While and Matthews till 9pm. It was a great plan, except that there were huge problems with the PA, so While and Matthews didn’t start playing till 7:45, meaning that there was no way that Bluehouse were going to be ready to play at 8:05 and we wouldn’t have enough recorded material by then of While and Matthews to play at the top of the show. So after some mild panic, we cued up a recording of a recording made the previous weekend at another festival to play at 8:05. In the meantime we recorded While and Matthews and edited up a section to play back at 8:30. Finally Bluehouse got on stage and then at 8:45 we crossed to them live to play out the rest of the show. So, not what we planned but it all worked out fine.

We split all the channels from stage so we could do an independant mix on an Allen and Heath console. Then the mix output was split 3 ways. The first split was to get to the ISDN encoder. This is a little thing we call the Glensound, which looks like a mixer and has an ISDN output for sending the signal back to the ABC master control. We had a line run over to the Clarendon otel, which Telstra had set up for us. Well, they installed the line, but we had to run it over to the backstage area, so DB was climbing the ladder hoisting the cable in the air so that it was off the ground and not in danger of tripping anyone up.
Split 2 went to the laptop with Wavelab for recording the music mix. Split 3 went to a portable hard disk recorder, to be a back up recorder and also to be primary recorder while we were playing off wavelab.

The presenter was backstage with us doing live announcements. DB looked after the music mix and I looked after the broadcast mix.

We stayed the night at the Clarendon motel. It was really nice to not have to drive back after the show. We got to pack up and then sit and relax over a glass of wine and not rush to get back.


The back view of the mess we made.


Starting from the left - laptop with Wavelab,
Little black box - sound devices USB interface for getting the audio into the laptop,
CD player,
Glensound,
underneath the glensound - rack of compressors and lexicon reverb.
Allen and heath mixer.

Mixing Camille

Last week I mixed the Camille concert I recorded during the Sydney Festival at Hyde Park Barracks. It’s the 1st time I’ve used the newly revamped P63 studio which has a new SSL C200 console and a super powerful Pro-Tools rig. I was a bit unsure about this as a mixdown suite at first as it is all completely digital. I thought a few 1176’s and pultecs would be nice especially for mixing music. But I’m really happy how my mix turned out. Plug ins of note are the MCDSP Analogue channels which simulate the effects of analogue tape. This was great on the beat boxing which just needed to be squished in and the tape saturation effect worked wonders.

Camille is a crazy French woman, with some great music. She was on stage with a piano player plus 7 other vocalists and beatboxers who did stomping and body percussion.

That photo is from the recording at Hyde Park Barracks taken on my phone of us with the JJJ rack with 48 channels of preamp plus 2 Tascam 48ch hard disk recorders.

Big Day In

Sydney Anglican’s Big Day In happened on Sunday. It was a broadcast of a special service for all Sydney Anglican churches to tune into. It was a massive organisational and technical event. I thought there was no way this was going to work, but it did! There were a couple of small issues, but in the big scheme of things, these were pretty negligible. I work in broadcasting, and for this event to go so well was such a good effort and well executed. And for a first time effort, even better. The organisers need to be congratulated for pulling it together so well.

I was there to mix the broadcast audio of the music. Garage Hymnal were responsible for that and they did a superb job! It was a total walk in and mix gig. I didn’t plug in a single piece of equipment (except for my studio speakers) or run a single cable. The wonderful team from Crosstalk did it all and they did a great job. If I needed anything all I had to do was turn around and there was someone waiting there to take my instructions. It makes you feel like you’ve made it as a sound engineer when you do this sort of gig. Turn up, mix, go home again. And it was a privilege to be involved. It was quite a challenging mix actually. I do live to air music mixes all the time at work, but they are not usually this big. Bands this size we would normally multitrack and mix later. Garage Hymnal have eight members – drums, bass, 2 electric guitars, acoustic guitar, keyboards and 2 vocalists. So there were plenty of open mics to muddy everything up. In a live mix like that, the big challenge is to keep the clarity and not end up with a big pile of mush. And then on top of that you need to get a good balance and make it sound nice. I wasn't in a great acoustic space to hear what I was doing, butI think it turned out pretty well. A bit messy on the balance side in some places, but hey – it’s live, that what it’s like. No time to sit and make it perfect, just fly by the seat of your pants.

And the other thing of note – the weather. We were in Kellyville in western Sydney where the temperature was above 40 degrees celcius. RF’s car had no air con. Yep, that was fun travelling home in the middle of the day in an oven. But I stopped complaining when I got home and saw the news about the Victorian bushfires and all the tragedy surrounding them.

Multi tasking

Today I became camera person, filming a humerous spot for the audio arts website, demonstrating the creating of sound effects.
And I took some stills. The one below I took. I didn't take the others - I'm in them.