Remote Recording, Choirs, and Old-School Rigs with Robert Marshall

You already be history story. Welcome Hi the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional and motivated with text. The LEO stars George Wisam, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International audio Engineer, Darren, Robbo Robertson Global Voice, Andrew Peters. Thanks to trib Austrian Audio Making Passion, her Sauce Elements, George the Tech Wisdom and Robbo and AP's international demo. To find out more about us, check the Pro AudioSuite dot com and welcome to another Pro Audio Suite the first one of twenty twenty six. Or is it the second season nine? Season nine? I think it could be the second episode because I think we're doing another one for them. Yeah. Thank anybody has that really binged a bunch of seasons of ourse? There was years ago someone downloaded the whole lot. Yeah, someone downloaded the whole back catalog once. Yeah, that was posted it on another podcast channel. Probably fed it into their AI would. Yeah, change the voices and took the ownership. Yeah that's right exactly. Yeah. Anyway, thanks to Austrian Audio Making Passion heard and try Booth. Don't forget the code t R I P A P two hundred to get two hundred bucks off your try booth. Now, pre Christmas, Robert was rather busy. He was in church. He was in I went to church, that's right. Ill, yeah, recorded the Halloa chorus. Actually, so tell us about the setup. What did you do? So it was a. Pretty big choir. I think there's at least one hundred people in the choir itself in a mid size orchestra, not not huge, you know, two double bases on one trumpet I think, or two trumpets maybe two trumpets, believe, But it wasn't It wasn't a huge orchestra, but a pretty big orchestra. And so the concert was there was a concerto at the beginning with piano and the orchestra, and then the second half was the Messiah. So it was the orchestra and the choir and the church was pretty big. So the orchestra at first on the first setup was up on the stage with the piano in front, and the second half was the Messiah, where the orchestra went down off the I shouldn't say stage, the whatever, the sanc, the. Podium, podium, the pit, the lectern. They actually took out a few pews to fit the orchestra down there, and then the whole. They gow pew pew. Set a fixed guy from Star Wars, and then they had the choir up on the top. So the setup was basically a pair of K one eighty four's were the main pair for the choir, and they were also the close up pair for the orchestra when it was the the concerto, and then the O C eights were the spot mics on the piano for the choir. The os were the spot mics for the soloists with. Eights. Sorry I was going to say yeah, And. The choir at that point was the K one eighty fours at the front, and then actually a pair of shirt sm et ones hung and more spread out in the back, so all the mics were set up basically O RTF style, you know, like a little space between them and roughly at a little maybe a little bit wider than ninety one. Yeah, I think it's like something like that degrees. And then the main pair was a pair of cheps and that was the main pair for the orchestra, and it was also the far back main pair for the orchestra and the piano when it was that section. And then funny enough, at the last second, I decided to grab a video, and I have a little shore MV eighty eight and I just hung it back there, and I was. Way in the back. My setup was up in the choir loft, which they weren't using for the choir, but I was up in the choir loft wearing in the back of the church. So I just set up my phone with this shore MV eighty eight stereo mic just to get a video. And when I mixed. Everything, I brought that audio in from that video, and it of course didn't time out right because you know, different sample clocks. But I just lined up a transient, zoomed way the hell in at the beginning, and then I went to the very very very end and I found the same trans and I did a little tiny stretch on it. It was a couple of frames because by the end, and it lined it up well enough, especially for what was effectively reverb. Right alignment would be quite as critical. There wasn't. It wasn't as critical as you know. It was supposed to be kind of a slappy I. Have a delay that varies in time right. In fact, I'm probably aligned it actually closer than it really was because the delay of two hundred feet it would have been a couple milliseconds. It's like you turned the knob on the digital effect, you know, for the early. What do they call it, what's the early reflections? Yeah, turned that down to zero or the time the time of the early reflections zero. But I use that so so the mix you guys have there, there's no fake reverb, but I did put a little bit of that in there, and it did help just sort of gel it together nicely. And then if you listen to the the main pair of the chefs and you