After watching Last Choir Standing (BBC1, Saturday evenings), I see they have four mic's on the front of the stage to pick up the choirs voices (and do so very well). What kind of mic's are these, and are they worht having, if you have a big group of people?

I saw these too

DOn't have a clue on model, but they were certainly a large diaphragm condenser of some variety.

I was quite surprised to see them actually. Tv is normally all about discretion, but these were very obviously there. A choice of sound over looks perhaps? Certainly sounded ok from the bits I heard. I guess they are purely for broadcast purposes rather than live sound.

I was amazed that:

a: they used four mics. The spill and phasing problems are likely to be increased. I too was amazed to see them on stands in direct line of the cameras. Aren't the majority of live recordings of choral and orchestral material made with a simple crossed stereo pair hung over the top of the choir and orchestra?

b. How they allowed some of the choirs involved to move from the back of the stage to the front. Okay, it created an interesting spectacle for the audience, but the soundman must have been having kittens as they moved, en masse, about 15 feet closer to his mics -unless there was some serious compression going on.

I was also interested to see that they had also used headset mics on some of the soloists (they looked like the same mics the BBC are using at the Olympics for their presenters). That suggests that they played around with the levels quite a bit, post production. I'd also be interested to see how they provided the backing tracks used for monitoring and got so little spill.

maybe I should just listen to the music!!!!

Regards

WAL

They had eight mics not four. Each pole had an end-fire mic of some sort mounted about half way up it as well as the upright condenser on the top.

Guess who's now going to be looking eagle eyed at next week's contest....... Never spotted those, must go to the opticians.

I would guess these aren't the only mics in use, probably a stereo pair somewhere flown above, but I have to say I really don't see how useful these stand mics would be.

Perhaps they are trying to cut out backing track and audience spill, nevertheless they are quite bulky for a tv stage.

one of these ???

a Neumann U87 Ai

http://www.neumann.com/zoom.php?zoomimg=im...w=489&h=600

I was wondering how long it would be before a topic appeared on this one... There's a (short) video on their BBC minisite about the making of the series. In that, they mention that the choirs record their songs as a safety track in a sound studio and these recordings are mixed in to the broadcast mix, particularly where the songs contain a lot of choreography. Their explanation is a little sketchy (not intended for a technical audience like us!) so I'd love to know more about what they're doing there. It does make me wonder a little whether what we hear bears much resemblance to what the judges hear. (I've successfully predicted the judge's decision every time so far so it can't be too far out though!)
Very good sound overall. The cynic in me does wonder how much those stand mics are actually used and how much they're there for show though...

Guess who isn't

The sound dept fight a constant battle with vision - and if they were really not required, the vision mob would have them out of the way in a flash. You can bet the placement of these ugly things was the subject of much discussion - and if sound won, they must have had a really good reason to "mess up the lovely pictures"

Hmphhh!
I think the Neumann U87 is a thing of great beauty...and sounds it!

This isn't strictly true, yes each pole has 2 mics but for example in episode 11 on at least 1 occasion there were at least 6 pairs on poles.





Also regarding monitoring:



Also some of the MD's have earpieces, so presumably they are getting a live feed.

Edit: img's fixed.

I think that the mic's are a bit of an eyesore, but I do appreciate why they are there.

But two or three more points:

1) Shouldn't we hear the sound more from the direction of the camera, to give it more of a live feeling, rather just from one position?

2) How do they get on when a soloist has a radio mic, and then they also use the on stage mic's?

3) From a vision point of view, it's pretty appauling in any event (especially from behind with the light that's hardly ever used), and also, the lights seem to cause glisteing in the cameras this week, which didn't look good.

This has always been a problem. Does the sound change with the picture? This is why for radio and TV simulcasts there's a separate mix. When the camera cuts to the closeup of the oboe in an orchestra, in the radio balance it may hardly be heard, but in the TV mix it might come up a bit.

In the example we're using of the choir. The balance from the audience's pespective may be very different from what we are seeing. Shot one - the choir with soloist in the centre. We have a stereo field with the soloist dead centre. Then we go to shot two, a medium close up with the soloist framed from top to bottom in the left of the frame, with the choir to his left vanishing into the frame, left to right. A common nice visual composition. Does the soloist then have to be panned left (where he is in the picture?) with the choir panned left to right in stereo? If we do change perspective as the camera angles change, this is very disturbing, and almost impossible to do live. If you have access to editing software - try cutting a few shots with sound edited in this way. If you wear headphones it's quite unpleasant - making you feel a bit sick!


