How we record WKMT London Classical Concerts

How we record WKMT London Classical Concerts

WKMT Classical Concerts

As the head Sound Engineer at WKMT, it is one of the jobs to capture our WKMT classical concerts and festivals that are held at St. Cuthbert’s Church.

The concerts are not only a great opportunity for our team and students to showcase their talents, but they are also a great promotional tool for us to spread the word about our business via social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

In order for these performances to represent us in the best light, they need to be of high quality both in terms of visual and audio. We normally use at least different camera angles to be able to cut between them to focus on different parts of the performance when needed.

My primary goal is to capture the best audio quality that we can achieve given space, instrumentation and equipment. If the performance is a simple piano performance then I would only use two microphones, however, if we have an ensemble playing then there could be up to eight microphones used at once. The latter set-up was the case during the most recent Joseph Haydn Double Piano and Violin concerto played by Juan Rezzuto on the piano. For this performance, we had a piano, solo violin, two first violins, two-second violins, one viola, one cello and one double bass. For this type of instrumentation, it was important to capture the individual instruments in addition to the ensemble as a whole. To do this I used a combination of close miking, where you place a microphone next to a specific instrument to capture it along with distance miking, where you place a microphone or set of microphones at a distance away from the ensemble to capture everything at once. Using these two methods gives us the most control over the final sound, for example, if the cello was too quiet during the concert, we are able to boost it up in post-production to give a more balanced sound.

Once the concert has been recorded, it is then mixed, where all of the levels are balanced and the sound is equalized to sound more pleasing to the ear. The mixed audio file is finally synced up with the video files to create the final result that you see posted on our YouTube and other social media accounts.

Here we share with you all the result of the Joseph Haydn piano concerto in G Major Hoboken XVIII:4 recorded in March 2019. For more videos from our classical concerts editions, do not hesitate to browse our Youtube channel.

 

How we record WKMT London Classical Concerts

https://youtu.be/L3nLKlGsFZA

 

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