Opera Sound Recording

[Svenfilm]

Good day.

 

I would like to find out what the best way would be to record a live performance of an opera production? What equipment would be needed and would the quality be similar to the live performance?

[kerry davies]

Short answer? The best way is to get someone else with a much bigger budget to do it for you.

 

Slightly longer answer is to read THIS ARTICLE then come back to ask specific questions for a while before finding someone with a bigger budget and loads more experience to do it for you. This is one of those piece of string questions and answers very much depend on what length of string you are willing to spend.

 

(Note that RoH have an apprentice which suggests that they have to train up their own specialists in this field even though they have their own college training humheads for theatre.)

[sandall]

It depends on the purpose of the recording. If it's just to make CDs of the event for an amateur cast to take home & never play, then a couple of mics hung over the front edge of the stage & a simple digital recorder might be all you need. Alternatively a few shotgun mics along the front of the stage & a simple mixer. Back in the days of cassettes a group of us did a lot of this, mostly for charities. Will it sound as good as the live performance? - probably not. Will that matter to those who took part - also probably not.

 

On the other hand, if this is a professional performance & you want something you can sell to the public (copyright permitting) then I'm with Kerry, though the RoH (& their budget) is perhaps an extreme case.

[paulears]

I hate doing opera recordings. Unless the venue is good, and EVERYONE in the ensemble is good, it's really a difficult project to make sound 'commercial'. The biggest snag I always get is the building.

[sunray]

Good day.

 

I would like to find out what the best way would be to record a live performance of an opera production? What equipment would be needed and would the quality be similar to the live performance?

It's horrible!

My advice is to get intimately aquainted with the performers [that's spent lots of time at their rehearsals and performances, not ...] to learn what they, the individual do, move etc.

The levels are all over the place and one can expect many 10's of dB's of variation and coming from all sorts of directions.

Edited January 8, 2020 by sunray

[paulears]

If you look into the SoS article a little more deeply, you see they have all got personal mics, and I'd bet much of what the remote audience is from these rather than any stereo space mics. Mic up the singers and the orchestra and monitor properly and recreate a live sound from that artificially. For a live broadcast, I can't see any sensible alternative. I'd promote it as a stereo recording capturing the live performance, but in reality, I'd be pushing the levels of the radio mics to make the balance better.

[sandall]

I hate doing opera recordings. Unless the venue is good, and EVERYONE in the ensemble is good, it's really a difficult project to make sound 'commercial'. The biggest snag I always get is the building.

Funnily enough I usually find that the building is way, way down the list of problems......

[paulears]

It's perspective. The flown arrays work great when the singers are downstage, but when they're upstage, so much of the sound goes to the audience, not up to the array, and worse, the pit 'slot' seems to fire it's content up to the mics. Even worse, lots of Opera style events take place now in strange spaces like churches and hall type spaces rather than acoustically helpful spaces like the opera houses. Other places, like the Theatre Royal in Norwich in my neck of the woods have very absorbent acoustics, great for speech and amplified music, but I always find just listening there to take extra concentration.

[kerry davies]

I was not being flippant or dismissive, the recording of a full orchestra is difficult enough with up to 20 or 30 mics but adding in a bunch of vocalists that won't stay still and snog, fight, climb the set and generally misbehave is on a higher level again.

 

I found another, older article from my heroes at BREGENZ. It's worth noting that Wolfgang is now Professor Fritz and 20 years ago he had a crew of 6 just for live sound reinforcement. He also had dozens of speaker sets all with their own delays and used two mics on every singer. They used computer controlled tracking even then of performers rigidly blocking from side to side and up and downstage.

 

From a single mic front and centre to the "Decca Tree" with and without outriggers to the full on Ron Streicher with his "New Stereo Soundbook" and Wolfgang and his banks of computers the scope is endless. Posing the question; "which is the best way to make a live recording of an opera" can only elicit the standard Blue Room response; "It depends."