compare it like for the singers or the piano, you can see really how effective those spot mics are. The C eights at really just letting the piano just pop through. It doesn't sound like it's super close mic, even though I had the C eights basically in the crook of the piano, just one pointing at the middle of the bass strings and the other one pointing at the last hammer of the high strings. So sort of ye a little stereo spread of the piano itself, and then just put that in there a little bit, and for the soloists, just enough to get them to cut over the whole mix and voila. That is the mics. There's no EQ, there's no compression, there's no noise reduction obviously or anything. And I have to imagine you probably didn't have the time to mix and match or try this pair of mics here and then these paranal. I was going to try to do a I was gonna try to do a bloom line with the with the the eight one eight's, yep, and I brought them, but there was this no time to Yeah, like we had a dress rehearsal, and then once we had the dress rehearsal done, I was like, that's it, We're not going to change anything. So and that would have been really complicated because there was also moving mics during like you know, you had twenty minutes during the in the intermission to switch setups and having that really top heavy stand with those eight one eight's up there and a big, fat four channel cable because it would have been you know, four channels for those two So I was looking forward to trying to do that, but in the end that didn't happen. Yeah, did you with the one nights because you got the front of back on the capsule, and you can use the two xlrs, the Mini XLR in the back and the standard one in the bottom. Could you do like into some kind of a stereocapture, Yeah, you can. It'd be a one to eighty stereo capture. Yeah, like a coincident pair just left and right, so you don't get the time delay that the RTF set up gives you. Like the RTF gives you a similar time delayed to what your ears, have a similar distance between your ears for the capsules, and that that does a lot to add space to the whole, like I find when I do stereo recordings, and the coincident techniques be it bloom line which is actually pretty cool, or just x Y or even MS, those are all coincident mic techniques where the capsules are right next to each other so there's no time difference between the left and the right capsule receiving audio. They tend to be a little bit not as exciting as a space pair, you know, like the space pair of omnies where you get the way apart of course is like the most like that gets also. A wire spread wacky. Yeah, it gets pretty out there, Like there's there's little definition. But with this one, when you listen to it, you can really hear the violins on the on the left and the and the double basses on the right, and you get a really good sense of space of orchestra, I think. And if you want to take it the next step further, you'd throw like a Jeplin disc in the middle of that kind of set up. Yeah, tell us about what that's designed to do, emulate more like human hearing or something. Yeah, it kind of starts to emulate what the head does, where the head blocks sound. Sound coming in from the left and it hits the left side of your head and your left ear hears it, and then your head is a big acoustic baffle. It is your right ear hear it late, but it hears it baffled and therefore lower like you get a high pass filter effect. Only the low frequencies make it around your big head acoustic baffle. So a Jeplin disc is just a sort of acoustic baffle between two spaced microphones usually RTF. It enhances the stereo effect. Basically, who would you use that? People doing sound effects libraries or even like if you just want to kind of beef up the stereo effect of a spaced pair. The next step from Jepplin disk is like the Noyman head microphone, where you basically are practically getting a binaural recording. Fritz is that his name? Fritz? Think it's Fritz? Okay, yeah, Fritz is Fritz? Is what they call baloney in Adelaide, isn't it? Isn't it Friz? Yeah it is Fritz. Yeah, Fritz. It's like a small goods things, the sausage, I think. So could you say, ah, Fritz, like you know, baloney? Yeah? Or what is it in Sydney? Is in Devon, isn't it? Yeah? It's Devon up here? Yeah, yeah, little five cents worth. You don't get much Devon or Fritz for five cents anymore. So how was the content used and distributed? Was it live stream? So it was live stream? So the setup was I actually used all the you know, like plates up on the Sanctuary stage area. So I was too lazy and I did and bring five hundred feet cables. I didn't do that, so I just plugged. Short stereo runs into their stage plates and then brought them up and they had a big analog soundcraft at the top of the choir loft. So I brought my splitter Snake and I just picked off the mics from there and fed one back