Gazing At The Night Sky - MIDI/Multitracks Download
Added 2020-03-30 08:08:58 +0000 UTCA few months ago, I wrote a piece called GAZING AT THE NIGHT SKY for fun and as I needed a piece to try out a few new sample libraries that I bought at that time so I just had some fun writing an adventurous little composition.
However, a few weeks ago I got the opportunity to fill a slot in a recording session with it. As I own all the rights to the recording and composition, I can make the individual microphone signals available to you guys, which as far as I know hasn't been done before in an educational context.
If you're coming from a sample production background, it might be quite interesting to get your fingers on a real orchestra recording, as it quite differs (also structurally) from what you might be used to work with.
Before talking about the individual tracks, let me briefly talk about the recording situation:
As you can see it's a quite large recording venue. It is a concert hall that used to be a church so the ceiling is very high as well as it having about 30 rows of seats for audience so we get quite a bit of natural ambience in the recording which is a nice thing to have if the room sounds great but can also make recordings quite muddy as well as limit flexibilty in the mixing.
You can see most of the seating of the orchestra on the picture which is important to place all the mono signals properly in the room. The string seating was standard: From the conductor's point of view from left to right: 1st Vlns, 2nd Vlns, Vlas, Celli, Double Basses to the right behind Violas and Celli.
In the mid we have the woodwinds and behind the woodwinds to the left the Horns and to the right Trumpets, Trombones and Tuba.
Behind the Brass we have Timpani+Percussion and left behind Vlns 1 we have the Harp.
The orchestra was a standard sized symphony orchestra:
- 3 Flutes (3rd Doubling Piccolo)
- 2 Oboes
- 2 Clarinets
- 2 Bassoons + Contra Bassoon
- 4 Horns
- 3 Trumpets
- 3 Trombones
- 1 Tuba
- Timpani + 2 Percussionists
- 1 Harp
- 12 1st Violins
- 10 2nd Violins
- 8 Violas
- 6 Celli
- 4 Basses
Unfortunately we needed to rush through this piece quite quickly with only having about 32 minutes of recording time for it so we needed to settle for a few compromises where I would have loved to to a few more takes. These become quite obvious in the close mic signals but get washed over a bit in the main mic signals.
The recording was not done with a standard Decca Tree where you have 3 microphones placed above the conductor pointing Left, Center, Right but with an AB setup with A pointing left and B pointing right (the mic stand can be seen on the pic above)
Additional Main microphones are called here AA and BB which are (as seen on the picture) microphones in the far left and far right, sometimes called "Outriggers".
There is also a set of A rear/B rear which are placed in the audience and record the ambience which you can mix in additionally or use these signals for 5.1 mixes to put on the rear speakers.
Additionally to these 6 main microphone signals you get one or two close mic signals of each section.
Be aware that there was no acoustic separation on stage whatsoever so there is quite a bit of mic bleed going on. Some signals (like for instance the Horns) are cleaner than others (Trumpets, which have a lot of Trombones on their close mic).
A general approach to a mix would be to start with the 6 main microphones and balance them so you get a solid sound as a fundament for your mix. Then add the close mics to create more definition.
In a follow up video on this I will talk you through the mix I made for this track. Until then, feel free to experiment with these tracks, try to do your own mix and don't hesitate to send along any mixes you're attempting, I'd love to hear the different approaches.
Below, I also attached the MIDI and PDF file of the track. The Midi is straight out of Dorico. Be aware that we recorded the piece without click so the tempo varies quite a bit on the recording which you would need to adjust by hand if you want to sync up the MIDI with the recording.
So without further ado, here are the files:
Username: nightsky
Password: nightsky
