AudioMedia - March 2009 - (Page 38) THE WONDER YEARS American legend Stevie Wonder helps legendary label Motown Records celebrate its 50th Anniversary with the release of his first-ever concert DVD, Live At Last. JONATHAN MILLER tracks its Brit-led audio journey – from recording to mixing to mastering. nitially signed, at the age of , by Motown CEO Berry Gordy to the Tamla imprint after being discovered singing on a street corner by a relative of Ronnie White (The Miracles), Stevie Wonder has recorded -plus US top ten hit singles, and is the winning recipient of no fewer than Grammy awards (including the Lifetime Achievement Award in ). Despite being blessed with an incredible career spanning five decades, what’s yet to be seen is a Stevie Wonder live DVD chronicling and celebrating that success – until now. March sees the worldwide release of Live At Last, Wonder’s first-ever live concert on both DVD and Blu-ray, which the Universal Motown press blurb claims captures a “lifetime of innovation and accomplishment”. The material was recorded over two nights (September , and October , ) while Wonder performed to rapturous , -plus audiences at London’s The O (arena) as part of his latest world tour. I mic amps onstage and the digital converters at the stage end, the lower levels didn’t have to travel much distance… it came digitally to the truck, so there was no quality loss of any significance whatsoever.” Tim Summerhayes was at the helm of the Red-TX truck at the venue. “The way that the show ran,” Summerhayes relates, “was that they were passively splitting their microphones three ways at the show end – for FOH and two separate [DiGiCo D Live] monitor boards – one was looking after the band mix, and one was looking after Stevie’s monitors… monitors They were very reluctant to split it a fourth way to us. “We decided to buffer the whole system between them and us with some highAnother recent Stevie Wonder event was the televised celebration impendence BSS MkII splitters; of the artist's receipt of the Library Of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song – a sixty minute programme, taped by WETA TV, and we would lose a little bit of gain hosted by President and Mrs Obama at the White House. on this, but, because we’d got the R ecordings O f Q ualit y And D istinc tion As so, Summerhayes found himself outside the vast venue assuming his usual position within MobileOne, Red-TX’s distinctive recently refurbished -tonne Volvo truck with its new Studer Vista Digital Live Production Console with inputs and total mono outputs, recording to Merging Technologies Pyramix DAWs at / – more than enough to handle the -plus channel count of Stevie and his band. “For a guy with a harmonica and a Clavinet that’s quite an achievement,” notes Summerhayes. “But because we knew it was going to post-production – I knew David [Woolley] was going to be involved – we did quite a big audience miking array within The O . I think we put about mics up, and that meant putting a lot in the roof, hanging them from catwalks, and around the front. I don’t think we sub-mixed those down; we just EQ’d them a little bit to tape, so we ended up with about tracks at the end of the day.” Actually, two times tracks at -bit/ kHz, as it happened, since Summerhayes sensibly recorded to two separate systems, even though the final commercial replay medium was going to include the higher resolution Blu-ray format, as well as ‘traditional’ DVD. “There were earlier discussions about recording at kHz, but they were subsequently quite happy to go with the standard resolution,” notes Summerhayes, adding: “It’s a cost issue, really, because of the extra stock and media involved, so I don’t think anyone wanted to go down that route.” From Trucks To Bikes Around GB of data stored on Glyph external hard drives were then dispatched by bike to Thornquest, R etaining D iscipline 38 AUDIO MEDIA MARCH 2009
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