Live Mix: On-the-Spot CD Release: Out the Door,
That Night's Show In-Hand
Abstract (summary)
Benzuly
talks with two front-of-house engineers about the rise of the practice of
burning CD-Rs at concerts, so that fans can buy them as they leave the show.
They discuss some of the questions this system raises, such as whether or not
the engineer should get a cut of the profits, what new responsibilities
engineers will take on as this practice becomes more prevalent, and whether or
not engineers will "need to re-learn their jobs." A sidebar
discussion with Kevin Browning details the process Browning uses for mixing the live music and then burning it to
CD-R.
Full Text
Advances
in technology have made the ability to do our jobs easier and - more
importantly - faster. Why FedEx when you can e-mail? Why wait until you get
home to call loved ones when you can do it on your cell phone while stuck in
traffic. Go to the bank anymore? Why? You can hit an ATM or hop online to
transfer funds. However, this technology has altered our collective minds - we
want it now.
The same
idea is now pulsing through the live
sound industry. Why wait for a band to release a live CD or - better yet - hop online the day after
the concert and download the set's tracks from their Website when you can shell
out $20 for a CD of that show as you walk out the door. Amazing.
Though
the practice of burning instant CD-Rs to be sold to fans as they walk out of
the venue is in its infancy, the concept is raising some serious questions.
What new responsibilities and issues lay beyond the front-of-house engineers'
ability to just be in the "here and now" and mix a show? On the business side, will the engineer
get a cut of the profits, much like a mechanical royalty for a studio-produced
CD? On the tech side, will engineers need to re-learn their job? The answers
are, we just don't know yet. Mix
spoke with FOH engineers and two companies that are offering this service to
discuss this relatively new idea.
MEET THE
PLAYERS
Recording
shows is nothing new to front-of-house engineer Robert Scovill (Def Leppard,
Rush, Matchbox 20, etc.). He's been hitting Record for the past 15 years, going
back to his 4-track cassette days. "My goal at that time was to hone my
skill at pulling off a live
recording, as well as do a concert at the same time," he says. "And I
think subconsciously, or just underneath the skin somewhere, I always knew that
we were going to be able to mass-produce and mass-distribute music after a show
to an audience."
This
thinking led him to become involved with DiscLive (where he currently serves as
an advisory boardmember), a New York City startup in the concert merchandising
and live recording
industries that has been offering same-night live CDs since February 2003.
DiscLive
supplies tours with a self-contained rig that incorporates the company's
patent-pending file-transfer technology, in which an audio feed from the FOH
board is cleaned up and distributed to a scalable number of servers and a CD-R
is burned to produce 800 discs in less than 20 minutes post-show, with the
first batch available in under five minutes.
"We
consider the FOH engineer in a way a member of the band," says Sami
Valkonen, president of DiscLive, "because of the level of input he has on
how the CD sounds. Our specialization is what we term mastering: the sonic
post-processing of the artistic vision of the artist and their FOH engineer to
make the best-sounding CD possible."
Working
almost exclusively with one act can solidify the "becoming one with the
band" mentality. Front-of-house engineer Kevin Browning has mixed for
Umphrey's McGees for many moons, burning in real time for himself and the band
for more than three years. "I have always been conscious of trying to
produce a high-quality live
recording, as well as the live mix,"
he says. "The bottom line is that it's the engineer's primary
responsibility to provide the best sound for the ticket-buying audience."
For the
past six months, Browning has been burning CDs of Umphrey's McGees' shows to
sell to fans via UM Live, a
three-CD set of that night's entire performance available at the merchandise
area for $15. "The recordings are high-quality matrix mixes containing the clarity of a
soundboard feed with the ambience of a live show," Browning explains. "Sign up upon arrival
as there are only a limited number of copies available. CDs will be available
only minutes following the conclusion of the encore."