The most simple system is to allow small balance changes but not mess around too much with the soundfield.

With a single shot it's easy to place the sound sources to make the soundfield make sense. This is made much more difficult once you cut together shots with very different soundfields.

If the mixer has access to better quality sources they make use of them, but they must sound as if they are really there. You hear this done badly sometimes in amateur and professional shows where there wasn't enough time to rehearse the entire thing. An ensemble that has decent internal balance, maybe being picked up through some boundary mics. Sounds just like a louder version of the real thing, until you add the signal from the two miked up people. The eq chosen for their solo contributions just doesn't blend. With time, you can tweak and balance, but it rarely happens.

Balancing a choir like we see on TV is really difficult, especially when like the web blurb says, tracks are also in use.

I wasn't going on about panning the mic's, I was on about using mic's with the cameras, so that we get a sens of direction, but it probably wouldn't sound as good (wouldn't sound as good).

I wonder how much of there voices are actually live, and how much they use the pre-recorded track?

Rifle mics on the cameras wouldn't really work as 'aimed' mics unless really close in, and most of the images we see are from a long way away. moving a rifle wouldn't create much of an effect at distance, plus, how would the mixer know when to duck the fader while the camera reframed for the next shot. The constant in and out of mics would be very wierd sounding.

There's an article in the current issue of the stage about this very topic

Can't find any links online to it but the gist was that the sound of the choirs was the most important thing.

I got the impression that the recordings are more for the pre-recorded nature of the earlier shows than for any live playback.

Though, I suppose that could be an option for when it's filmed live ...

[rant]

Possibly a bit OT but although I watch the programme I don't approve of it. It's supposed to be a choir competition. Choirs sing: "choreography" is superfluous. The whole series should have been on radio then it could've been mic'ed as required 'cos no-one would have seen anything.

[/rant]

Simple, tie the vision mixer tally outputs/GPOs into the sound desks GPIs, you could probably even come up with some crazy arrangement of tubes moving over the rifle mics as the camera zoomed in and out. Although I agree it would sound very bizarre! Or I wonder if you could do something with the mix minused clean feeds, invert them and feed them back into the desk to cancel and therefore dip the mics on the cameras that aren't live, then it wouldn't be quite so extreme. The possibilities are endless, the results probably pointless at best!

What about if they belonged to the set / props dept?
They're always carefully laid out even for the heavily choreographed pieces for which the impression is given that the safety recoding is more used. The rest of the orchestral / choral world seem to be able to manage with unobtrusive solutions from the likes of Schoeps; is it possible that the absence of very visible mics might lead Joe Public to think that they all just mimed to their safety tracks?
</conspiracy theory>

Despite all this, What about when they make mistakes, which has happened on a couple of occasions, you can't tell me these were carefully rehearsed pre-recorded and repeated live.

I suspect that the thing is pretty much live when it is recorded. They probably only mix in the recorded track afterwards to cover problems that occur with the recording and to act as a monitor for the singers - rather than to cover deficiencies in the performance. So they will use the backing track as a sticking plaster if a performer suddenly moves and the mics don't pick up an even sound, or if the mics pick up an ugly cough from the audience etc.

If they were using just the recording everything would have been perfect, which it clearly wasn't. There were some very obvious wayward notes in some of the performances. That would suggest that the sound you heard at home was pretty much what the audience and judges heard. I can't believe they would record bum notes on the backing tracks and leave them - most engineers wouldn't be happy letting that out of their studio and neither would the choirs, especially if they performed the song properly during he live show.

The reality is that the judges have to judge what they hear and therefore the sound guys can't be allowed to polish it - despite the fact that they easily could if they were allowed to overdub everything.

Regards

WAL

And they do this how on a live show?

Also, as to the judges hearing what they're hearing, they have two monitors placed just in front of there staging area (which again don't look very nice), but it shows that they must be hearing a lot more than just the choir live.

This could quite simply be for more accurate re-enforcement.

To add to Shez's comment on the Mixing in of the pre-record. If you go on the website and look at the short clip of this you will see they just record the group parts, all the solo's are on the night and all the soloists/extra parts have Lav's/headsets.