Brisbane Festival Recording

A couple of weeks ago, SAE’s Audio Department was approached by Brisbane Festival to do some recording for their Indigenous piece this year! The message made its way to our class as an open invitation to work on the project and being one of SAE’s Indigenous Scholarship winners, I immediately put my hand up and began working out the details with my lecturer. This was a really unique project to do as unfortunately the details were wildly all over the place and nobody really seemed to know what was happening, this happened up until the day so keep in mind the planning that did had to be done with little known detail about what specifically I was going to be doing. I was told a couple of days after agreeing that we had a recording date set for the NEVE studio and a list of the other students involved were also included on the list as other studio engineers with me being the lead. The project is a 10 minute audio / visual storytelling piece that takes place over Brisbane River and is likely to be seen by over 500,000 people!

Example of what the show looked like in 2018.

To be honest I'm pretty grateful that I had engineers helping me as my signal flow and knowing how to use the NEVE is definitely not my strong point. There were little details about the project besides the fact that we had a recording session in the NEVE and that some Indigenous instruments such as a Didgeridoo were going to be recorded. I didn’t have much information about what we were recording, but since I knew we would at least be recording a Didgeridoo and it's a rather uncommon instrument, I decided to do some research on how I would go about this.

I came across an article on lapaine.com that suggest the following steps for recording a Didgeridoo:

"First, lift your didgeridoo off the floor. The sound will be much clearer. When we recorded, bell of the didgeridoo was some 35cm elevated.

Second, put some absorption underneath the bell of didgeridoo and, if possible, the mics. We had 10cm thick 60X60cm square of rockwool for absorption. Notice the difference of sound.

Third, most complicated, get some help of great ears for didgeridoo. This person has a very demanding task in both physical and mental ways. This brave person needs to: – take the bell of the didgeridoo while you play some characteristic part of the song to record – lift it off the ground on the height where stands hold the didgeridoo, – put his/her ear on the distance which is similar to the distance of the “main” mic – for me it was around 35cm – move it, at the same time with the absorption underneath the didgeridoo, around the room to find a sweet spot

What is a sweet spot? Well if you like bitter, it might be a bitter spot for you, anyway it is the spot where your didgeridoo sounds the “best”. By “best” we could say it is a perfect blend of articulation, clearness, kick- bass, fullness… Once you decide which spot it is, try to stick to it unless you realize you can’t place the microphones properly.” ("Recording didgeridoo tutorial – part 5", 2010)

("Recording didgeridoo tutorial – part 5", 2010)

To me, microphone selection makes all the difference when it comes to recording particular things (as I've found with drums). For this recording I decided on using the SM7B as the primary ‘close’ mic and have the NT2A and the B2 pro as a room mic to capture some additional tones. The reasoning for selecting the SM7B is because I have always had a great experience using this mic and know that it works very well for recording loud sounds (it is often regarded as a great microphone for metal screams). I did see some research that suggested the SM57 or SM58 for this project, but judging by my experiences between the two I opted for the SM7B as I have never had a bad experience with that microphone, but have with the 57/58's.

Though I originally had a team to help me record prior to the recording, they all decided to cancel the Friday before we were recording (which was Monday morning), so I was instead joined by two members of my class who put their hands up, Mike Allen and Micky Hatzis.

The weekend before I received a rough schedule of the day and some more information about the things we’d be recording. From the email by the Brisbane Festival representatives I found that we were not only recording instrumentation, but also Dialogue and some foley elements in the one session. Although many things were still quite up in the air, this cleared up a lot of questions, and helped us prepare for what types of things we’d be doing. I also found that we’d be recording the elements in the studio, but sending the session files to an engineer who would be doing the rest.

Now that I’ve explained some background of what I knew in regards to planning prior to the session, heres what happened on the actual day:

Myself, Mike and Micky arrived at our studio session in the early morning and began getting some microphones put up on mic stands before the arrival of the Brisbane Festival team. The team arrived about 10 minutes later and I was introduced to a few of the people who would be joining us today, one of which who was Brisbane festivals hired audio engineer for the project named Mike. Since we already have another Mike listed in this blog, I’ll refer to Mike from the Brisbane festival as M, to avoid any further confusion!

