This was our first production at the temporary tent, installed at "Turn and Taxis" at Molenbeek, during the Brussels attacks (22 mars 2016). Since La monnaie is closed for more than one year for renovation works, we installed a big tent, the MMPalace with more than 1k seats on the grounds of an old industrial place.
We were very curious about the acoustics and ambient noise for the shows and recordings and during rehearsals we had some overflying cargo flights and rain which were disturbing the performance but since all microphones were relatively close to the instruments for amplification, you cannot hear these noises on the recording. The tent itself has dry acoustics since it was treated that way to fight flutter echo's, which can be very ugly in this kind of venues.
All Singers had wireless lavelier microphones for amplification and in the orchestra we installed 16 microphones. on top of that there were 8 microphones on the proscenium for the choir and 2 omni's in front of the orchestra for the recording. These 2 were the only omnidirectional microphones, all others were cardio or hypercardio. Another 4 ambience microphones were installed in the hall for applause. That Makes a total of 50 channels for live mix and multitrack recording.
Every microphone was distributed by an optocore system to the FOH desk and the monitors desk and to the recording van via an optical MADI stream. We had one day of rehearsal and then the second day of recording we went live on arte web. The mixing engineer for the live streaming recorded the first night on multitrack and rehearsed the second day from 9 o clock in the morning until 5 PM with this multitrack to be sure to have all the singers entrances and volumes right. With this setup all 3 mixing desk used the same preamps (and thus gains) of the optocore system. some are pro, others against. I think it is an easy way of distributing the signal and there is no quality loss in conversions.
For the Radio Mix we took the multitrack recording and mixed at La Monnaie on our protools system the days after the recording. For radio purposes we had to take out some silences which were too long on this medium.
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