Sound crew worked hard to ensure the Boston Pops’ Fourth of July performance was as vibrant as the fireworks.
There’s nothing like hearing majestic symphonic music and then seeing a sky erupting with colorful fireworks on the Fourth of July, and the concert at the Esplanade on the Charles River is the most prestigious annual celebration of its kind. Featuring lively performances from conductor Keith Lockhart and the acclaimed Boston Pops Orchestra, guest appearances throughout the years by everyone from David Lee Roth to Rascal Flatts, engaging hosts like talk show personality Craig Ferguson, and (of course) a vibrant fireworks display, the event is a local sensation, and after 10 p.m., a national television event on CBS.
Organizing a Local Sensation
This past summer, Boston Pops audio supervisor Steve Colby — who has become the de facto organizer of the performance audio side of things over the years, — procured a state-of-the-art microphone package from DPA. “I got involved with the DPA while doing a show in Boca over the winter with Acme Sound Partners,” explained Colby. “They had a package of mics from DPA. I was so impressed with them and thought the July 4th event would be a great venue for the Pops to try them out. So, I got in touch with Bruce Myers and the DPA guys and collaborated on an enormous collection. In fact, more than 65 DPA mics were used.
DPA was wise to lend out mics for this prominent event, which draws 500,000 people along the Charles River in Boston plus millions of television viewers nationwide. “The equipment got a lot of exposure. The P.A. guys get to hear them, I can hear them in the TV truck and the Rascal Flatts guys were kind of looking at them,” added Colby. “The orchestra is easily 99% DPA this year, and it just sounds fabulous.”
A Sense of Adventure
Colby has been working with the Boston Pops orchestra for three decades, including tour sound for the entire 14 seasons that Keith Lockhart has been conductor. They first traveled together with a three-week Christmas tour of NBA arenas with no rehearsal and no sound check. “I can’t imagine there’s anybody better in the business for doing live sound orchestrally in the varying spaces,” enthused Lockhart of Colby. “Anybody can get it right if you give them enough time and enough money. But [he does] things on limited resources with no time, with something as variable as the kinds of venues we play in. In one tour, we’ll play a 10,000-seat arena, a little concert hall and an outdoor space with no acoustic whatsoever. So, we look for a sense of adventure in our sound engineers.”
“One of the great things about working with Keith is that he completely gets the technical side of it,” asserted Colby. “He understands when something goes wrong why it went wrong [and] how to deal with acoustic or musical problems first, then supplement that with the electronic side of things. He’s just a dream to work for.”
Multiple Mix Locations
All in all, eight engineers were involved in creating the sound mixes used for the production. “I’ve been the front-of-house guy for the Pops for many years, and then when CBS took over the July 4th broadcasts about six years ago, I moved into the truck to do the TV music,” Colby says. “I’d been the Evening at Pops TV mixer for PBS for many years, so that’s how I got associated with the orchestra as a broadcast mixer. “When I can’t be in the FOH PA seat, we’re lucky to have that position filled by Paul Bevan.”
In the Sheffield Remote Recording mobile, Colby mixed the music for the TV show through a 96-input, all-digital SSL Axiom console with total recall and a 24-input Mackie sidecar for audience reaction microphones. Nearby, Al Centrella created the final broadcast mix in an All-Mobile video truck, adding in local announcements, tape features and more. In addition to the broadcast mixers, and Bevan at FOH, mix engineers included Howard Rose for orchestra monitors, John Daley building a direct string mix used for some segments, Clayton Young of Capron Lighting and Sound, (the overall event tech coordinators), handling local preshow playbacks plus FOH and monitor engineers for guest stars Rascal Flatts.
Out in the field, FOH mixer Paul Bevan and system tech Kevin Delaney tackled the difficult challenge of mixing a live orchestra, rock band and television production elements for a crowd of half a million people. The main PA, provided by Scorpio Sound, is comprised of a JBL VerTec system powered with Lab.gruppen amps.
Working at a mix position approximately 40 feet back from the stage left array, Bevan operated a completely full Midas XL4 for the orchestra, plus a Yamaha PM5D for Rascal Flatts, which totaled 106 inputs.
Bevan reported that they were “in probably one of the worst mix locations you could possibly be, but that’s a function of the way the event has been for a number of years. We’re in an enclosed tent, and the audience is out there with the speakers in the open. “There’s enough PA pointing down so that if you could open up the roof of the tent you could hear,” he said, “but otherwise you get a lot of the low end. You have to imagine what the high end sounds like and stick your head out periodically.”
Ambient Miking
The biggest problem to contend with, beyond the threat of bad weather, was the shape of the famous Hatch Shell. “Stuff just builds up in there,” remarked Bevan. “You get a lot of low mid that builds up and obviously you get a lot of spill from some of the louder instruments like percussion and brass into the string mics. You just factor that into the mix. So, if you’re getting a lot of high end from the brass or the percussion into the string pickup, then you make the sound of their individual mics a little bit darker just to compensate for the bleed. One of the expressions I’ve heard about mixing orchestras is that you don’t mix instruments, you mix spill. It’s not like the usual mixing of a band where everything is really close miked. It’s really ambient miking.”
