| The session | Recording a live concert is always a tricky endeavour and inevitably there have to be compromises made as ultimately the audience are paying to see and hear a concert and don't want mic stands in their view. Equally the musicians don't want any more mics than necessary to deal with and particularly where space is at a premium like this gig with the Hull Philharmonic backing three groups on a stage that really could have done with being about twice as big.
Hulls ￡3m Albemarle music centre opened 4 years ago and was built as a performance and rehearsal venue with teaching rooms for 15 Hull musical organisations from the orchestras and brass bands to jazz groups and choirs. I suspect that this was the first time that electric guitars had been allowed in ! It's not really a very good sounding venue and infact the stage is far too small but it seats 250 and was a sell out performance on the night with a few extra rows of chairs pushed in for good measure in front of the stage.
The PA guy had realised pretty quickly that there was no point in trying to mic up the orchestra but rather the best way forward was to mic up the band instruments (musical saw anyone?) along with the vocalists and gently push enough detail up to get a balance on the night.
The three bands and the orchestra met up for the first time to rehearse on the Friday evening and then their final rehearsal on the Saturday afternoon before the gig, It's a pretty tall order to get this thing right and despite a few worries about tuning early on infact the whole evening was a great success which was also a no small part due to Ian the PA guy.. The sound in an empty auditorium is very different to one with 300 people in and he made a great job on the night.
With the recording inevitably playing second fiddle (Humour) I figured that really I was looking for a recording that was basically a memento of the evening and the easiest way for me was to run splitters from the pa mic box direct into my set up avoiding any EQ and level issues with the PA. Almost everything on stage was miked up with the standard PA fare of SM58s with the exception of a 414 under the piano lid and another 414 as a drum OH. Initially I put up a spaced pair of Omni Hebdens about 8 foot in front of the stage but the band amps and drums drowned out the orchestra and so in the end I put the Hebdens behind the band one pointing in cardioid over the violins and another over the cellos.
The mighty Soundfield was the only mic out front and I quickly realised that because of the sound of the room I wasn’t really going to get much usable other than the audience. It seems a bit extravagant to use a ￡4.5k mic to pick up the applause but what ho!
However the highlight of the night for me was my discovery of the Placid Audio Copperphone mic which had initially been bought along to act as a spare coms mic but which was discovered by the bands in rehearsal. The Copperphone is an inexpensive dynamic mic that looks as though its been made from a length of copper tubing but unlike all other studio mics which offer shiny transparent HI FI the copperhone is engineered with a frequency response of 200Hz to 3K which gives it a fantastic lo fi vintage vocal sound without having to resort to any EQ. I’m sure you could get pretty close with some expensive EQ but I just thought the Copperphone really lifted a number of the band tracks. It's one of those mics that makes you approach the song differently and I loved it so much I bought one. ( See review)
In the end I recorded this track from Rory Mansfield on just 10 tracks and basically the mix is down to the usual mix of EQ, compression and a bit of reverb slung over the lot. I’m pretty happy with it as a memento of the night but more than that as it has introduced me to a fantastic new mic that will get used loads in the studio
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