into the Soundcraft and the other one into my mic pres and we agreed that the Soundcraft would do the phantom because it's a passive split. It's not a transformer to wire like split it out. And that's where I got the chance to use their smat ones that I didn't bring that we're already pre hung. I was like, hey, let me grab those two, you know. So they split it and they sent that off live to YouTube and they did a mix off the board, and then I just did a garbage stereo mix into my Zoom two track is a like a safety but recorded mainly everything into George. Pull up that picture of that mac. Tell me what you see. Yeah, that's the very old G three, G four G four power. That is a G four power book lap. A firewater cable coming out of it. Yeah. Yeah. So the setup is Mike Pree's go into a fast text twenty four to twenty four or whatever. It's like literally a spinning hard disk recorder twenty four tracks. That's the backup recorder aight at optical out of that into an m audio firebridge, which then has FireWire going into that laptop, and then that's my main record. There's also a zoom recorder sitting there. Is that, Like you got a zoom recorder right? The zoom recorder is a backup because the mic preamps I have also pull a stereo mix off. Of the eight channels. Oh yeah, cool. You can daisy chain those those mic pre vamps. So the knobs on the if you notice on any channel the mic pramps, there's three knobs and it's gain level and panne. Anyone on thirty five would have no idea what you're talking about. Nine, I guess not, but it's it's a I mean, you could go in with a slightly more modern setup, but the idea is all the same. I mean what you'd switch out the fastexs for something like a semantic hard drive recorder instead of I spinning a desk recorder. You'd switch your laptop out for something newer with a newer interface that also does optical. But honestly, I found that the like I was looking at getting a semantic and stuff, and sometimes those things are really limited, like they can only be an interface or a recorder, but they can't do both, and then if not, you've got to spend huge money on a Joco or something like two thousand dollars. I mean that fast text that's my mobile rig. I've had it for twenty years. Someone needs a mobile recording thing weighs a thousands. Maybe one of these days you can build a studio on wheels. I've done it. You've done it too. So I don't mean a hijacked this, but this just the craziest thing happened. Speaking of remote recording, you see the screenshot right now. Oh yeah, yeah, I've I've got one of those those those at I s. Yeah, I've got I've got. One of them. So I'm met the owner of this. I'm standing outside the Trader Joe's by the Marina. It's the best Trader Joe's grocery ever because it's right on the marina. Like it's full of both. So they just bring it straight into the traders and I'm staying there with my bicycle that has a pair of speakers mounted to it, because come on, guys, I mean, I am George the Tech and I'm a biking. Through so a pair of speakers, not just any speakers tannoy speakers the little little black arenas I called little tannoy speakers, right, and they're mounted to the side of my a basket mounted to the front of my bike, you know. It's and this gentleman, older, scruffy little guy is couldn't get his eye off my bike. And my girlfriend's like, Hi, yeah, I noticed you'd like my boyfriend's bike. What is it. Any guy starts talking about the speakers and I walk over to him. Long story short, He's like, oh, yeah, I have a remote recording truck. And I was like, really, not too many people have that, and he tells me. George's like, I've got a remote recording yeah. I used to have one. And then it turns out he's like, oh yeah, I have studio on wheels recording truck dot com. I was like, what the guy that I got this gig from he died, but his thing that I used to do all these remote records from. So that's how this gig yeah, sort of twenty years later, but he was reels on wheels. Well, this truck you're looking out right here is the record plant truck. Oh really, I might I might know who built that. Jim Reeves was my buddy, and he used the record plant trucks. Was was this from New York Record? I think, soboy, you know, he's in LA and he he was like, you want to go look at it. It's parked in the parking lot over at XYZ. And I'm like, oh, I don't have time now, but yeah, I love to come see it some time. But he uses the SCR Maki. Yeah he's got the Maki recorders. But he's got he's got him retrofitted with solid state so they're all running solidly. Okay. But I was like, oh my god, that's like my dream recording truck. But just you know, it's been twenty five years since I built mine. But well that API is a dream board, right, that thing? Yeah, ooh that board's got to be one hundred thousand dollars. No joke, this thing, but yeah, it just fit tickled me. And when you were showing