Audio In the Big Leagues
I’m standing at front of house inside L.A.’s Staples Center the night before the 49th Grammys broadcast. I’m surrounded by some of pro audio’s biggest heavyweights, and the mood is best described as “watchfully relaxed.” After six grueling days of install and rehearsals, the crew is ready to wrap and get ready for show day.
But first, we’re all in for a treat: The Police are about to re-form before our eyes and ears. Some thumps from the bass, the stage lights come up and Sting greets us with a cheeky “We’re back,” and the ‘80s icons launch into “Roxanne.” Ron Reaves is at the main desk, with Sting’s sound guy by his side. Reaves seems to be giving the band a little time to settle into a groove before sliding anything. Then the magic happens, and the sound blooms in the cavernous hall. Which, strangely, is not empty of spectators. About 100 radio contest winners, hardcore Police fans all, take up a small row of bleacher seats on the west slope of the arena. The band must have wanted an audience; previous Grammy performers, such as Madonna last year, demand the set be completely cleared of non-essential personnel for these rehearsals. By the second run-through of the song, Reaves has the audio dialed in beautifully, but the band will have to run through it four times for the camera crew and stage director. Smiles all around. Everything works. But getting to this point was anything but easy.
“Music’s Biggest Night” is also audio’s biggest install. And that’s the word from the guys who pretty much do all the big shows: MTV’s VMAs, the Oscars, the half time show at the Super Bowl. Of all of these, the Grammys have the most musical acts, the most microphones, the fastest pacing. You name it; this is a pretty labor-intensive production. Keep in mind that the Grammys are really two shows in one three-and-a-half-hour package: there’s the live gig inside Staples Center being mixed for the industry’s movers and shakers in the house and the separately mixed audio for the live broadcast. And it’s not really just one night. The P.A. and set install, which transforms L.A.’s famous basketball palace into music’s showplace, took from February 5-7 followed by three days of rehearsals and run-throughs.
Although much of the audio gear brought in by ATK/Audiotek is essentially the same as last year’s, and the XM/Effanel trucks and personnel are back at their state-of-the-art-stations, some aspects of the show get more complicated. “The bandwidth problem, for one,” says monitor mixer David Velte from his perch high above stage right. “With the Feds selling off radio frequencies as fast as they can and more HDTV stations coming on board, available frequency bands for us to use are becoming harder to find. They’re filling up all the holes we used to use.” With the trend toward personal monitoring systems and wireless mics, this can spell trouble. “Rehearsals are one thing. We have some control of the venue. But on show day, ENG’s can suddenly switch on without warning,” explains Velte, referring to the electronic news gathering circus that sprouts up around Staples for the big day, not to mention in-house security and private bodyguards who can compete for radio space. “The wireless thing is out of control.” So what’s a struggling RF professional to do? “This year we’re limiting wireless to the essentials. See my body pack? My Shure PSM 600 is hard wired into the floor because I don’t move around much when I’m doing monitors. We’re doing the same with drummers, keyboardists, pedal steel players; anyone who doesn’t require mobility gets wired. Every day it becomes harder to get wireless gear to work.” Indeed, RF problems arose during the telecast, perhaps most noticeably when James Blunt’s wireless mic failed near the end of “You’re Beautiful.”
“I was five feet from Blunt when he did his song,” said a seasoned observer in the audience.” There were actually three occasions during the song that the mic cut out. I had been present for the Blunt rehearsal, and it was flawless. Gnarls Barkley sang at the same stage for half the song; he did not have a glitch.” A small event in the course of a three-and-a-half-hour show, perhaps, but a testament to the technical challenges that can crop up unexpectedly.
Out on the floor where the show is constructed and plugged in to 1000 inputs, nothing about the Grammys is simple. Michael Abbott is the guy in charge of everything audio. His official title of audio coordinator tells little of his ever-growing responsibilities.
“All the advanced planning done is based on the info provided to me starting a month in advance by the Grammy producers Ken Ehrlich and John Cossette. During this period leading up to the show, there are significant changes/variables in the spec and layout of the broadcast right up to going live on Feb. 11 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time,” states the 21 year Grammy veteran.
