Recording Aisa Ijiri at St Georges Hall, Bristol November 5th 2015

We have just completed another recording of a recital for the supremely talented concert Pianist Aisa Ijiri. This was a lovely acoustic to record in, and also a very good sounding Steinway D concert Grand piano. We used 2 mixing techniques, our old standard for piano mixing a spaced pair of DPA omni 4006 mics not too close in, so as to capture some room acoustic. The other was an ORTF stereo configuration using Schoeps CMC5's with cardioid capsules. A lovely sound was achieved, but why oh why do people not turn their phones off or onto silence, as we found out during the last 10 seconds of the performance! The repertoire consisted of Music of Bach/Liszt, Chopin and Prokofiev.
Thankyou to Gordon Fergus-Thompson and Aisa for the very welcome sustenance after the concert!

Recording Joanna Wallfisch album at Wyastone

We were very pleased to be asked to record Joanna Wallfisch's new album. She is from a well known family of classical musicians her grandmother is the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who is one of the last known surviving members of the Girl orchestra of Auschwitz and her father is the cellist Raphael Wallfisch. Joanna ( voice and ukelele and piano) assembled a team of Dan Tepfer on piano and melodica, and the Sacconi Quartet on violins, violas and cello. This album is predominantly comprised of Joanna's songs with a couple of tracks by Joni Mitchell and Tim Buckley. Joanna and Dan have been receiving worldwide critical acclaim in reviews of previous albums and live performances, so it was with excitement that we rigged our recording equipment at Wyastone Leys concert hall. We set the quartet up on the stage with the Steinway piano so they were in front of our sound field microphone and the piano to its rear, in cardioid mode so mainly pickup was of the quartet. We mic'ed the 2 violins with Schoeps CMC 5's and the viola and cello with Neumann TLM 193's all close in but still with space to allow the instruments to breathe. The Steinway we mic'ed up with a spaced AB configuration of Dpa 4006 omni's. At the request of Joanna we hired in a Neumann M49 valve vocal mic and some API 3124 mic preamps. The Neumann M49, wow! what can we say, it sounded amazing on Joanna's voice. We also used a Brauner Phantom AE, as a backup vocal mic. We used the API's on the vocal channels and piano, and Focusrite ISA 428 on the strings. It is a great space to work in, with virtually no background noise, so really allows pianissimo playing and singing to shine through. The album still needs to be mixed and have a number of overdubs on some tracks.
Below are some photos and a video from the sessions and some press about Joanna.

 

Live Sound Hire For Spookyfest 2015

We were pleased to be asked to provide the live sound equipment for Spookyfest. The curators of the event were The Spooky Men's Chorale, who were also performing headline slots with Dele Sosimi and his Afrobeat Orchestra. Other Artists performing during the day included Roy Bailey, Spiro, The Rough Island Band, Folk Dance Remixed, Jess Vincent, Kirsty Bromley and Jenny M Thomas. The Schedule for the day was such that changeovers had to be seamless, sometimes as short as 5 minutes,
which Paul and James coped with brilliantly. Artists and audience complimented us on the quality of the sound. We are looking forward to providing the P.A for this biennial event in 2017.