Recording - August 2014 - 50

For the movie Jersey Boys, we recently
had five singers, one in each of the two permanent iso booths, and we also built three
rooms outside in a similar fashion [in the
live room] and they are all singing at once.
It works; there's bleed into the booth for
sure, but you want the level difference to
achieve your results, and they are singing
with the music so it's there anyway.
How did you achieve isolation for the
vocalists?
We acquired all of our gobos from the
Todd AO - CBS/Radford Scoring stage,
which was being shut down at the time of
building our project here. We got 3 types
of gobos; the usual shorties which are 4'
by 4', 5 glass-top which are 8' by 4' and
are actually quite heavy and effective, and
4 "Monsters," which are about 800 lbs.
each. They are 8' x 4', but very thick,
maybe 12". One side is covered with fabric and has very absorptive material underneath. The effect of how they absorb sound

is quite astonishing, actually; playing my
trumpet into them is akin to playing into a
big pillow. The other side of the Monsters
is a solid QRD diffuse reflective surface. I
did not build them, but the magnitude of
the weight suggests that there is lead sheeting inside.
So for this session I built a booth in the
main room, using three of the big
Monsters and two or three of the glasstops. I built a room with wood slats and
mics over the top and put the singers in
there with visibility for us to see them and
for them to see out to the conductor.

Even for a group of this size, it doesn't
seem like you modified the room.
No; let the room work for you! I could
have split it up, à la the Simpsons sessions,
or maybe some other groups. It helps a little bit for isolation, but I wasn't trying to
achieve that.
Because of the eclectic nature of
Gurrisonic's music, did you have to
make adjustments between pieces?
Not really. The players were set where they
were; there were six woodwind players who
were doubling on 11 instruments or more in
some cases, so there might be a mic shift if
there was an alto or soprano solo in a song.
But that was minimal; these guys are pros.
They know how to play into a mic and once
they were in the zone, it just worked.
Which of the outboard units did you
use for the recording?
For fun I put in a compressor on the
vocal for playback, and on the mono drum
room mic. Just for our edification. None of
it goes to tape. [Pro Tools, really-BH] For
the Simpsons sessions they use everything
on the Neve console, and none of the outboard gear.

The Result
I was lucky to listen to some of the "raw"
tracks of the sessions, and was amazed at
the clarity and naturalness of the captured
performances. In some cases, Greg soloed
the room mics, and it was great to hear how
well balanced and precise everything
sounded with only a few pairs of mics!
I can only anticipate an outstanding
project to come out of these sessions. The
new Gurrisonic album is scheduled for
fall 2014 and will be made available at
www.orendarecords.com/shop/ and
you can learn more at gurrisonic.com.

Fig. 2. Microphone selection and placement, and preamp selection,
for the session. Document courtesy The Bridge Recording.
50

RECORDING August 2014

Beto Hale (beto@recordingmag.com) is
Recording's Editor At Large, working in
Los Angeles.

http://www.orendarecords.com/shop/ http://www.gurrisonic.com

Recording - August 2014

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