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Recording Gluck's Alceste on Location

by David Holland

One day in late July 2000, "the Firm" (David Holland, Jim Purcell, Stewart Smith and Paul Young) gathered at noon at the 15th century Alderton Church in Suffolk, England, to record Gluck's opera Alceste. Rehearsals were due to start at four o' clock, and we had to be rigged and ready for a sound check by then. The concert was a one of a series called "Summer on the Peninsula," which runs between May and September.

The church building is without any pillars, and has a clear span wood and tile roof. Someone had erected a stage at the west end, scenery had been painted, and the pews reversed for the performance. The set up of the church gave us little choice but to sling the microphones. If there was a fire or another kind of emergency, the only exits were to stage left and right, and at the altar end through a small door. We had to keep the passageways clear, so due to the lack of gangway space, the use of stands was out of the question.

Slinging of the main pair was our biggest problem. The second pair, for soloists and chorus, would be slung from the in-house lighting rig above the stage, and would not be such a challenge, but finding a place in the cavernous ceiling to hang the main mics was not easy. As luck would have it Jim and I found one of the finest ladders you could come across laying in the aisle, left by an unwitting electrician. We duly borrowed the ladder, and ran it up the walls to its fullest extent for access to a couple of old hooks we had spotted at stage left and right and planned to use for our main pair rigging.

OK, so what's hard about rigging? First you must know where your singers/artists will stand, and arrange to hang four metal spring clips about twelve feet apart - six feet in front of your artists and six feet behind. So the focal point is bang in the middle. If you draw a cross between the four hanging clips, the cross would be where the artists will stand. Then from your clips you hang your nylon cords, (which are black if possible). Four of the ends must be clipped to the microphone stereo bar, the other ends are tied off at floor level. One convenient nylon cord must take the mic cable away from the mics and on to your stagbox/snake. You do this by taping every yard or so to the nylon cord. With the microphones mounted, (and at this point they would be hanging about six feet from the floor), you can adjust and raise them. As you now have four cords at stage level, it is possible to manoeuvre the pair forward or backward over the focal point of the singers. You can also raise or lower the pair and now have a great deal of flexibility to check the sound, adjust. I have seen other professionals tie off cords way up in the triforiums of churches, with very little chance of making any microphone adjustments - but 'the Firm" knows better! With our method, once you raise the rigs, you can tie off the four ends, and at any time you can make an adjustment.

Got all that? Good.

While we were climbing up the walls, Stewart was busy setting up our makeshift control room in the very small vestry. Our master recorder was a Tascam DA 30 Mk2, with Jim's Sony A8 for backup. Stewart also set-up his Tascam DA-P 1 DAT portable for a third copy, and, finally, my Sony MiniDisc recorder. Why a MiniDisc recorder you ask? Because we were going to record two performances, Saturday and Sunday. The conductor would then review the two recordings via MiniDisc, choose the best performance and save us from loading two huge files into the computer for editing. We were also planning to cut in parts from the other performance using SoundForge 4.5 software.

Our mixer was the excellent Soundcraft Folio SX, a 12 mic in, 4-bus mixer. Since the vestry was close to the audience and not the stage, we decided not to use an amplifier and speakers because we didn't want to leak sound into the church. Headphones would have to suffice. We also used "the Box" from Mike Skeet which gave us the equivalent of a Lissajous display. For the layman this is an array of 100 colored LEDs shaped in a diamond. It displays amplitude vertically and phase horizontally. Out of phase, LEDs go off in the middle of the display, so we could see immediately if one of the microphones was out of phase.

One other item was the Gold Channel. This is a device used to slightly increase - and I mean by milliseconds - the time of arrival of the input of the soloists and the chorus on the second pair of mics. When you record with two pairs of microphones, the secondary pair is usually well behind the main pair and it is possible that the sound will arrive a bit late, which might introduce smearing of the audio image. You can set the Gold Channel to the number of feet/meters between the main and secondary pair, and it will calculate the relative arrival times of the sound so that both pairs of mics are in sync. Result: no smearing of the sound image. The Gold channel can also be used to compress the sound that goes through it, but not on this occasion.

Using my eight-way snake from the stage to control room, we made the point of carefully avoiding the lighting cables with the possibility of associated thyrister noise. Thyrister buzz, generated by the thyrister in the dimmer is particularly objectionable because of the odd 3rd 5th 7th 9th harmonics which are very difficult to remove afterwards. All microphone cabling should directly cross main and lighting rig wiring, unless you want trouble. If mic cables run parallel with lighting, it is possible that the thyrister buzz could be picked up by the mic cable. During rehearsals we do a full lighting check for noise. It only takes minutes and all you need is a friendly electrician.

Our main pair were a couple of spaced Omnis, the soloist's pair being an MS pair, (Mid and Side). The Omnis gave us the space, and a good bottom end to the orchestra, and the MS pair gave us the ability to zoom in and out for soloists or chorus. We set them up, two Sennheiser MKH 20's with acoustic pressure equalisers (APEs), the microphones being about 17 cm apart, and for our MS pair, Sennheiser 30/40, the mid a cardioid (30) and the side a figure of eight (40). We also used a stand spotting microphone for the harpsichord: one of the new, very small Neumann KM184's.

We spent quite some time adjusting the main pair, in height and angle. Even though the Omnis are, by definition, omni-directional in their pickup, they can actually be somewhat directional at high frequencies, but are improved with the APE. (Acoustic Pressure Equalisers modify the direction, and frequency response characteristics of a mic. The APE presents an obstacle to the high frequencies from behind, making it more directional. When we first used APEs we actually drilled some billiard balls on a lathe for a couple of Calrec 1000 series mics. Sennheiser use a very thin rubber ring to do the same job). The Omnis would give us the feeling of the room space and that extra octave of lower frequencies. The MS pair gave us the option of making a slight adjustment on the mixer which brought up the soloists, or widening the image for the chorus. However, there was nothing dramatic about it, otherwise this would spoil the effect.

On a fine summer's evening the concert duly started, with a packed house, with us shoe-horned into the vestry. The evening went superbly, and we got it all on tape. It will be yet another one of those recordings that will be remembered long after the event has passed. We even had a pub right next door to the church, which pleased our cider-drinking colleague, and at which everybody enjoyed a very fine meal.

Editor's note: Orders for the recording of Alceste can be placed with Jack Phipps, who organizes the Summer on the Peninsula series each year. Contact jacsue at phippsj.fsbusiness.co.uk.