“Andrew Rodd, Norwest Project Manager: your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to clear the field of 10,200kg of speakers, masses of cabling, and a dozen field of play monitors prior to the first game in under 10 minutes.” Andrew and his crew did it in nine.
It’s interesting, because at an Olympic ceremony you have more than three hours to play with and if you notice something has changed or is not quite as predicted, you have time to make some adjustments. But our show was half the length of a typical olympic preshow. We didn’t have any time to make changes and we didn’t make any changes. It was really a case of trusting the numbers. I couldn’t even walk around – the show would have been all over by the time you got from one end to the other. It helped that it was a [L-Acoustics] Kudo PA and I know those boxes very, very well, as does Shappy [Ian Shapcott, who mixed the show]. MICROPHONE EXPOSURE
CH: Has miking up performers in huge auditoriums progressed much over the years? SWA: Not really. Wind is still your enemy. We were fine. We had perfect weather, and considering it rains most days in Auckland at that time of the year we were very lucky. To cover ourselves, we had each live performer doublemiked, with a hypercardioid and a cardioid. We resolved that if it was windy we’d bury the mics further down into the costumes and sacrifice a bit of top end to avoid wind noise. But it was so still that the mics were actually exposed. There was top-end in all those live mics. CH: Where best to put the bud mic? SWA: It’s a function of the costume. The best spot is the one that gets the mic as close as possible to the mouth, bearing in mind the movement of the head, while at the same time protecting it from wind. Combine those factors and you have the best spot. It could be down the front of a dress; could be up in the headware. It depends... MIXING: THE 2.5 RULE
CH: Okay, next. What are you referring to when you talk about optimising the pre-recorded mix for show night? Are you talking about fader mixing on the night?
AT 46
SWA: There was a lot of mixing done, but mostly in the week prior to the show. All of the music was broken down into stems and then we did a mix that helped to ‘thin’ it out. CH: We’re talking about orchestration and backing choirs here? SWA: That’s right. We spent time with the musical director and composer, Victoria Kelly, simplifying the recordings somewhat – ‘time sharing spectrum’. For example, in the first 16 bars we might let the log drums sit forward, then in the second 16 the percussion comes forward and the log drums sit back. Sharing spectrum becomes really important so that you don’t have all these layers landing on top of each other creating a great big mess. CH: Where do you acquire this mix trick? SWA: Featuring different instruments over time that don’t overlap spectrally? That’s a film mixing technique that goes back to the days of Tomlinson Holman. One of the most celebrated applications of the technique was in Apocalypse Now. It’s the ‘two-and-a-half things at once’ rule – if there’s more than two and a half things happening in the same spectral region then we need to thin it out. CH: And the main vocal? SWA: A featured instrument or vocal is the equivalent of dialogue in film mixing – it sits front and centre. Really, it’s thinning out the underscore so the vocal comes through. It took a long time. We spent a week or more going through things piece by piece, track by track, tidying it up as best we could. It was worth the effort, it tidied it up a lot. CH: Clearly, that finessed mix wasn’t what you sent to the host broadcaster? SWA: No, they got the original stems. Then we also gave them direct feeds of any speech mics or live mics. Ambience? No, they took care of the ambience mics themselves.
A pair of Digico SD8s in a dual-redundant configuration at FOH, with Ian ‘Shappy’ Shapcott in control. The signal is distributed via 14 nodes of Optocore fibre supported by XTA DS800 analogue backup. Every network node has the ability to run off the analogue or the digital and the switch between the two occurs within a single sample.
CH: So you’re trying to make the broadcast mix engineer’s life as easy as possible, I guess? SWA: Sure, because remember: the audio mix engineers don’t see the show much prior to the first camera rehearsal. They really only get two cracks at it before they’re live to air, and that’s nowhere near enough rehearsal when you consider we’ve rehearsed it for three weeks. In my view that’s always been the biggest risk with these big shows – the broadcast guys sometimes flying blind. So we deliver as much pre-packaged audio as possible. CH: How does the pre-packaging extend to live mics? SWA: Every mic on the field has three receivers. So if they’re double miked, we’re effectively giving the broadcaster six channels of receive on digital and six channels on analogue – for every live performer. And without much rehearsal, it’s a bit daunting for someone to just jump in and throw faders around. So we organised a radio mic group for them. Which comes off Shappy’s console. So whichever fader he has open – based on the one with the best RF performance – that’s the one that appears on that fader for the broadcaster. So ultimately, all the broadcast mix engineer had to do was leave the 5.1 mix stems open (they were straight off the replay machine to him); leave the radio mic open; leave the speech group open, and another stereo replay group for prerecorded video audio. That’s not a lot of faders to deal with and if you left them all up at unity it would sound fine. All you’d have to do is ride the crowd in and out, and the camera mics. 10 TONNES OF PA IN 9 MINUTES
CH: Finally, let’s talk about the ‘quick change’ PA conundrum. SWA: Well, the issue was how to get 10 tonnes of PA off the field as quickly as we could. There was less than 30 minutes between the end of the speeches and kick-off for the opening match. And in that time there needed to be warmups,