Easter Broadcast from Sydney Opera House
With a bump-in time of midnight Saturday night, and going live to air on Ch7 from 6am on Sunday morning, time was everything for the recent Wesley Mission ‘Rise and Shine’ Broadcast from the Sydney Opera House.
Trevor chose to use the Roland M400 and digital multicore for the job and it proved it’s worth in many ways.
“From notes I had taken in rehearsal and along with the patch list I was able to pre program the vast majority of the show on my laptop, so when I got to the Opera House it was a simple matter of patching in the multicore to the Roland stagebox, then loading the program into the console and we were done”
From start to finish of setup including a separate feed to multitrack record the program it took less than half an hour, valuable when under that sort of time pressure.
“We had agreed with the House and Ch7 to do a full line check at 3am, however as I was setup and ready to go by 1am, so I had the band run a few songs. I tweaked my mix settings and recorded that mix to a USB stick direct from the console. Then I took that mix up to the Music Director and plugged it in to his computer so he could hear it. We talked through the songs and made more notes and he was really pleased to be able to hear the mix early, it gave him confidence in the broadcast.”
“We were done and dusted by 2.30am, half an hour before Ch7 wanted to line check. That’s what I love about digital technology - used well, it lets you spend time on the music and creativity, not on plugging things in and being caught up in the technical aspects.”
The M400 performed brilliantly, the sound was clear and clean and the recording to Sonar took place via the inbuilt ethernet port form the console, one cable to record 40 channels!
“I was very happy with the result, it went faster and smoother than I had anticipated I can’t imagine going back to full analogue for this situation when the sound quality is so good and the speed and flexibility of the system is so extensive. I made huge use of the user layers which allowed me to have fader control of all 40 channels on the one 24 faders layer, with a mix of direct channels, groups and DCA’s.”
Below are two videos from the event, featuring Steve McPherson and Steve Grace.
