AudioMedia - June 2008 - (Page 67)

06|08 AMSR the level that we needed to get out of them, so they are all on [Sennheiser] SM58s – one each. They’ve also got some wedge monitors, simply because they’re so close to the rest of the orchestra that it’s very hard for them to pitch properly, because they’re getting a lot of French horn.” “ The choir is used as another voice in the orchestra – not like normal choir singing by any standards, and they work a lot with the keyboard player.” Ah, yes, George Fenton’s right-hand man, the gig-getting Simon Chamberlain. “He’s doing a plethora of sounds,” states Pink. “We spent some time adjusting his own monitoring levels so that the internal balance worked well, and I spread his sounds through the foldback on stage so that blends better from the source, as it were. A lot of it is choir-ey pads and piano-ey stuff, and percussion – all sorts, in fact, but it’s quite sympathetic to the rest of the orchestra, and it seems to work very well.” music is being brought to life by two equally magnificent full-scale orchestras – with the BBC Concert Orchestra handling the London and Cardiff dates, while the Manchester Camerata stepped in for Manchester; Nottingham, and Birmingham – whose contribution to the success of The Blue Planet Live! production – led, of course, by the aforesaid celebrated composer/conductor – cannot be understated, even if the audiences are inevitably drawn to looking at those fantasticlooking onscreen images upon which everything ultimately hinges, as alluded to earlier by Pink: “There’s two video sources, one doing the main screen, which has four tracks of audio – basically, a stereo music track, because there is some backing music, and then there’s the sound effects tracks for the images that you’re seeing – lots and lots of waves, and fish and whales! It’s quite hard to blend the two together – not from an audio point of view, but more from an emotional one, like in a film soundtrack, where the music is sometimes featured more and sometimes the effects are, depending on what’s happening emotionally, and it’s exactly the same here.” “The effects were put together in isolation as an effects track for this piece by a traditional recording engineer who’s looking at it as a flat TV effects mix that was then going to be sub-mixed when it came to voiceovers and music, and so on, which is what Colin’s having to do dynamically,” chips in Technical Director Alan Cox, a battle-hardened systems designer specialising in video control, > > again, just a great mic. “Everything else is more akin to theatre orchestra miking than recording: basically, the woodwinds are all on Schoeps CK4s; there’s four percussion players, which are mainly all on [Neumann] KM184s – great ‘sling it on anything and it’ll do a great job’ mics; lots of [Neumann] U87s on the timps; the French horns, trombones, and the trumpets are on [AKG] 414s; the harp is an MKH40 stuffed in a hole in old rock ‘n’ roll fashion, so we’ve got decades of level on that. “Interestingly, again, we needed control of the choir, because of the proximity to the orchestra; normal overhead miking wouldn’t have given us While Fenton’s magnificent and atmospheric Synchronicit y O f Life

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AudioMedia - June 2008

AudioMedia - June 2008 Contents Recording Post Broadcast AES Review What's Up UK? Geofocus: Australia For the Record Special Report: Videosonics Newstalk: DPA New Microphones Novation SL Compact Allen & Heath IDR-8 Eastwest Quantum Leap SD2 & Goliath Final Cut: Indiana Jones Merging ADR Module Koolworld SSL Duende Good Product Sampler: Microphones Video Guide AMSR Meyer Sound The Blue Planet Live! Royer Labs Mics R-121 & R-122

AudioMedia - June 2008

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