Galliano Concert Benefits from Virtual Live Mixing

posted:

25/03/2013

Merging Pyramix and Horus used to mix renowned accordionist

Is now the time to challenge the traditional concepts of how to mix a live concert? Igor Fiorini of VDM Studio in Rome certainly thinks so and he is not alone. For some years now, the recording industry has used DAWs to record critical concerts with admirable reliability and Pyramix has already been used on Olympic opening and closing ceremonies with no issues at all; so why not mix a concert live with the same technology.

Not only does this reduce the size of the rig needed, it also introduces many less obvious advantages. It opens up the opportunity to use a huge array of plug-ins, offers large channel counts without taking up any more space in the auditorium and offers higher resolution DSP than is generally available with a conventional live mixing console.

The concert in mid-February that gave the opportunity to put theory into practice featured the renowned French accordionist, Richard Galliano playing with the Orchestra Camerata Ducale; a nineteen piece chamber orchestra under the direction of violin soloist, Guido Rimonda. The venue was the very fine “Sapienza” in the University of Rome and the programme contained pieces by Bach, Vivaldi, Piazzolla, Gardel and four of Mr Galliano’s own compositions.

Igor Fiorini takes up the story; “I had the idea that this would make for an easy way to do the concert but the other big improvement is to use Merging’s Horus. Now we can put the mic preamplifiers on the stage and I just have a Cat 6 cable to connect all the lines to and from the stage and I have full control from where I am mixing. Even though we have had no problems with reliability, my colleagues in VDM Design developed our own dedicated, embedded PC for Pyramix which we call demiQuaver. So with just a monitor, one Horus, our computer and one cable, we have the whole front of house set-up. If we have this quality of signal path, we need the microphones and speakers to match so I used a rather rare large diaphragm DPA for Mr Galliano and DPA 4099s for all the other instruments. I only use d&b so we had model T with 2 x heads and 2 x subs amplified with 2 x D6 at the front with 2 x Monitor Max for the musicians and we had 2 x Monitor E3 as a spares.”

We decided that it would be interesting to do this event at 192 kHz which is very easy to do with the Pyramix/Horus combination and what surprised us was that it made a real audible difference. Now we know how simple and how good it is, we can do similar concerts in this way. It provides benefits for everybody.”