LOCATION SOUND

Dan Snow shoot

 Like many of the teaching staff at Bucks, I still get to be involved on professional productions from time to time. Eg. this recent corporate film shoot, a conference opener for IoD – with BBC presenter Dan Snow. I was the Location Sound Recordist, providing all sound equipment required and working alongside a small camera crew to capture the presenter’s pieces-to-camera.

The call time on location was 6am at IoD's HQ in central London, an early start even by filmmaking standards!

As for most shoots like this, I used a radio clip mic on the presenter. This enabled an even pick up of Dan’s voice as he walked around the building (up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, etc) and it’s normally better than trying to use a boom microphone for ‘walkie-talkie’ shots like this.

 It was shot using a Steadicam, used to track the Canon C300 camera smoothly around the location.

A steadicam in action

This needs to be perfectly balanced to keep the movement smooth, hence we needed to do away with the cable i normally run between the SQN sound mixer and the camera and instead use a wireless ‘camera hop’... basically a radio transmitter hooked up to the mixer and the receiver mounted onto the Steadicam rig. When working like this you need to run a backup recording, we used a Zoom H4N recorder.

The shoot was done and dusted by about 9am, at which point we enjoyed a bacon sandwich from a nearby cafe and went home. A good day at the office!

Location sound recording techniques like these are covered during the Sound Design modules of the course that make up 25% of the teaching in years 2 and 3. We have multiple location sound kits for students to use – all spec'ed to a broadcast standard with kit from Sound Devices, Sennheiser, and Audio Ltd etc

Al Green

Sound Design lecturer

My SQN 4S mixer and location kit

AMP Graduate Interview: Ally Siu

Q) What is your job title and where do you work?

Currently I am a self-employed freelancer. I keep my own diary and set my own pay rate. I work for multiple companies that vary from agencies to production companies and major corporate businesses.  I usually refer to myself as a live events technician; this covers my whole skillset, which is more then just being a sound technician.

Q) When did you start working there?

I have been freelancing since the summer of 2013 so just over a year now. However I did spend a year as an onsite audiovisual technician and manager for a production company.

Q) In a typical day, what do you do?

A usual day for me starts at a ridiculous time in the morning and travelling to the event site where I then help unload the truck(s) carrying the show kit.  The next several hours will be spent rigging and testing and sometimes rehearsing before the show starts and we are live.  There isn’t usually much time for testing so you have to be sure you know what you are doing and test along the way to give yourself a helping hand and lessening the rush when time is running out.  Operating during the show is the highlight of course where you can enjoying the thrill from executing your role to the highest standard.  Once the show is done you are then in de rigging mode and preparing to load the van back up and then go home at another unsociable hour!

  

Q) How did you get the job?

As mentioned earlier I worked as an onsite technician and then as a venue manager for a production company. I soon realized that being a venue manager was basically a fancy term for salesmen! I decided very quickly that I didn’t want to be a salesman, so I handed in my notice and started looking at various options.  With my experience levels from the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics and my time working on site I decided I could go and be a freelancer as I had the necessary skills to be successful.

Q) What are the best bits of what you do?

I get to work with some very talented people, which is an opportunity to learn as much as possible to further my skillset.  Since working after leaving BNU I have picked up more skills and am far more employable because of it.  I now get work not only as a sound technician but also as video/data operator, lighting tech and video conferencing controller.  My degree in audio and music production has had an influence in all the jobs I do as not only can I step in and help out whenever needed but as a video/data, lighting and VC technician I know how sound/audio interacts with each discipline and can offer advice to improve the overall show.  Being a freelancer also means I don’t have to work every day.  At the moment I earn more from 3 days work as a freelancer then I did from a 5 day week as an employee and I still work nearly 5 day weeks so my weekly turnover is excellent!

Q) What are the worst bits?

Definitely the unsociable hours, I’ve realized that all those midday naps I took while at university were in no way preparing me for a working life!  A hard part of freelancing is finding your own work.  I am now at the point where some companies come to me asking for work because they know me now.  If you choose to go freelance be prepared to do a lot of job searching and make sure you are comfortable with approaching people and essentially getting in their faces.  One company that now provides me nearly 45% of my work ignored my first two emails.  I then sent another and waited a few days before calling them to see if they had it.  Don’t be afraid to be bold! Companies like that!

Q) What advice would you give to anyone looking to get into the same line of work?

Get involved with everything.  Even if you are on the job as a sound technician have a chat with the video/data guys; I know we tend to call them vidiots but there is a lot of work out there for good video/data people and adding an extra skill to your repertoire is always a good thing.  If you can pick up some lighting skills as well do it.  Companies have a real appreciation of multi skilled people and will always employ you if they know you can do more then one thing!  I began to make friendship with project managers and now I do some project managing of my own.  I have managed two mid scale musical productions which included soloists, choirs and orchestras! I organized all the equipment and had it rigged into the venue and operated the shows. 

