Ballet a whole different way: Mixing the new LA Ballet's Nutcracker

[Walling1]

I do not enjoy mixing backing tracks for the musicals I do, but it's often a necessity for budgetary reasons. Also, producers and directors are wanting the band to sound as 'lush' as possible, and to sound 'just like the CD,' using orchestrations bigger than they can afford or practical. Of course, this causes more problems when we have to squeeze those pesky actors' voices in the mix too...

I look forward to your posts, Ben.

-Dave

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OK... Continuing on...

To accomplish these tasks, we had a bit of a complex setup, but it worked pretty well.

The elements at play: Live, we had 8 violins (4 first, 4 second), 2 violas, 3 celli, 1 flute, 1 oboe, 1 english horn, 1 clarinet, 1 bassoon, 1 frech horn, 1 trumpet and 1 trombone. The computer was playing back 10 channels of stems- they consisted of stereo stems of strings, woodwinds, french horns, and brass (trumpet/trombone/tuba- which doubled as the choir in the snow scene) and a mono percussion/celeste and a mono click track

musicians- All musicians were listening on the Aviom personal headphone systems. Each stand had a controller where I was sending about 13 channels to be mixed by the musicians. These elements consisted of mono sends of live and computer woodwinds, brass, strings, computer percussion, and stereo live instrument and computer mixes as well as the click track. The musicians were a bit resistant at first to having to mix their own monitor feed, but by the end of the run, many of them enjoyed the flexability of their own mixer. To get them to make monitor changes rather than to ask me to do it at first was, well... fun. It is all in the learning curve of the show. The thought here was that each musician wanted to hear different things. Instead of hiring a monitor mixer for everybody, we decided to let the musicians deal with it themselves.

The Sequence- as I mentioned, the original had been done by somebody else and Michael fit tempo maps and obviously removed the instruments that we had live to make everything work. He worked in Sonar and then exported the stems to Vegas Video for playback. We had a MOTU interface running on his PC for the stems. All stems were recorded dry so that I could fit the dry orchestral sound in with the dry sequenced sound. Using the stems allowed for this to happen. Doing it with a mix of the show (as I did in the first rehearsals) was exceedingly difficult as I had to make the orchestra fit into the sample sound rather than making the samples fit in with the orchestral sound.

The PA system and mix system. This is where things got fun. In each hall, we provided the ground speakers and the halls provided the flown rig. In the pit, we placed speakers facing straight up on either side (in this case Apogee AE5's) This was to send sound up ambiently into the hall to approximate was was coming out naturally from the orchestra. We also had 4 front fill speakers across the lip of the stage. Here, we used a speaker that Hollywood Sound had designed by Bill Jenkins- a great sounding wide horizontal despersion fill that had a very narrow vertical despersion (I want to say something like 150 degrees by 20 degrees). This allowed for a very even coverage that left virtually no gaps. On Stage, we had 6 monitor speakers overhead for dancers- again a monitor designed by Bill Jenkins. In two of the houses, we had L-C-R systems flown and the third house was a mono flown system. We also used a pair of the Apogee AE-SB subs on the show for a bit of extra beef on the low end.

With the exception of the mono system, all speakers were run in a stereo configuration or for the L-C-R and Stereo + Mono (center) configuration. This includes the pit and front fill speakers.

The Mixing console was a Yamaha M7CL and it had the ethernet card in it for the Aviom. In addition, I brought a Lexicon 300 to provide a bit higher quality reverb than what the Yamaha could provide (I used the internal Rev-X verb for a second reverb)

The Orchestra was also mic'd using the Symphotec microphone system. It is a microphone designed for use with instruments in pits where space is tight. (http://www.symphotec.de/) We used omni mics on our strings and cardiods on our woodwinds. The cool thing is that the mics use a pretty low voltage element which uses its own preamp. They have 2 models- a mono and a 5 input combiner. Meant that I could bring the channel count at the console to individual channels- violin 1 was a single channel, violin 2 was a single channel, etc... The placement of the mics was a bit different than the "normal" gig. All violin and viola microphones were placed beneath the instruments (between the 2 chairs on a stand). Woodwind mic were placed in a pretty conventional manner, and the brass mics were all placed off axis of the instrument- the most radical being the trumpet where I was in relatively close but under the instrument looking up (90 degrees off axis of the bell).

While mixing, we tried to make this sound as natural as possible and not so much of a loud overhead sound. The pit and front speakers were the keys to making this happen. In all of these speakers, we put a lot of the computer tracks in to mix with the acoustic sound of the orchestra. However, we also found that once that was done, there was a presence difference between the samples and the live. To remedy that, we ended up placing a bit of the live performance into those speakers as well to enhance the acoustic sound (not so much to make it sound amplified). The overhead speakers got the full mix- especially needed for the balcony in one house and the far back of a second house. In the end, when we'd let the samples just fill out the sound, it was pretty difficult to tell that they were there. When we pushed them, though (usually to fill out solo sections), it became more obvious that they were being used. The good thing, though, is virtually nobody in the audience realized they were being used if they didn't read the program.

The next fun thing was that as I mentioned before, this was a travelling show. The specification of the show had us relying on the various house's sound systems and making them work in our needs. To further complicate things, budget dictated a 30 minute sound check only in the new houses (the orchestra, being union cost a lot of money). Meant that we had to be absolutely ready to make it work instantly. Something that proved to be easier said than done.