Front-of-house
engineer Steve Young, who has been touring with .moe for the past nine years,
has been recording that band's live
shows for their live CD
series called Warts and All. "They're just left/right mixes from the console with
audience mics [a couple of 414s onstage] to record the crowd and that goes
right to the DAT," he explains. On .moe's recent fall tour, the audio crew
was accompanied by Clear Channel's Instant Live reps to record concerts using a combination of ambient
mics and feeds from the soundboard. Fans can pre-order when purchasing their
tickets; those who don't attend the event can buy Instant Live CDs at designated Best Buy
stores.
"This
is about more than just technology expanding our ability to bring live entertainment to music fans
in new forms," said Steve Simon, Instant Live project director and executive VP at Clear
Channel Entertainment, in a release. "We are leveraging technology to
improve the concert experience for fans and enhance the connection between them
and their favorite artists."
Gearing
up for Instant Live, Young
consulted with reps from Clear Channel on how the racks were configured to make
sure that the additional gear was road-worthy. On tour, Young worked with Clear
Channel's Dave Tessler, who was situated at FOH and was responsible for
recording the shows, "putting in the CDs, making sure of the levels,
tracking the songs," Young recalls. "He was a .moe fan, too, so he
could tell when they were going to go into a song while in the middle of a jam.
All I had to do was make sure the mix
was right-on. I took a couple aux sends so I did have control over certain
things. The only thing I turned down was the effects return for the vocals,
because they were a little too apparent on the tape. The left/right mix went to a TC Finalizer to
perform simple mastering and it went right to the CD burners. It was real easy.
"They
had road cases with CD-burning towers - three towers to a box - and each tower
did a dozen CDs," he continues. "They had six of those cases at front
of house. They would burn three masters: the first set at intermission, the
first CD of the second set at the end of the show and the third CD after the
encore. And with those three masters, in 15 minutes, they would have
100-and-something copies of the show already packaged. Usually a half-an-hour
after we were done, the kids had the CDs in their hands and were already out
the door."
IS IT
TOUR MERCHANDISE?
One of
the main challenges that Scovill raises is the classification of the CD-R when
working with a major recording artist. Is it tour merchandise or a master
recording for retail, or both? Scovill believes that, to some degree, if you
are selling the item to concertgoers as they exit the venue, then you are treating
the end product as merchandise, which means that the merch vendor and/or the
venue may ask for a percentage of the sale. "Where it can get complex is
when you consider that most major artists are going to have a
recording/exclusivity clause in their contracts, meaning that if the artist
wants to sell re-recordings of songs that have been recorded exclusively for
that label, the label will mostly likely ask for a fee to do so. There will
certainly be a need for somebody to mediate and negotiate all of this for a
given tour. That's going to put more strain on the tour
managers/accountants/artist management to cut those kinds of deals, not only
for a given tour, but in terms of settlement every night."
If the
CD-R was defined purely as a "master recording for sale," would the
mixer deserve a mechanical royalty? "As much as it pains me, probably
not," explains Scovill. "I'd love to tell you there is some kind of
standard setup that we could borrow from the recording industry, but there's
obviously not, in that in that side of the industry, not all mixers get points;
they're more often than not paid a flat fee. My gut instinct tells me that it's
one of those things where the artist will say, "Well, we're already paying
you to mix the show. Why
should we pay you this much more just to hit the Record button?" In the
end, they will have to see "added value" in your work and feel you
were truly contributing to the success of the product. I think as the concept
starts to blossom, and reputations of mixers and their various results start to
grow, you could see some value in "who mixed the disc," much as you
do in recordings concerning producers and mixers. As for the live mixers and royalties,
whatever gets established early on in the game will most likely stick around
for quite a while until somebody is in a position to break from the
tradition."
Browning
agrees that engineers should receive some sort of royalty for their work and
adds another reason why: "Mechanical royalties depend largely on who owns
the gear being used. Obviously, engineers need to be paid for their time, but
it varies after that. If an engineer is providing the gear to make the live sales happen, he should be
compensated for that."
