The 50th Annual Grammy Awards shook up the Staples Center with a record number of performances — and challenges.
This year, the Grammy Awards hit the big 5-0. The show, at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, lived up to the Recording Academy’s assertion that it would be the biggest show yet in terms of number of musical performances: 35 songs in 19 segments. Those performances required more than 450 microphones, not including what was used on the outdoor stage for the Foo Fighters’ show.
Plenty of attention has been given in recent years to the broadcast audio for the Grammys, which went to a parallel 5.1 surround mix five years ago, and this year saw the main broadcast mix become 5.1 for the first time — the stereo mix would be an automated folddown. But nothing’s going anywhere if it isn’t right in the house. That’s where Ron Reaves and Mikael Stewart come in.
Reaves, the FOH music mixer, and Stewart, the FOH production sound mixer, commanded a pair of Yamaha PM1D digital consoles that sent to a JBL VerTec 4889 system comprised 94 cabinets and 12 flown subs. They sat down to talk to FOH at various points before and after the show. Reaves has mixed the Grammy’s front of house for six years. Stewart, a 10-year veteran of the show, mixes everything that Reaves doesn’t: dialog, announcements, audio from video and commercial interstitials, combining them with Reaves’ music mix and sending the whole thing into the PA.
FOH: What was the biggest challenge you faced at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards show?
Mikael Stewart: The diversity of artists and personalities. Thirty hairdos a day [laughs]. Seriously, though, the challenge for live sound on the Grammys is the Staples Center itself. The suites create a vortex effect for the sound. Combined with all the flat, hard surfaces in here, there’s only so much you can do in terms of EQ before you start to lose intelligibility.
Ron Reaves: The set this year exacerbates what is already a tough room. It’s a concave design that tosses the sound around the stage. It creates the equivalent of a huge parabolic horn that sends the sound right back at us. It contributes to a lot of the leakage we have to deal with. For example, Carrie Underwood’s song had the drum kit off to the side, but the parabola set projected it into the middle of the stage. We inevitably have a lot of drums leaking into the vocal microphones. We get some help — the venue puts down carpet and drapes for us.
What can you do about that?
MS: It’s a broadband problem, especially when the hall is empty. The seats are soft, but their vinyl covering makes them reflective between 800 [Hz] and 6 [kHz]. We’ll tweak the XTA processor to some extent, but once the room fills up, the sound tightens up. Every engineer does a sound check in an empty arena. Though, we got lucky this year with the smooth, slanted piece of the set behind the podium. It’s better than the cocoon-like set piece we had last year, and this one actually helps the sound on stage by deflecting unwanted sound upwards.
RR: The PA is tuned post my console, by Jeff Peterson, who is walking the room with a wireless tablet for the XTA processor. I found myself EQing my mix bus in addition to what was already on the PA.
What other challenges did the show present?
RR: There was a lot of lighting that was creating a hell of an RF field on stage. The buzzes and hums changed with the fluctuation of the lights. Also, stage volume is often an issue with bands, and here it was exacerbated by the horn effect created by the set design. I try to keep it between 95 [dB] and a peak of 102 [dB], but some of the bands, like Brad Paisley, get a little hotter. What we have to remember, and what sets this show apart from any other you mix, is that the front rows of the audience are made up of record producers and engineers, and they don’t want to be assaulted. But you also still want the sound to have some impact.
There were some backing tracks used on the show. Some were obvious, as with Kanye West, and others were blended in with the live performance. How does that work?
RR: When an artist brings us backing tracks, they have to be in the form of a Pro Tools session and they go to a technician backstage near Splitworld [the routing and patch hub for the show]. He runs them on our Pro Tools system and sends them out to us. Most of the time, it’s sweetening tracks, loops, effects and background vocals. Things that would be time-consuming and difficult to have me achieve. It’s easier to give me a track and let me blend it in. Kanye was simple – eight tracks for one song: a pair of percussion, a pair of instrumental tracks, a pair of strings and a pair of effects for Daft Punc.
The second song was literally just a two-mix. A problem with prerecorded material is that they are mixed for a totally different medium. Audio-for-video is mixed on a pair of Genelecs in a truck or a recording studio. When you translate them to 90 15-inch speakers, I have to do a fair amount of EQing to make them sound the way they were intended to. When you mix on a 10-inch speaker, you’re going to get way too much low-end on the tracks. Add that to what’s coming off the walls and I’m fighting it in the 160 to 300 [Hz] range. I often high-pass those tracks because they have too much low-end for what we’re doing. It’s probably worst with audio from videotape. It’s not done in a music environment and they typically hype the low-end so it sounds good on a television speaker, but not through an 18-inch sub.
What were the two or three most critical pieces of gear you worked with that night and why?
MS: The CEDAR DNS 1000. I used it as a kind of active noise gate on the podium microphones. It has a multiband filter capability that allowed me to eliminate room return into the podium mic. The Yamaha PM1D is versatile and reliable, which is great for this kind of work. I didn’t need the snapshot automation like Ron did; once I set things, all changes going forward are all organic and all on the podium microphone — I’m constantly chasing EQ based on all the different voices up there.
RR: I especially liked using the 1176 and dbx 160 clone plug-ins on the PM1D. The 1176 plug-in is great for very powerful voices like Alicia Keys’.
You did two remotes in one show — the Foo Fighters across the street and Amy Winehouse across the Atlantic Ocean — as many as have ever been done in 50 years of the Grammy Awards. How well did they translate to the PA?
MS: Pretty well. As Ron mentioned, these are mixes made for TV. I made EQ changes to help in the room. The feed came to my console first, as a two-mix, I made some minor adjustment — in rehearsal I cut Amy down about 5 dB at 75 Hz, but needed less of a cut when the room was filled — then it went to the PA.
RR: I concur, they translate as well as you could expect.
Were there any new audio production elements at this show?
MS: We did more of the performance-into-award format. For instance, Fergie and John Legend did two minutes of a song and went right into the intro for an award. This is something you just don’t encounter on other award shows.
What kind of input were you getting from Leslie Ann Jones (advisory council member of the Recording Academy’s P&E Wing, who supervised the live sound) and from the artist’s own live sound mixers?
RR: We get suggestions and they are very appreciated. At one point [Grammy-winning audio engineer/mixer] Leslie Ann Jones was behind me, calling out the moves on the Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang Gershwin tribute. She hung over my shoulder saying, “Clarinet! Herbie! Trumpet two!” It was difficult to see my own notes and that was a complex piece. I was glad for the help.
How big were some of the snapshots getting on the PMD1 console?
RR: Herbie and Lang Lang were 54 inputs, including three different stereo miking possibilities on each piano. Alici a Keys used up 61 inputs, but the biggest was the gospel medley, which used 64 inputs, 72 if you count the effects returns. Occasionally, I had to pop back and forth between two layers.
John Harris, who along with Eric Schilling, mixes the 5.1 surround broadcast from the Effanel truck, also chooses and places the microphones. He’s looking to optimize the mic set up for broadcast. How does that affect what you do at front of house?
RR: It’s never a compromise. It actually helps — his taste in mics is impeccable, and the microphone manufacturers are there in force and they help out.
Looking back on Sunday night, what would you have done differently?
MS: I’d have got my hair cut if I’d known how many video crews were around. Actually, every time we do the show, I always look for ways to make that room tighter.
RR: I might have worn a hat.