“I am responsible, in the four days leading up to the live broadcast, for passing on the vision of the producers from the weeks in advance and the 40-plus pages of wire schedules and band audio I/O lists and hardware specifications of the project to the 40- plus Grammy audio engineers, the 30 onsite manufacturer tech and reps and the 45 IATSE Local 33 stagehands involved with the project.”
Examples of these variables are as follows:
“The number of musicians and instruments in each orchestral segment,” says Abbott, just getting started. “Will the performances require a recording session for string parts to be doubled? Do I have enough equipment onsite for changes when an artist decides to go live days before the show, or adds an orchestra and then cancels onsite? I have a deadline for equipment being shipped from manufacturers that’s a week prior to the show being installed at Staples, and lots of changes occur in that amount of time,” he finishes.
During last year’s Grammys, the first rehearsal with an artist transpired like this: Two–three weeks in advance, Abbott speaks with this artist’s management and engineers, and confirms that the artist will perform live with a band. The rehearsal day arrives, and band shows up and says they are playing to track. The A2s un-wire the band carts that they set up the day before, and 20 minutes later the band decides to play live. Which in turn means that Abbott has re-wire the band.
“Seems like a small issue,” says Abbott, “But multiply that example of ‘oh, by the way’ times 14–18 performances, and you have a lot of variables. The per hour labor overtime cost for a project the size of the Grammy’s can be in the six-figure region. You can see there is little room for a scheduling error with pop-up requests like this.”
Especially when its complicated enough just getting things working normally. In the days before the show the Grammy Pro Tools Engineer is kept busy constantly updating and conforming Pro Tools sessions brought to the show by the artists. Pro Tools has become a part of the show that is just as important and integral as the seven-foot Steinway piano that John Legend played during his performance. After these broadcast-quality .wav files are ingested into the Grammy Pro Tools platform they then need to be configured for the playback during the rehearsals and actual live broadcast. The tracks for performances are also routinely synched to video playbacks throughout the show. These “lock to video playbacks” require finding the pre-roll timecode location and determining various timecode offsets between the various playback devices in order to cue the playbacks at the right moment.
“This year our engineers had to perform what is usually an audio post-production procedure by re-striping one of the PT sessions,” says Abbott. “It had to be played back during the broadcast as a timecode source to trigger a video playback; the PT session provided by the band was found to have low level timecode on the master session. Our engineers had to re-stripe the session on site so the artist could use their video in their performance.”
And Pro Tools isn’t the only thing prepped off-site.
“This year, again, there were three performances where the PM1D monitor consoles were programmed remotely by the band engineers,” explains Abbott. “The files were brought to the venue and ingested into the Grammy consoles for the artists’ rehearsals at Staples. This seems like an easy transfer, but it requires the artist to give us the info of their complete audio specifications in advance, then we need to integrate that into the Grammy audio config to patch into the split system, and give it to the Grammy foldback engineer assigned to that artist’s specific stage, then program a template that is sent via e-mail to the band foldback engineer, who may or may not be familiar with the operation of a PM1D.”
Not to mention the fact that the artist’s engineer also has the luxury of a completely different focus than the Grammy staff.
“The artist engineer is not concerned with the busses of redundancy we program into the mixes at all mix platforms, the additional audio I/O config of many sources and mix destinations required between 12 consoles and the multiple crossfeeds and patches that are involved for a live TV broadcast,” says Abbott. They don’t need to be. That’s because Abbott and his staff will program and sequence each scene, and there’s a lot more involved than a single application for one artist out on tour. All the programming demands a fair amount of coordination and involvement from the entire Grammy audio team.
Luckily, artists and their production companies are very aware of the exposure a Grammy broadcast provides. “They want to maximize what is going to be their Grammy moment,” says Abbott, but it takes a lot of contingency planning in order to accommodate all these changes.
“What I try to do every year as audio coordinator,” says Abbott, “is marshal the audio team so that the Grammy engineers can say ‘the gig is the same as last year.’ The Grammy Awards audio is to outsiders a ‘smooth operation,’ but to the staff it is controlled chaos for five 12-16 hour days.”
And Abbott is quick to give kudos to his staff.
“Given the seemingly insurmountable obstacles we encounter throughout the week onsite, you have to give credit to the team of engineers that come to this event with positive attitudes and a work ethic that you don’t find every day.”
