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.