us your setup and what's in there, and then I just happened to run, like, you know, it's so la that you run into a guy like that, you know. But he's like, yeah, I was just record. I just had Bob Clear Mountain in this truck last week recording a live appearance of King Crimson. I was like, what, what, holy shit, I got to talk to you sometimes. I gotta get you on my podcast. But his portable forty eight rig is a lot like my rig, so mine mine, Mine is a portable twenty four. So he's the bottom two mic preamps with my fast Tex and I don't have a power splight in it. I have a whatever. And then yeah, those Atis, I've got one of them. But those the studio projects I have are pretty similar in that they have a mix. All those ATI mic pre's off also have a mixed. Mess to them, right, And I was like, I bet you don't get that truck out that often. He's like, oh yeah, six six, seven times a year. You know. I'm like, that's a hell of a vehicle to maintain and keep around, you know, and you just don't use it that all. Yeah, it's just not necessary anymore because like, honestly, you think about what this truck is capable of. And granted he's got a lot of nice analog in there, but like I can switch out my my recorder for a TDM system, which is still fairly portable, and then I've got all the DSP and mixing you want to do so if you want to do a live record and broadcast instead of just collect. The mics there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got all his one got his old guy whatever you need, and he's done voiceover to tie it into voiceover. He's got a couple of credits, Josh Brolin for a Mercedes spot and Christina Applegate for a fruit water. So what does he drive up to their house with this thing and. Either to their house or to a set. You know, I don't know if you know about Christine Applegate, but she has I think I think she has MS or something. She's pretty become a lot more immobile. So he got out there to record her. So, yeah, he's he's on a lot. He's on somebody's a you know, resource list. He gets brought in. You know. I'm like, damn, that's just amazing. Though. It's just it's so if. You and I hung out with him, it would be like crossing of the streams, you know, and uh in Ghostbusters, right. The conversation would not end and nowhere. Exactly exactly. That just inspired me. I was like, holy crap, what are. Those giant monitors back there? Those are years or jbls of some sort. I wonder. Yeah, I don't know what they are. I don't know. That's massive. Those got to be like eighteen likes to me. Yeah, they're so huge, and they're so close together relative to their size. Yeah, you know what I mean, classic general like ten thirties maybe, and then thirty one, and then there are ten ss and s ten sorry, yeah, and that's tens the a couple of years sitting on top and a DBX on the other one. For anyone that's listening to this, you have not been you constant the picture, So hopefully we're being descriptive enough. To maybe we can gravel link to it in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah, it's just recording truck dot com. But that API board is to die for. Yeah yeah, yeah, well I miss it. I miss it too. I wish I could pull up a picture of my rig. But I had a really similar rig to what you were doing to, Robert, and I kept it until I moved to California and I used it to The last live shows. Are recorded were of. A local band called called Weapon of Choice, and I always loved these guys and I recorded them live a couple of times and had like some like a Halloween show at cal Arts, which was a crazy show and you know that kind of stuff. But I used a very similar gear and uh, it was a lot of fun. You're you're with like the D eighty eight's and the spirit board. Right. Well that was when I had my truck back in Okay. But when I moved out here, I let all that. Oh I sold all that, so then got rid of the truck. My friend bought the truck. It was just in a little little old RV, like a little literally like twenty foot long camper like tiny. So when I came out here, I just brought the Bear essentials, right, I just brought the macy SDR recorder and I had like a small rack like you did, with sixteen channels of pre amps. And then I had this little rolland line level. Mixer that I use for monitor mix and two mix for the reference recording that sat on top. Gotcha, and it was a piece of junk. Did you split the outputs of the preamps? How did we do it? Oh? I might have Mai Mecki had analog or digital? Was it eight ad into the amp to the Makie or is it? Yeah, I can't remember. If I had a direct Oh, I must have gone out of the Mackie into the Roland sort of monitoring off the record. Yeah, off three cords so long. But it's just fun. I mean, it's just it's it's an intense way of recording, especially if you're trying to do it yourself, which seems like me and Robert were always doing it ourselves and I was trying to do