Recording - May 2015 - 18

What have we got?
Looking through the stuff we have backstage, I find a Behringer stereo mic kit. I
steal the stereo bar off of it, put my personal Schoeps Colette mics (CMC5 with
the MK41 hypercardioid capsule) onto
the bar, and gaff-tape that to the top of
one of the tall telescoping stands that are
used for the stage draperies. I drop it on
the ground about eight feet behind the
conductor and slightly to the right. It
blocks sight lines a bit more than a proper mic stand but it's very solid.
I have a pair of Electro-Voice N/D468
microphones in the kit as well. These are
small egg-shaped microphones with a
very low profile that are intended for use
on drum kits, but they are phenomenally
versatile. I put one on the vocalist, about
three feet in front of her at waist level.
This gets a lot of leakage but it also gets
a good mixture of head and chest voice.
Anybody who tells you that the chest
sound is not important for sopranos and
mezzosopranos should try comparing a
mic at waist level and head level and
hear the difference for themselves-the
waist mike invariably sounds
more like the live sound.
I also put a second N/D468
up on the harp. Now, remember
I don't have any score yet, so I'm
wondering why it's needed.
Usually with orchestral pieces that
feature harp, the arrangements
are built so that the whole band
goes pretty quiet when the harp is
playing, so the dynamics are
quite dramatic, but the harp itself
doesn't need any help being
heard. I put the harp mic up only
because the producer told me to.
I would have put mikes on the
theremin and the electric piano,
on the general idea that they
should be treated like acoustic
instruments and that the speakers built
into them are part of their sound. But, we
didn't have any more good mics; all I had
left in my kit were two AKG C747s, and
all the venue had for any application
were Shure SM57 and SM58 mics, fine
pieces but not really harp material.
I went asking around for dynamic mics
without presence peaks, and there wasn't
anything in any of the other stage kits
either. So I brought up the main pair, left the
spot mics down, and the rehearsal started.

orchestra and the room, or at least as
close as possible given the limitations of
feeding back. I was expecting to have to
pull the main pair back from the original
starting position, but in reality the sound
that the producer wanted wasn't what I
had been aiming for.
That's okay, though! Once I figured out
what his goal was, I said, "I know what
you're going for and I can do that, but
we're going to have to make some
changes at the break."

And we're off
When the system was handed over to
me, the rental system engineer, Matt from
Blitz, had set up three main speakers
above the stage, three more delays back
about 3/4 of the way down the hall, and
some fill speakers for the first row. He had
notched out the first two feedback modes
of the room, which was a start, but I was
still worried a lot about feedback.

A brief digression: the sound of an
orchestra
All of the different instruments in the
orchestra are producing different sounds,
and they are producing different sounds
at different angles, and all of those sounds
are going into the room, blending together, and getting to the ears of the audience.
If you have a single violinist on stage,
there is a very bright sound coming from

RECORDING May 2015

My main pair was located almost directly below the main speakers, so once you
got back a few rows there should have
been good time alignment between the
sound coming from the orchestra and the
sound coming from the speakers. I figured
the fill speakers would be superfluous and
it would be plenty loud up front anyway,
so I disabled the fills.
The band came in, set up, and started
playing. I brought the mains up slowly
and carefully, since I had no idea where
the feedback point was and how much
gain before feedback we might have.
Adam wanted levels up more and more,
and he wanted the strings closer and
brighter, so I shifted the position of the main
pair down a little bit and tilted it to the right
a little in order to bring more strings on. He
wanted more of a lot of things... it became
evident that the sound he wanted was a
much more close-in sound than that of an
orchestra in a concert hall.
I had been trying to keep the main
microphone pair back as far as possible
in order to get a wide and natural sound,
to get the blend of the sounds of the

the front of the violin and going above the
heads of the audience, striking the ceiling
and coming down to them, but there is
also a mellow sound coming out of the
back of the violin, striking the wall behind
the stage, and coming out to the audience.
Then there is a sound that comes from the
violin directly at the listener, that has a different mix of string and body sound. If you
put a microphone in front of the violin, or
behind the violin, or over the shoulder of
the violinist, you get only one part of this
blend, so when you spot-mike the violin
and run it through a PA, the overall effect
is very different than what you get from a
distance. No equalization in the world will
make one sound like the other, because the
blend is much more than cutting some frequencies and boosting others.
This is why my original goal here was
to work entirely with a single pair as far
back from the orchestra as possible, as if
I were making a natural recording but
using some of that just to go into the room
speakers. If you listen to the string section
on a Beatles record, however, it is very
close-miked, with everyone gathered
around a sectional mike in a
smaller drier room. If you are
trying to get that sound on
stage, you have to close-mike it,
there's no other way.
I often speak disparagingly of
the "Barry Manilow string
sound", where a very bright fiddle section is placed right in
front of a raised microphone set
up in the brightest part of the
radiation pattern of the instrument, then the top end is rolled
off with equalization.
This is a very artificial sound
that is totally unlike anything
you'd ever hear in a classical
concert without PA, but if in fact
you were running sound reinforcement for Barry Manilow you would
want to get that sound because that is the
sound his audience would want to hear.
A new approach
Once I figured out what the producer
was looking for, I went around trying to
dig up some other microphones. After
some fruitless searching (and an argument
with a crew for another stage that wouldn't loan me the AKG C480 mics they
weren't using), I did find that one of the
video team had a personally owned pair
of AKG C451 mikes in his backpack...
One of them went on the first basses at
about knee height, and one of them went
on the high percussion, so it would pick
up triangle, vibrophone and bells. Both of
these microphones were equalized
aggressively, with the top end rolled off
completely on the bass mic and the bottom end rolled off completely on the high
percussion mic. Pizzicato basses come

Recording - May 2015

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