"I
try to stay away from all of that," Young adds, "but I think we
should get a royalty. The show's first and everybody's there working and making
that happen. The tape is just a photograph of the show." Young did receive
a credit on the CD, but the royalty checks haven't arrived.
CONSUMER
MENTALITY
Because
of the need to catch consumers before they leave the venue, these discs will
not be reviewed by the artists nor are they necessarily mixed "for the
medium" in which they are recorded: Will consumers buy the CD purely from
a novelty standpoint or will they expect a studio-quality finished product?
Scovill insists that consumers will maintain a bootleg outlook. "What they
really want is to walk away from the show with the disc in their hands and
listen to it in the car on the way home - warts and all," he says.
""I want my night, I want my town." They don't want the perfect
performance; they want the one that was special to them. And if it has mistakes
in it - if the singer is singing flat, et cetera - the artists have to let down
their vanity a little bit and relax. If you don't play to the impulse buy -
somebody can walk out of the show with a disc in their hands - then I think
you've really missed the golden goose." DiscLive hones in on this
"grocery store checkout line impulse buy" by providing individually
numbered CDs in a customized, pre-printed case.
"The
fans really love the fact that they can drive away from the show listening to
that night on CD and have it sound real good, be real clear and be able to hear
all the nuances," Young adds. "Even stuff that they hear on the CD
that they didn't really hear in the room just because in the room, it gets kind
of lost. Ever since we stopped doing it, a lot of people have asked, "Hey,
where do I get a CD tonight?" And I say, "Oh, it was just a limited
time." I think they really, really enjoyed it and definitely want
more."
RAISING
THE "BOOTLEG" BAR
"My
guess is some fans expect a studio-quality disc while others expect bootleg
quality," Browning says. "I'm trying to make them one and the same. I
have just added a TC Finalizer to try and give our discs a more consistent,
better-sounding edge. Mastering to some degree is possible live, and as time goes by and
standards are raised, fans will begin to expect more from the sound, as they
should because it only encourages us to work harder."
Young
also used a TC Finalizer to help in on-the-fly mastering. Also knowing that he
will be providing the mix
for the CDs over the course of numerous shows allows Young to "tweak"
for the next night. "If you do it on a set of aux sends, then you can make
adjustments over a couple shows," he says. "Like if you do the first
night and you listen to it, if you decide something's a little too loud or a
little too buried on the CD, you can go ahead and change that the next
day."
While the
industry may be a few touring seasons away from selling a fully mastered CD
post-show, FOH engineers are going to have to become more conscious of how
their mixes sound on the
"small speakers." "I don't feel we should hold this process to
the same bar or the same standard that we now hold when we're mixing records," Scovill
says. "But this process is going to redefine some of the methodology at
the front-of-house mix.
[Front-of-house engineers] are going to have to think in terms of that 2-track mix and understand that what
they're doing during the show is being printed. For my money, if there's an
Achilles heel for this model, it is just this: A large percentage of the
quality is reliant directly upon that front-of-house engineer's mixing abilities."
That's
okay with Browning, who says, "Sound companies and engineers are there to
provide fans and audiences with high-quality-sounding music in whatever
context; formats make themselves available as outlets. There is no doubt that
the demand for live
recordings has increased and it has given us a unique opportunity to provide.
It provides a needed service and can be a lucrative source of additional
revenue for companies and bands."
"Overall,"
Scovill says, "it could stand to raise the bar of concert sound in total,
because now you're going to have guys really concentrating on making that mix sound right and good coming
off the console. You're going to see the focus of the band be a little bit
stronger, because now they're going to know, "Hey, I can't just get up
there and sleep through it tonight. It's going to be on record to the
public.""
LONG AND
WINDING ROAD
At the
highest levels, things that seem simple on the surface can get very complex at
their core, "especially in terms of money distributions and fees, labor,
royalties, publishing, et cetera - even distribution of it after the
show," Scovill says. "It very easily swirls into this very complex arrangement,
where somebody has to be in charge of managing all of this activity, not only
between the artist and the disc-makers, but between the venues every night, the
promoters, the unions."