“I think the biggest challenge is trying to make an orchestra, in what’s not really a terrific sounding venue, sound natural,” remarked Colby, confirming Bevan’s assessment of the Hatch Shell. The TV mixer noted that it was constructed before the days of amplification and specifically to project sound out, but those same characteristics make it a challenge today to get a good sounding television and front-of-house mix. “You hear everybody in everybody else’s microphones unless you’re very careful about microphone choice and placement. That’s where the DPA products really helped the cause.”
The bleed-through and isolation issues become equally challenging when a rock band plays on the thrust built at the front of the stage. “When you put an artist like Rascal Flatts down there, with a very loud backline and a big drum kit and guys that really like to wail, all that sound goes back into the shell,” adds Colby. “Now that sound is in all of the orchestra mics. Plus there are musical issues with that as well because the orchestra is trying to stay in time with the guest artist, and the guest artist is trying to hear the orchestra augmentation of songs they play on the road all the time. These arrangements are often not completed until a day or two in advance. So, there are music challenges, electronic challenges and acoustic challenges.”
“Lost In the Sauce”
Orchestra monitor mixer Howard Rose, working from a Yamaha M7CL and assisted by monitor tech Kevin Fuller, added that, “Less is more because of the acoustic signature of that shell. Basically, the four or five mixes that I have on stage are mainly time, which is to say kick/snare kind of stuff. The conductor likes to hear some vocals, sometimes a little bit of piano and any melodic or rhythmic info he can get to keep the star act and the orchestra synched together. The downstage mix for the one or two primarily vocal acts that I have are star vocal, time and piano. Again, it’s such an ambient environment that the less I do, the better I do. You get lost in the sauce so fast that you’re not doing anybody any good.” Rose added that 9 to 12 Galaxy hotspots are used onstage for the orchestra monitors and their distinct lack of low-end was a godsend given how much bass reverberated in the shell already. The musicians only wanted time-based info — kick, snare, guitar strumming — to get through.
If all of this does not sound complicated enough, the massive size of the audience in attendance meant that delay towers must be setup to cover miles of outdoor seating. An additional responsibility that Bevan dealt with was the tuning of 13 to 15 delay towers that ran back along the length of the Charles River from the Hatch Shell. Even though the Pops held a concert on July 3 as a trial run, the towers did not go up until midday on July 4, which gave Bevan and the Capron Lighting and Sound crew little time to tweak things. “I take a listen to the P.A., jump in a golf cart and go around and try to balance them out,” revealed Bevan. “With the audience out there you can’t do any kind of analysis, so we ship this [pre-show] music out. I listen to the P.A. here, then go out and EQ the speakers and get a rough level in comparison to what it sounds like in here.” He then hoped that it translated on their end when the show began.
Coloring the TV Mix
“Another big element for PA is the live TV broadcast, so one of the challenges is you want to make the P.A. sound nice and big and exciting for the audience, but you also want to make that mix clean so the sound doesn’t get back into the microphones and color the TV audio,” said Bevan. “So, I check in with Steve to make sure that the PA is at a level that’s not interfering with what he’s doing and ke eping the TV broadcast clean. Also, EQing it is really important as well because even at a low level, if you have spikes with people with odd frequencies sticking out, you’ll hear that on the TV. I also have the TV production elements for the audience; all the bumpers, tape rolls and host mics. As well as mixing all the music, I’m also blending in CBS host Craig Ferguson and all the other [television] hosts that are placed in different parts of the property.”
In the end, this year’s Fourth of July celebration at the Esplanade turned out to be a fantastic event, with a powerful but crisp sound splashing across the Charles River. FOH was positioned on the media platform beneath one of two speaker towers, located specifically by stage right, and the amplification was clean and not overwhelming. The biggest hitch of the night was the fact that there was a lot of humidity and a distinct lack of cross breezes, which meant the smoke from the fireworks hung in the air and obscured some of the explosions.
CREW
Pops Audio Supervisor/Audio Designer for the Stage/Music Mix for CBS: Steve Colby
Production Mixer for CBS Broadcast: Al Centrella
FOH Mixer for Boston Pops: Paul Bevan
Monitor Mixer for Boston Pops: Howard Rose
FOH/System Tech: Kevin Delane of Scorpio Sound
Monitor System Tech: Kevin Fuller of Scorpio Sound
Deck Audio Crew:
Jay Arthur/ Patchmaster
John Daley
Lynn Scornavacca
Lance Vardis
Music Mix Mobile Unit:
Sheffield A/V Audio Mobile
Jake Mossman EIC
Wireless Microphones/ Intercom:
Wireless First
Overall Event Coordination/
Production:
Capron Lighting and Sound
Project Supervisor Paul Mcgalliard
GEAR
SSL Axiom with total recall
Yamaha PM5D
Yamaha M7CL
24-input Mackie sidebar
JBL VerTec System
Lab.gruppen amps
Midas KL4
Galaxy Hot Spots
Mics:
DPA 4066 Headset: narrator microphones
DPA 4041-SP Large Diaphragm Omni : brass, basses, timpani
DPA 4006 Omni: percussion
DPA 4021, 4022, 4023 Compact Cardioid: violins, violas, cellos, harp
DPA 4061 Miniature Omni w/ Bridge mount: close mics for strings
DPA 4061 Miniature Omni on custom hanger: main omni pickup for orchestra
