Recording - May 2015 - 20

through nicely on the main pair; the bass
mic was just to add some grunt and artificial depth to the low end. Likewise the
high percussion mic was to bring the percussion forward and make it sound closer, almost as if it was next to you.
If I were going whole hog, I might have
close-miked the brass in order to make
the brass sounds more blatty than they
are in real life, and I might have put sectional mics on the violins and violas. Both
of those would be standard operating
practice when recording a film soundtrack, again to bring the individual parts
of the orchestra forward. I didn't do this,
in part because I wasn't willing to quite
go that far, and in part because frankly
we had run out of microphones.
Had this been a perfect world with a
full mic kit, I probably would have used
Sennheiser MD441 microphones for all
the spots except the vocalist; the N/D468
is a great choice for the vocalist because
aside from its sound, it's physically very
small and doesn't impede sightlines.

declares that he's happy and I feel like I'm
pretty comfortable with what we're doing.
During the break, someone had brought
me a program, so I marked out settings for
various of the spots on the program, in
some cases making some assumptions
about what some of the pieces on the first
half were going to be like. I also got some
instrumentation questions answered by
Michelle Weinstein, the daughter of the
video director. This was when I brought up
the fill speakers for the first couple of rows:
not very loudly, just enough to bring some
of that close-miked sound up front as well.
The sound at this point is very much like
what you would hear in a typical film
soundtrack. Strings and brass are fairly
natural, but they are larger than life and
sound a bit closer than they would from a
given seat. Basses are very much larger
than life and have a deep growl that
would normally be lost in a room this size.
High percussion is bright and very much
in your face. It's not a natural sound, but
it's a familiar sound; when the audience

Thoughts in the aftermath
This was brought home to me the next
day when I went to a Proms concert at the
Royal Albert Hall.
The Albert Hall is another room with really terrible acoustics, one that people have
been trying to tame for well over a century
now, thanks to a dome that seems almost
designed to create flutter echoes. The only
way to deal with some of the echo issues
seems to have been to deaden the room to
the point where sound reinforcement seems
needed, but I found the overall effect
extremely heavy-handed. Again, the sound
and tone that I heard was nothing like that
of a live orchestra in a good room.
So, from this, I take two lessons: first of
all, people don't actually know what a live
orchestra sounds like any more. Secondly,
due to the use of reinforcement at concerts, people aren't going to be learning
what it sounds like any time soon. I regard
this as a terrible tragedy, because a live
unamplified orchestra is a unique and
wonderful thing.

The 441 and the old RCA BK-5 are my
two favorites for orchestral spots because
they are very tight and have little leakage, but the leakage they do have sounds
good. The N/D468 is a real sleeper,
though, and deserves more attention than
it gets. The AKG C451 is a bit wide for
my tastes, with more leakage than I'd
like, but that's how it goes sometimes.
There are plenty of good condenser
microphones that can be used for this
application, but they are all up in the
Schoeps price range, and the last thing
you want for orchestral spots is something
that sounds harsh in any way, since you're
already exaggerating the harshness by
spotmiking stuff in the first place. The higher end dynamic mics will give you what
you need without paying Schoeps prices.

sits down and the concert opens with John
William's "Superman March", they are
getting a sound much like what they'd
remember from the movie itself.
And then the concert began. People
loved the concert. They applauded. They
even applauded between movements.
(Why do people do that?) During the
interval, a couple of people dropped by
to ask if the PA was actually in use. After
the concert, several people came by and
told me how natural it sounded.
This absolutely boggles my mind, since
the overall effect I was aiming for was a
totally unnatural one, and I think I
achieved it pretty well. The sense of
space and the sense of tone on a closemiked orchestra is very different than that
of a live orchestra in a real room. So
what I would consider very heavy-handed
use of instrument miking and reinforcement was clearly considered subtle by a
lot of audience members.

Now, that said, since this was a program of film music, having the concert set
up to sound like a film orchestra rather
than a traditional classical band is a valid
artistic decision. What's more, it's not a
decision for me as engineer to make, it's
the decision of the producer. My job as
engineer was to make the producer or the
konzertmeister happy... and I think he
was happy, or at least he will be until he
reads this article.
In the end, this gig turned out to be
pretty much the opposite of the way that I
normally work, so doing this well
required that I think very differently about
instrument miking and getting the right
sound for the job. And that, in the end, is
what a vacation is all about, isn't it?

Once more with feeling
So, I bring things up and we do some fiddling around with the producer until he
20

RECORDING May 2015

Photos printed with kind permission of the
photographers: Susan Parker (ashleyrpollard
.blogspot.co.uk) and "SF Strangelove"
(strangelove4sf.blogspot.com).


http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/ http://ashleypollard.blogspot.co.uk http://strangelove4sf.blogspot.com

Recording - May 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - May 2015

Contents
Recording - May 2015 - Cover1
Recording - May 2015 - Cover2
Recording - May 2015 - 1
Recording - May 2015 - 2
Recording - May 2015 - 3
Recording - May 2015 - 4
Recording - May 2015 - 5
Recording - May 2015 - Contents
Recording - May 2015 - 7
Recording - May 2015 - 8
Recording - May 2015 - 9
Recording - May 2015 - 10
Recording - May 2015 - 11
Recording - May 2015 - 12
Recording - May 2015 - 13
Recording - May 2015 - 14
Recording - May 2015 - 15
Recording - May 2015 - 16
Recording - May 2015 - 17
Recording - May 2015 - 18
Recording - May 2015 - 19
Recording - May 2015 - 20
Recording - May 2015 - 21
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Recording - May 2015 - 23
Recording - May 2015 - 24
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Recording - May 2015 - 28
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Recording - May 2015 - Cover3
Recording - May 2015 - Cover4
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