And even
beyond the politics, this brings the "taping community" - especially within
the jam-band scene - under scrutiny. "I do know of a lot of tapers that,
when we were doing Instant Live,
were really excited because they left all of their gear at home," Young
says. "They just brought their $20 and walked out at the end of the night
with a recording of the show. A lot of [artists] don't even let them tape their
shows, but they might think differently if they can sell it to everybody at the
end of the night."
In a
sense, then, in this age where every company is looking for new revenue
streams, same-night distribution can be seen as "free money."
"The artist doesn't have to work one inch harder for it than they did
before it was happening," Scovill says. "The venue doesn't have to
work one inch harder than before. The labels don't have to put out one dime to
get money coming in. From that perspective, it just seems like such a simple
process and concept, but in the end, everyone will have an appetite for a piece
of the proverbial pie. It's really in its infant stages - we haven't seen it
really bloom into what it could be. It's going to be fascinating to see if the
whole thing eats itself alive before the aforementioned pie even comes out of
the oven."
Sarah
Benzuly is Mix's associate
editor.
Kevin
Browning's Recording Chain
"I
take a stereo matrix feed from the console, preferably Midas, and run it into a
pair of channels on the Allen & Heath 14:4 Mix Wizard. I believe subgroups are the key to a
balanced-sounding live
recording. I start by assigning a healthy dose of the L/R mix to the matrix, but then
fine-tune with subgroups. I do not assign the subgroups to the house, only the
recording. That way, when I find I need a little more drums to tape, for
example, I can boost them without crushing the house mix. If vocals seem to be excessively hot going to
tape, I will increase the entire band behind them to even and smooth things
out.
"Once
I'm happy with the direct soundboard mix,
I mix in a pair of
microphones at front of house, usually Schoeps with 4V capsules, using another
two channels on the Mix
Wizard. I then send the soundboard feed to the delay unit using pre-fader aux
sends and return it to another pair of channels on the mixer. I then time-align
the soundboard feed with the mic feed to ensure a tight fit using Smaart,
SpectraFoo or, more typically, by ear.
"I
then put additional microphones onstage for crowd/stage ambience. Microphone
choice and placement depend on venue size, sonic characteristics, FOH position
and about a dozen other factors. For example, the Neumann dummy head works
exceptionally well in many venues, but not all. Some spaces call for very
directional hypercardioid mics, while others sound great using a wide omni
pattern. The Focusrite compressor is inserted on the crowd mics, sidechained
off the soundboard feed so that they'll remain squashed while the band is at a
louder dynamic but open during lulls in the music to allow applause to cut
through.
"Finally,
I have just started to run the entire mix
through the TC Finalizer to give it a mastered, more professional sound. The
resulting 2-track mix goes
to DAT and CD-R, which I track in real time.
"That
is the basic setup, but it varies almost nightly in small nuanced ways: a
different mic here, different placement there, varying EQ and compression
details and so forth. I try to capitalize on the pros of each individual venue
while minimizing the cons."
Word
count: 3089
Narrow
subject
Live Sound Engineers, CD-R, Concert
Tours, Live Recordings, Live Sound Engineering, Music
Technology, Business
trends, Merchandise, Audio
equipment, Bootleg
recordings
Broad
subject
People
Company
Title
Live Mix: On-the-Spot CD Release: Out the Door, That
Night's Show In-Hand
Author
Publication
title
Volume
Issue
Pages
88-90
Publication
year
2004
Publication
date
May 2004
Year
2004
Penton Media,
Inc
Place of
publication
Berkeley,
Calif.
Country
of publication
United
States
Journal
subject
ISSN
0164-9957
Source
type
Magazines
Language
of publication
English
Document
type
Interview
Document
feature
Photographs
ProQuest
document ID
1292099
Document
URL
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1292099?accountid=144516
Last
updated
2012-09-17
Database
International
Index to Music Periodicals Full Text
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