More in a bit... gotta take another break here.

--Ben

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So, anyways....

The house systems ended up being the source of the most frustration. Obviously, we had a certain sound going in the pit and trying to make a given system that was not designed for that was, uh... fun. The first venue had an EAW 850 rig. Sounded fine, but was a bit big compared to what was in the pit. In the balcony, though, it worked wonders. Sounded great. The second venue had a Renkus system... This time, we had a lot more difficulty. Renkus sounds nothing like Apogee or EAW. Also, the speakers were directly over the pit and the room was shaped like a trapezoid. Not a fun work situation. Our house crew was awesome, though, and helped us get everything working. It just would have been nice to have more than 30 min to get the system working together.

The last house was the one in mono. As it turned out, this one had the best acoustics so we had to rely on the house system the least of all. There was a curve to the ceiling which projected all the sound coming out of the pit into the hall. Literally, in the balcony it sounded like a left-right set of speakers were up in the corners of the hall. Worked pretty well. Meant that my job mixing was so much easier as we could work the show as it had been originally designed. In the last house 90% of the sound in the house came from the pit- either from the speakers or the live musicians.

When putting together the mix, I found reverb and its use to be the key to making everything work together. For those unfamilliar with the Garritan samples, they are recorded individually in a dry space. That means that when mixing in the live musicians, they need to come into the console with a similar sound. In one show, I tried putting some Schoeps mics up over the orchestra and they just didn't blend with the sample tracks. I used 2 reverbs. A short, somewhat bright one and a long dark sounding one. The short was used to simulate early reflections and the long to create a tail. Together, they created a pretty realistic ambience. The Lexicon was used on a large hall setting for a tail for the ensemble.

Well, I think that is most of it... I could probably answer questions if I forgot anything here. I'll attach a couple of photos. Special thanks to Gary Garitan for the use of these photos. I was so busy that I just didn't have time to take any. This means I only have photos for the first hall, but you get the idea

--Ben

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A couple views of the pit- see how tight things were... you can also see a couple of the main speakers we relied on and an Aviom mixer on a music stand.

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More pix- the top one you can see the speakers a bit more clearly. The AE-5's are in the foreground. In this pit, they were sitting on the subwoofers, but in other pits (due to a solid front wall), the subs were moved into various places in the theaters (usually in the theater's "designated" sub location). The bottom picture is obviously the dancers. The production values were pretty high- beautiful sets and some spectacular dancing.

[Shelton]

Ben,

I love Billy's boxes! Those lip fill boxes are pretty neat.

Which venues were you playing?

Oh, and the inportant thing...did you get any recordings?

[Roland]

It's funny how gig's like this are always a lot harder work than the straight recording gigs. Sound's like it was interesting.

Hope everyone involved was pleased with the results.

Regards


Roland

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Originally Posted by Shelton

Ben,

I love Billy's boxes! Those lip fill boxes are pretty neat.

Which venues were you playing?

Oh, and the inportant thing...did you get any recordings?

Yeah... Billy makes some pretty kickin' speakers. We played the Wilshire theater, Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center and the Alex Theather.

No recording- Union gig so no recordings were authorized.

--Ben

[Remoteness]

Ben, is the M7CLworth the bread it costs?

I remember reading that you like the tactile surface, but feel it's a bit noisy.

Is it better or as good as (lets say) an 01V?

What would you compare this desk with sound quality wise?

Thanks!

[fifthcircle]

The layout is great- like most of the Yamaha desks, the sound improves greatly with an external clock.

It is a good board for certain things- if you're doing PA work, it is probably one of the best deals out there. If you're trying to make a serious recording, it probably isn't the best due to the noise concerns. I'd say it is at least comparable to an O1V, but perhaps not the O1V96. If you were running through outboard pres and converters, it would be completely adequate for serious work. Due to the fact that it is a live board, certain functionality isn't there (like you can't choose the bit rate of a digital output- it only sends out 24 bits).

As for the noise, it is interesting. When I hear a PA system that is fed by the console, it always seems a bit noisy- listening on the headphone amp, it seems noisy. However, listening to stems recorded into my Pro Tools rig from various live gigs, I can't say that noise has seemed to be an issue. If you look on the New Products forum, there are sound samples of the Mojave MA200 that I recorded in some live gigs using this console. They certainly sound pretty good, but would sound a lot better with better pres. On none of them, however, is noise really an issue. On this particular gig, noise on the Aviom system wasn't an issue either.

48 channels in as small of a footprint as it comes in is also a great thing. It really is a pretty small board. In its large configuration (48 channels), it is probably only about 4-1/2' wide.

As far as the layout is, I like it quite a bit. It seems like they learned from the PM5D and the PM1D. It may not be quite as capable, but it is great to mix on. My only major gripe when using these boards going from venue to venue is the firmware. If you memorize your settings on a new firmware console, you cannot open it on an older board. I had an issue on this gig where one venue had ver 1.13 and the other had 1.08 (I think those were the numbers) and the 1.08 board couldn't load the 1.13 settings.

In the end, it is built for live work, not as a recording board. It does that quite well.

Hope this helps a bit...

--Ben