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A few thoughts

Posted by Bill Way (A) on August 24, 2014 at 21:50:06

In Reply to: The pic of that console is a great example of posted by E-Stat on August 24, 2014 at 15:29:25:

The sound I heard in that room, through that console, on B&W 801s was stunningly good. (The amps, btw, were Mac MC-2500s, one per channel. I don't know if they were modified or not.)

I have never been in a session with 60 channels going - not even close. But Kaufman has done operas there, and I can see that adding up. When you are not recording in, say, Carnegie Hall or the Met Opera house, you're pretty much stuck with lots of micing. Their live room can fit a full orchestra, chorus, and principals, and, with flippable gobos on the walls set to their hard side out, the room has a 2.5 second decay time. But it's still not a great concert hall, so you can't do it with Bob & Wilma's three spaced omnis. How many mics do you need in a big neutral room to capture 70 musicians, 200 choristers, and 6 principals? I don't know, but it's probably a bunch. From what I can figure, Richard Mohr used about 15 mics for the 1961 Price/Gorr/Vickers/Merrill Aïda, which was tracked *in* La Scala.

Kaufman does a lot of film, and to get the spacial audio cues correct for a movie audience apparently takes some fairly intricate micing, which I'm guessing adds up to lots of channels.

The control room is interesting. It's a live end/dead end setup, with the rear wall *absolutely* dead. One of the engineers brought a blind friend over and asked if he could hear the back wall. He couldn't. (Diffuser pic attached.) It's a little spooky, but lets the engineer hear *into* the mix with extreme specificity. Again, I'd guess this becomes a big deal when mixing for 7.1, or whatever standard is used for film now. Pic is one of the diffusers in the room.

For pop or (especially) rock music, channels can get eaten up pretty fast. You can mic a drum kit for a small jazz combo with mics on the snare and kick, plus a pair of overheads - four mics total. But for rock, you'll get mud. That's when you'll often see these mics: snare top, snare bottom, kick in, kick out, floor tom, rack tom, hat, and pair of overheads. That's nine mics for a basic drum kit. Each electric guitar will be mic'd at its amp, plus direct. That gives you the ability to balance whether you want more of the intrinsic sound of the instrument (direct) or more of the amp/speaker, which may or may not be sounding its best in your particular live room. And some guitar amps benefit from having both dynamic and condenser mics on them, which brings you up to three channels per guitar. (Remember, mics do not hear like we hear. They can act as audio microscopes, or telescopes, or flatten everything, and their response can vary with the extreme SPL ranges generated by amp heads.) So, a basic drum kit, two electric guitars, bass guitar, keyboard, and three vocal mics can be 19 channels or more. Add more for bigger drum kits, other percussion, and yet more for some of the effects guitarists have on their pedal boards. It's all about capturing in the limiting environment of a studio live room what's needed so the band will sound right when played back at home.

Some of my favorite records are the three-mic Mercuries, and Doug Sax's minimally mic'd Sheffields. But the Layton/Mohr RCAs are pretty amazing, as are the Deccas of that period. In the right hands, a bunch of channels can be a good thing, even if, back in the Mohr days, everything had to be mixed *while tracking* down to the number of tape tracks available, which wasn't much.

Big consoles don't make bad recordings. Bad engineers make bad recordings. Rupert Neve's V3 sounds just glorious, and in the right hands it's gotta be a really good tool.

WW
"Put on your high heeled sneakers. Baby, we''re goin'' out tonight.

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