Be a help not a hindrance, just because you area good sound tech doesn’t mean you are above mucking in and helping get a show ready.  Don’t be a white glove operator (someone who turns up expecting everything to be ready to go) going above what is expected of you is a sure fire way to get more work and will play in your favour when you ask for a pay rise! 

Q) Anything else you’d like to add?

Enjoy what you do! If you don’t enjoy it then change something.  I found working as a venue manager depressing because I was spending all day at the venue and sometimes all night before going home, sleeping and then returning to my venue! Leaving that job and going freelance was the best thing I have ever done.  I get to meet new people and do new things every day! I now find it hard to see myself doing anything else.  There’s no one way to achieve success so make sure you make it your own way.

Visit to Wycombe Wanderers Football Club

Final year AMP students recently had the opportunity to carry out an audio 'health' check at Adams Park; the home ground of Wycombe Wanderers Football club. Students got to shadow professional consultants from Sennheiser, looking at the way audio is currently used at the ground on match days and suggesting system updates and improvements. 

Check out a short video documenting the visit, here; http://youtu.be/dDq5e2OGmG4

BBC Introducing in partnership with AMP: Live performance from The Scruff, 10/12/14

Today was the first studio-based multi-camera production that we have undertaken as part of our new partnership with BBC Introducing.

Students from BA (Hons) Audio & Music Production, supported by tutor Dan Peters, captured the sound and their mixes will go to air on the BBC this weekend. The BBC have sent out this tweet: Recording @TheScruff_ at @bucksnewuni for #BBCIntroducing this Saturday night at 8pm on @BBC3CR

                   

Students who specialize in sports and live events production within BA (Hons) Film & TV Production, supported by tutor Gary Emmins, filmed both the live music performances as well as an interview with the band that was conducted by BBC Introducing presenter Gareth Lloyd.

           
This is what The Scruff had to say about their day:

“The students were great, totally professional. We were made very welcome and the whole operation was slick on every level. It’s been a pleasure to work with the students from Bucks New University.”

The videos will be presented on the BBC Introducing YouTube pages as from this weekend.

New Music Rehearsal Space at Bucks

It’s great to see work on the new Music Rehearsal space finishing this week, and the results look pretty impressive!  You can take a virtual tour of the space too at http://www2.bucks.ac.uk/virtualtours/music_rehearsal_studio_W12 


The room was commissioned to support students on the  Music Performance Management Degree in the Dept of Music & Live Events Management.  Kitted out with a brand new  Yamaha Drum Kit, Fender and Ampeg Amps, Mackie PA and Shure Microphones, it should be the perfect space to practice.  Whilst module and course related bookings will take priority,  we’re keen for other Music & Events Management and Audio & Music Production students to make use of any empty slots too.   Bookings will start in the new year and will be handled by Media Resources.  We’ll let you know more about the bookings process and how it’ll work in January , just as soon as all the core course bookings are loaded up. 

AMP involved in new partnership with BBC Introducing

On Wednesday December 3rd, guests from BBC Introducing will be on-site to launch a new partnership with the department of Production. The partnership will see AMP students capture and post-produce sound which will ultimately be promoted via the BBC Introducing YouTube site.

When asked about how the partnership with the BBC came about, Steve Partridge (head of department for Production) said: 

"We have been filming live music performances for a few years now and have gained a reputation for doing this pretty well. Colleagues from the BBC noted this during a visit a year or so ago and as a result agreed to my proposal that we might partner with them to support their remit from government to promote new music"

Steve continued,  
"The music [captured during multi-camera shoots] will be broadcast via BBC 3 Counties on the Saturday, and the video output will be promoted via the BBC Introducing YouTube site. 
This is increasingly a collaborative project that will engage all three course areas within the Department. The multi-camera crews comprise Film & TV Production students, the audio crews who manage live sound and post-production/mixing are Audio & Music Production students. And the aspiration for when we have installed our new Vizrt VR solution (likely to happen around Christmas), which is of great interest to our partners at the BBC, is that we will soon be able to offer the option of filming a band in a full VR set that has been created by animation students as a full 3D render that will then run in real time via the green screen studio facility."

Trip to The X Factor

On Thursday the 13^th of November, a group of third year students (myself included) took a trip to Fountain Studios in Wembley, to the set of The X Factor. Dan Peters, our live sound lecturer had managed to organize the visit as he had previously toured with sound engineer Ben Milton, and now Ben mixes monitors for the show.

First of all we were taken for a tour of the TV studio. As we walked around, we were given an explanation of how everything works, the procedures that are followed and the equipment that is used for such a massive show. As you can imagine, the equipment used is of the highest caliber and is very impressive. One thing about the studio its self that stood out was how small it looked in person compared to on TV.

