Benoît Gilg
„The moment it’s connected to the music mix, it enables a realistic live concert hall sound experience.“
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„The moment it’s connected to the music mix, it enables a realistic live concert hall sound experience.“
I mix 3D audio as if I was blowing up a balloon of sound.
For years I’ve been fascinated by space, acoustic space. It took me quite some time to distinguish between space and the multi-microphone mix independently from the format. To find the acoustic space in mono is the reference for me. It requires a specific compositional task coupled with sound treatment techniques. It’s thanks to years of experience in recording sound sources, mainly musical with coupled stereo recording techniques, that I eventually disassociated these two notions. If smartphones had existed, I would have been delighted and saved a lot of research time by using Neumann’s “Recording Tools” App which helps for setting up stereo mic techniques. 3D audio is an extension, a continuity which offers to live a pretty incredible physiological experience. I started exploring it through film and cinema as I’m often asked to mix concerts in 5.1 and 7.1 and more recently in 3D 11.1 and 9.1 in the case of personal experimentation.
My quest lies upon mixing ‘music’ essentially with a head-on or raw layer from stage, coupled with a second dimension of spatial information, which is acoustically thought of and constitutes the multichannel shroud. These two layers are treated more or less together according to the style of music. The multichannel shroud, included for amplified pop rock music, is composed of additional microphones further from the source on certain instruments and occasionally more diffused.
Concerning the audience and the concert hall, the idea is to have an acoustical imprint of the space and additional microphones for audience capture.
The cube is a perfectly indicated tool to record this imprint of the venue where the performance is happening. The moment it’s connected to the music mix, it enables a realistic live concert hall sound experience. It helps to transport the listener into the show with an enhanced timbre from the front and a stronger impact in the case of amplified music.
This experience with the cube has been a recent discovery for me. I’ll need the upcoming months to deepen the experiments with various colors of microphones, such as the D01 or Neumann’s KMD series, which offer undeniable dynamic advantages.