like I should have brought an assistant to I can't tell you how many times I do a job and I'd be like, why did I try to do that by myself? Especially when I had the truck. I would have to like literally like sprint from the truck into the venue sometimes because there'd be like an issue, you know, Like. The worst part about this was like you know, the like foldable dollies. Yeah, okay, So I've got this six space rack that's got just massive amounts of copper in it because the snake that coils up that has all the xol rs, it's probably got at least a ten foot whip that comes out of the. Back of that rack. So when I get there, I'm not plugging stuff inside the racket is like whip it out and then that's right, But this little dolly with foldable wheels that you're just waiting for them to fold in upstairs like the stairs. That was the worst part. Yeah, exactly, I mean those are those were good times. I remember them fondly, and I remember how many times I still actually have actual anxiety dreams from that time, because you know, of all the times I would be on location doing it totally solo and have something, you know, go wrong, or something entirely preventable. There you go. Now you guys can see it. That's the RV, right, THERV I think it was. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, so he's that young, felt. Likely, right, that's when I was first putting it together. Yeah, there is the one D thirty eight and a separate rack so I could pull it out and take it around ephex processing, HATCHBA a little bit outport almost. Those MACIU monitors that you just sold recently, didn't you. Yeah, big old MACKI twenty four's. They don't look big in the picture, but those things were far bigger than they needed to be in an RV. Back in the day, my radio days, we used to do OB's and we would have bands playing, and I remember there was one time just hearing you talking about having nightmares. I still have nightmares. About this week. There was a band band in Australia. He were big at the time called Boom Crash Opera and I was working I was working at Tripling in Brisbane and we had them. We did an ob from the front of the building for something or other, I can't remember why, but they played on stage and so I had I had the little the little ob console for the radio station to take care of, and I was also mixing the band at the same time and trying to you know, and bringing in announcers and you know, talking back to the studio and all that sort of stuff. And I still have nightmares of it, you know, things where nothing happened. We went seamlessly, but I still have nightmares occasionally. But you know, something goes wrong, something didn't work or you know whatever, and you have that little freak out moment where your heart just stops and you know, two seconds feels like a year that yeah, and there's just nothing going to air. It's funny every person who was as an ext jock of a certain age always has the same nightmare about your record running out and there's no other record queued up. Did I tell you my embarrassing story from my from my midnight to dawn days in Newcastle? That was one where you're off here, Yeah. There was. There were the dunnies for this radio station. We're outside of the radio station. By the way as a toilet toilet. So so I had to say about eleven o'clock or whatever, it was one Saturday night and I needed to go to the loo, and so I put on the extended mix of Michael Jackson's Black or White, which goes for like twelve minutes, and bolted out the door because I was busting and you know, did what I needed to do, and got back and realized that I didn't. Have the keys. Yes, we've all done that. So I had to back in the days before mobile phones, of course, I had to race down the road to find a phone booth and call my mate Ben to and sort of to say, listen, can you do me a favor? Can you do me stolely? Can you come let me in? This is whatever time was that past eleven and so yeah, and he comes and lets me back into the building we were, and the emergency tape luckily, yes. After sailants or how does that work? Do what? Sorry, there's the emergency teach kick Yeah, you've. Seen after three minutes of silence minutes. The emergency tape was so the. Emergency tape was so old. It was playing like. Yeah, yeah, thank god it was Newcastle, thank god it was me. Wonder why they three minute long delay before the yeah radio. The compressor will be sucking so hard that if you do. Them, it's just yeah, it sounds like white noise. The Pro Audio Suite and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, Edited by Andrew Peters and next by Robo. Got your own audio issues just ask Robbo dot comment tax report from George the check, don't forget to subscribe to the show and join the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, so just the topic or just say it. Drop us a note at our website. Audio sweet at the Dog Cast