After being introduced to each other and getting some information about what we’d be doing in the studio, we were joined by Fi, who was the creative producer of the project. I discussed with them about the specifics of the session, if they had a particular sample rate and bit depth, and how they wanted the recordings. M actually uses Ableton as his DAW of choice, so I decided we would give him the Pro Tools folder on his hard drive after we were finished, and he could go through the stems in the audio files folder within that.

After setting up the session, the first thing on the agenda was to get the voice overs done - Myself, Mike and Micky discussed this prior to the session and decided on the Neumann U87 Microphone for Dialogue. I had also asked some others in class who have done great dialogue before and they also recommended that I use the U87. We each received a script of the dialogue to have a brief look over and before we knew it the voice actor had arrived. The recording of the voice took about 20 minutes in total to do, and we had great success using the U87.

The next thing that was happening was the recording of the musicians, that we had found out were still not expected to arrive for about another hour or so. We used the time that we had in between to record various foley elements before taking a lunch break. For the foley elements we used a U87 as we had one left over from the dialogue recording (as they come in a pair), with the goal being to create the sound of an old ship sailing. For this we ducked into the C24 Foley studio and took out 2 blankets, a chain and a creaky chair, this was recorded in about 15-20 minutes.

After a lunch break the musicians were expected to arrive and we had the room set up to record all of the elements live, but originally used a baffle to help separate the sound a bit considering how loud the didgeridoo is, we later decided not to use this mainly because the musicians needed to be able to see each other, and the SM7B has quite a tight sound where very little bleed gets picked up. Initially the idea was to record the songs live and potentially do some overdubs with stomping and other various sounds, but we decided to change this and go with a fully live approach. We found that we would only be recording 3 people in total, one didgeridoo player, one clapping sticks player and one main singer. For the didgeridoo, I had decided that since the NEVE was carpet, we’d use a wooden box to help get a better reflection of sound. This was done in accordance to my research which suggested that soft surfaces absorb all of the sound from a Didgeridoo.

Although this video isn’t of what looks to be an Indigenous Australian digeridoo, it shared some similar tonalities so I still used this video for inspiration.

As a quick turnaround, after finding out the number of people we were recording. We ended up using the U87 for the main vocalist, the NT2A for the backing chants (also performed by the clapping sticks player), the KM184 for the clapping sticks, and the B2 Pro as an omni-directional mic which was placed in the centre of the band. From then on we recorded about 6 songs with the bands and then we were finished with the musical aspect. We then had to record just the main singer who was the writer of the script and narrated a majority of the story (with the first voice actor playing a character). After this was done (similarly to the first voice actor as we still had the same microphone etc set up) we said our goodbyes to the artists and wrapped up the session.

This is a really great piece for me to have on my portfolio, and is probably some of my proudest work so far. As an Indigenous Scholarship recipient of SAE Australia, I believe that this is a strong portfolio piece for me to have especially as an Indigenous creative practitioner. Indigenous australian creative work is something I’ve always wanted to do heaps more of and being able to do so at such a large event has been an amazing opportunity. I was sure to keep my networks up with the band members and we exchanged phone numbers before they left, I had also found that one of the members shared relation to the same tribe of people that my family is from! It’s great for me to be able to work in something that I’ve been passionate about my whole life and being able to use creative media to share some of my culture will definitely be one of the best things of this trimester.

On top of that, the Brisbane festival crew was a great networking opportunity for me to be able to meet professionals in the industry and represent SAE. They had also brought along an intern who was an Indigenous student studying at JMC Academy and I networked with him and we hope to work together in the future.

I was actually contacted a week after by Brisbane festival to see if they could come back into the studio but plans changed and they decided to cancel, but the fact that they remembered to come back to me was a positive sign in my eyes.

I’m excited to see the finished product which will be playing throughout September for Brisbane Festival!

References

Didgeridoo recording of Dubokobud at Kramasonik 2010 Part1. (2010). Retrieved 10 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuxJqbDtBC4

Recording didgeridoo tutorial – part 5. (2010). Retrieved 10 August 2019, from https://lapaine.com/index.php/2010/02/01/recording-for-kosmopterix-part-5/