I just finished a production with a Philharmonic and a Youth Symphony combined production as the Audio Engineer and TD. Now I don’t cross with them very often but I have had most of the Directors and coordinators from those groups on several occasions in the venue that I own. They are there for either awards ceremonies or for any number of standard concerts. By Standard I refer to Rock, Celtic, Blues etc. Not large stringed groups. So when they arrived on site of the performance hall that was hosting the production they were (needless to say) a bit… uneasy at first.

Now they have worked with me on many other events and are aware at the quality of events that I am able to do but have just never seen me work on a large stringed group.  I am usually never around when the local productions are going on so that explains why they never see me around for those.

It was a “Peter and the Wolf” adaptation for a Western and had a major focus on just the instruments that represented the characters. If you are familiar with the production and concept then you understand what I am talking about. So I place microphones’ above the location where these principal instruments are located and immediately got questioned as to why I was placing microphones in a harmonic  orchestra when their sound is “All Nat’ural”  and that they never deal with microphones. This I understand  but stood strong saying, “trust me, when these instrument need to accent characters moods and movements you will want these for this production”. Especially since there was a narrator doing a monolog the entire time over the group.

So I placed an AT414 over the percussion, two Shure KSM32 over the principal instruments because they were sitting together, four Sennheiser 421 over the rest of the group. Just enough to bleed in to the PA for support if needed. That was plenty. 

Long story short, my mentality for this particular show was to mix it like a rock show (minus the 105 dB) in terms of the soloists and bringing them out front and center above the 60 piece orchestra as a whole. Even when the group was playing in all of its entirety I still mixed the instruments representing the characters as a 6 piece band and used the orchestra boundary mics for effect. And for the Lobby page feed.  I also had to mix a 4 piece bluegrass group in at the end ( Acoustic Guitar, Banjo, Mando and Fiddle)  when was quite different to place a full orchestra behind.

Doing what I did and getting away from a traditional orchestra mic’ing, it allowed me to enhance the audiences senses of the emotional  movement of the characters and give the production a more… produced (haha) feeling. In the end I did win over the Conductors and the lovely.. cough cough.. parent coordinators from the orchestral groups with my technique which they were not accustomed to.

Though it is nothing new to an experienced engineer who has been around, this is my recap of this orchestral production. I have worked with over 10 different Philharmonic groups in my career so far, but hardly ever have to pull out a selected few instruments for a production of this caliber. It was a very fun experience.