Mixing monitors for the show came across a mammoth task as it’s not a case of just sending sound to stage. Traditionally a monitor engineer would be in charge of the foldback, making sure the band can hear each other/what they want to hear to enable them to pull off the gig at an optimum level. A lot of the time this can involve a fair amount of diplomacy which has it’s own problems. The X Factor is broadcast live (roughly 9 million viewers a week) so the monitor engineer has additional tasks to do. As well as providing the foldback for the different contestants/backing bands, the job also includes making sure everybody can hear each other, e.g. the contestants can hear the judges and visa versa, the producers of the show can be heard by basically everyone and as well as the performers, dealing with the presenters, to name a few.

 

For monitoring purposes, the show uses a mix of 14 stereo in ear monitor mixes and a large number of monitors on stage.  The main console for mixing monitors is the DIGICo SD7, however they also use a small SD8 for guest bands that come in to play on the show e.g. One Direction, this means that an external engineer won’t interfere with how the show is mixed. The smaller SD8 is also used to mix The Xtra Factor straight after.

We were also taken up to the gallery to see what is used to mix the sound for broadcast. This is where we met Robert Edwards, the sound supervisor for the show. This means he is in charge of what is heard on TV. He explained to us a little about his role. The backing tracks are received on the Friday morning and are mixed on an in0house protools rig. They are then bounced to stems for the live engineers to mix for the contestants. The desk used for mixing to broadcast is a Calrec Apollo Console that can handle 1000+ inputs and Robert splits the desk into different layers to suit the layout of the show.

 

All in all it was a really good trip that gave an interesting insight into real world live sound and broadcast sound. It was particularly positive to hear that Ben went to University and did a degree in an area of sound before he began working in the live sound industry, with a variety of jobs. This experience will also be useful with what we do at University as even more comparisons can be made to what we learn and what we do as this runs parallel with industry practices.  

Release The Bats - Live Music Recording

People say sound isn’t something you just hear, it’s something you feel. I certainly felt the sound, blasting out at around 110 dB for an assigned OB task; a video recorded live session of the band “Release the Bats”. Sounds simple, right? Jam a couple of microphones into an amplifier, throw a microphone at the singer and whatever microphone shaped objects are left get carelessly positioned around the drums. “Give it a raw feeling”. It doesn’t work like that, especially when you’re being assessed, and want to get the best sound opposed to doing the mother of all botch jobs. Before the actual day, preparations were made between myself and my peers, technical riders and stage plots were designed (on behalf of the band whom made communication a difficult process) and contingencies were prepared in the event of problems. The first problem we came across was the concept of an OB. In other words, we were being assessed on something we’d never done, and hadn’t used the equipment (a nice shiny Midas Pro2 digital desk) in over half a year.


Needless to say, I was worried about complete catastrophic failure on our part. When the ball got rolling, and we started setting up, nerves were eased. That was, until we encountered a problem with sending a direct link from the desk, upstairs to the recording studios. Using even more technology, known as Focusrite RedNet, we attempted to send all the audio directly to the studios without processing it on the desk. It’s another thing that we’ve never done before, and encountered a problem almost instantaneously, no sound. This is bad, but we quickly found the missing link that was causing the whole issue, a good old trusty router. Who would have thought of it? Certainly not us, that’s for sure.

This is all before the band has arrived, in typical punk fashion, they arrived little over an hour late, and this is where the show began, things started to become real, and everyone had to put their professionally first. Lines had been checked, and it was all about getting the best damned sound with the given environment, until we realised that the monitors weren’t plugged in. It was a bit funny that the band weren’t getting any vocals through their monitors. Without further ado, they were plugged in, line checked, and appropriate monitor feeds were sent as requested. Simples.

Not only did we have to record the sound for the OB, sending a premix to the PT Recorder (which records all the sound and the video together), we had 48 hours to do a studio rough mix, with a 48 hour turnaround. Mixing the drums wasn’t so much of a problem, sampling the drums to compliment the recorded drums assisted the mix, it’s the vocals that caused the greatest issue. Tune? Dynamic control? Vocal technique? It’s like he not only ignored the conventional singing technique, but done the exact opposite. Performance value was great, but recording quality was a difficult thing to work with in the studio. There was no amount of compression that could save the vocals, so the dynamics had to be ridden manually to ensure equal levels overall. That at least stopped it poking in and out of the mix, the tune and melody was the second and bigger problem. Autotune was out of the question, using Melodyne, a pitch correction to gently shape the vocalist’s tune was also impossible (due to bleed and sharing microphones), so what do you do when you can’t make it sound better? A lightbulb moment, make it sound worse. Adding grit and distortion to the vocals made the tune somewhat irrelevant, as a matter of fact the imperfect tune complimented a rawer mix.

Overall, the entire production was challenging, but successful. It’s taught us all how to work together, collaborate with video students, liase (or attempt to liase) with bands, and informed us how important getting a decent sound right off the bat (haha, get it? Release the Bats? Okay, I’ll stop). There was certainly room for improvement, but it wasn’t a failure either. I’d quite happily do an OB under similar circumstances, with the newfound knowledge of the technical understanding within Outside Broadcasts, and from which, can only improve the end result and product.