News | Jonny Pipe Audio

Thought I'd drop in a few words about this amazing event I worked at/attended in January this year. Formerly under the name ForWatt, Fledge is a group of talented and kind-hearted folks that have been making music, encouraging musicians and creating art over the last few years, and I'm lucky to have been involved with helping them to capture and mix a whole heap of musical magic along the way. The last even I helped out on was at Birdlings Flat - which was my first blog on this website.

So this one was situated near Lake Hawea at the beautiful Te Awa Lodge. Promising to be better and bigger than ever, the technical side of it also was more fiendy than ever. Working with fellow audio geek, king fiend and masterchef value adder David McKinnon, we set up a recording system and PA to accommodate everyone and all their instruments (while mastering the perfect stove top espresso extraction along the way)

It was a fantastic 9 days, both for the creative aspect of the trip, but also as a technical challenge to go to a place and set up a 28 channel recording studio with PA and monitors!

For those interested, here's how we did it:

Recorded to Pro Tools, with the main recording interface being a MOTU 828Mk2
This thing has got 28 possible inputs, and we used them all!

2 Mic/Instrument inputs
8 Line inputs
2 ADAT inputs (so 16 channels)
2 SPDIF digital inputs

The mic and line inputs were fed by external pre amps and DI boxes.

The ADAT inputs were fed from a Presonus Digimax for the first 8, and then a Focusrite Octopre for the second.

The SPDIF inputs were fed through my Focusrite Sapphire Pro24 DSP in standalone mode.

Because of the use of all these different bits of gear, and using digital ins and outs, I had to be very aware of word clock issues too, so I ran BNC cables, using the MOTU as the master clock, down to the Digimax, and through to the Octopre. The Sapphire was also clocked to the MOTU using SPDIF.

Sending to the PA was a challenge also, because I couldn't/didn't want to run all the channels through the Allen and Heath desk we had before recording. Basically I could send 16 channels back out to the desk and then PA by using...

A: the Octopre, which cleverly has direct outs of each channel in a multi pin connector. And...
B: using the CueMix software that comes with the MOTU.

To explain this, the MOTU also has 8 analogue outputs, and using the software you can route any of the inputs straight to the analogue outputs before it goes to pro tools. So there's no latency. You can also compress and EQ using the DSP on board the unit. Pretty cunning. So once I had the channels I wanted hitting the Allen and Heath, we could create a mix and send to monitors in a pretty standard live front of house scenario.

It was certainly a challenge getting my head around a lot of gear and software I hadn't used before, but the results were great, it proved to be a pretty stable set up, and most importantly we captured some great music!

Last weekend I was hired by RNZ to assist Adrian Hollay in recording the performance of Handel's Messiah by the Christchurch City Choir with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra at the Christ's College Assembly Hall. Adrian Hollay came down to record the concert from Auckland, where he is employed as recording engineer for Radio New Zealand. Here's a link to his website.

Over the past couple of years I have assisted Noel Maginnity in recording each concert that the CSO performs, generally live at the CHCH Town Hall. Usually when we set up these recordings it's a pretty quick process, since we have all the holes in the ceiling marked and the cables also marked, so we can drop the appropriate microphones down in the right places at the right heights pretty quickly. However since the quake, the Town Hall has been out of action, so this performance was held at Christ's College.

This basically meant that we had to work out the best way to hang the mics, and make adjustments as we went, which took a lot longer and involved a lot of crawling around on the catwalks high above the auditorium and testing out positions.

I won't go into details of mics used or exact positions, because these things are kind of like the tools of the engineer, who has worked them out by trial and error over time, but here's a rough outline of how it was recorded.

There were two main parts to capture - choir, and orchestra. Generally when making a classical recording what you are trying to do is faithfully capture the sound of the orchestra in the room. This is quite a different approach from studio band recording, where you're trying to make each instrument or vocal sound bigger and better than real life.

Going with this theory, the starting point is always a really good quality stereo pair, hung in just the right position above and in front of the orchestra. If you have a really good quality pair of mics in the right place, then quite often, this sounds just great all by itself! (and luckily enough Radio New Zealand has some wonderful microphones!) After that, other microphones are hung to bring out some presence in certain parts of the orchestra, for example woodwind, tympani or perhaps the harp. These 'spot mics' are not intended to boost the volume of the instruments or make them stand out, rather they are there just to capture the presence. When put in the mix with the stereo pair, the particular instrument or section shouldn't be amplified above the other instruments, but you should gain a clearer picture of where it is sitting in the orchestra - you should be able to 'pick it out' in the stereo image.

So after setting up mics for the orchestra, we also applied a similar treatment to the choir. The key here is to place the microphones so that individual voices are not being picked out. You want it to sound like a single unified choir, as it would if you were sitting in the hall listening.

Here are a few pics showing some of the hanging microphones...

The Recording was captured in 2 ways - as a live mix to stereo, and also a multi track recording. This was achieved by simply taking direct outs of the channels in the desk to the multi track recorder (in this case Sadie) and also taking the main outs of the desk straight to a Sound Devices digital recorder. In the picture you can see Sadie on the left and the Sound Devices in the back right. The stereo live mix was made, because somebody needed excerpts from the concert soon after for a production, but the main multitrack recording will be mixed by Adrian up in Auckland in the Radio NZ studios.

If you would like to take a listen to the results of the recording then tune in to RNZ Concert on the 17th Dec at 8PM.

Fledge Music Festival

Messiah Concert Recording