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Field Mics for Entire Ensemble


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Weeeellll....Front ensembles are about double the size they were 25 years ago and they are amplified.  Instruments requiring amplification are in that front ensemble.  Singers that have to be amplified are also in widespread use.  Front ensemble contribution has exploded as far as content in their writing.  Meanwhile, brass lines are 10-16 players larger, but certainly haven’t doubled in size, nor has the battery.  Some groups are pretty unabashed about creating GE with the volume knob.  So, field mikes for more ensembles are the result.

Doing the electronic thing well is tough.  Two groups get it right almost every year....Bloo and BD.  I think with these two teams it’s about more than the wattage and volume knob.  It’s also about a team of designers that compromise and put their ego to the side for the good of the whole.  It takes musicianship and maturity to create and balance a product so that ensemble texture has clarity while also impactful without being deafening in this era of the speaker stack.  I’m ok with amplification and field mikes.  Used tastefully, creatively and not all the time, they can contribute positively.

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16 minutes ago, One n Done said:

Doing the electronic thing well is tough.  Two groups get it right almost every year....Bloo and BD.  I think with these two teams it’s about more than the wattage and volume knob.  It’s also about a team of designers that compromise and put their ego to the side for the good of the whole.  It takes musicianship and maturity to create and balance a product so that ensemble texture has clarity while also impactful without being deafening in this era of the speaker stack.  I’m ok with amplification and field mikes.  Used tastefully, creatively and not all the time, they can contribute positively.

Kudos to you for this observation ... and to Cappybara who JUST made the same sort of comment about the use of voice in the Bluecoats thread.

Both electronics and voice can be used effectively.  But it takes talent.

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1 hour ago, Fracker said:

I don't know about the rules but I will say that blanket shotgun mic'ing is AWFUL.  I was at two Colts shows where they had at least 6 shotgun mics, and every one of their big hits (and most of the rest of the show) were nearly 100% speaker volume and almost no acoustic.  Its gross, its blatantly obvious (even the casual show-goers were commenting), its not FUN for the audience, but sadly, I think it help them beat the Scouts who had (at least on a brass level) a MUCH better sound. 

Phantom and Cavaliers seemed to have learned their lesson from last year and their mic set up is pretty good, but the Colts are a huge offender and need to be called out.  I think they're a great group-- loved last year's show-- but this year its torture to listen to them play because of the shotguns.

I have to agree with you about Colts.  I have seen them live three times now.  It’s a shame because they clearly have a talented horn line.  But the volume coming out of the speakers is off the chain.  It was especially bad in Wausau where there was no track.  Speakers were only a few feet from the bottom row of the stands and all the sound was coming from the speakers, not the horns right behind them.  I also think Colts are one of the groups with voice over lyrics in the show, but no vocalist.

But even with that, I liked them more than Scouts...

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59 minutes ago, Fracker said:

I don't know about the rules but I will say that blanket shotgun mic'ing is AWFUL.  I was at two Colts shows where they had at least 6 shotgun mics, and every one of their big hits (and most of the rest of the show) were nearly 100% speaker volume and almost no acoustic.  Its gross, its blatantly obvious (even the casual show-goers were commenting), its not FUN for the audience, but sadly, I think it help them beat the Scouts who had (at least on a brass level) a MUCH better sound. 

Phantom and Cavaliers seemed to have learned their lesson from last year and their mic set up is pretty good, but the Colts are a huge offender and need to be called out.  I think they're a great group-- loved last year's show-- but this year its torture to listen to them play because of the shotguns.

Ok. The beauty of DCP and America in general is that everyone is entitled to their opinion. In the same vein that you say that the “casual show goers were commenting”, I’ve heard casual and not so casual show goers comment on how impressed they were with Colts and how they love their show/sound, especially in Rockford when the crowd was on their feet before they finished! I’ve personally attended rehearsals when the mics were not set up, and the same power was there, in a bigger stadium no less. And, to be quite honest, I really don’t think that it’s the mics that are giving Colts an edge over Scouts. Everyone has their preference: mics/no mics, g bugles/b flat horns, traditional uniforms/modern unis etc. I know the sound that I heard, and several others that I’ve talked to from other Corps, was FAR from gross. Long story less long, take the mics away and Colts still beat Scouts. 

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1 hour ago, Fracker said:

I don't know about the rules but I will say that blanket shotgun mic'ing is AWFUL.  I was at two Colts shows where they had at least 6 shotgun mics, and every one of their big hits (and most of the rest of the show) were nearly 100% speaker volume and almost no acoustic.  Its gross, its blatantly obvious (even the casual show-goers were commenting), its not FUN for the audience, but sadly, I think it help them beat the Scouts who had (at least on a brass level) a MUCH better sound. 

Phantom and Cavaliers seemed to have learned their lesson from last year and their mic set up is pretty good, but the Colts are a huge offender and need to be called out.  I think they're a great group-- loved last year's show-- but this year its torture to listen to them play because of the shotguns.

What is there to "call out"??  This winter the corps directors refused to agree to limit field amplification.  Colts were a major advocate for limiting mics, amplification, etc.

After nothing happened, the Colts decided to play ball.

If it's a balance issue, then call it that.  It'll get worked out.

But don't act like they're committing some major crime for doing something other corps are doing and the activity refuses to restrict.

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2 minutes ago, WaxDCIFan said:

I have to agree with you about Colts.  I have seen them live three times now.  It’s a shame because they clearly have a talented horn line.  But the volume coming out of the speakers is off the chain.  It was especially bad in Wausau where there was no track.  Speakers were only a few feet from the bottom row of the stands and all the sound was coming from the speakers, not the horns right behind them.  I also think Colts are one of the groups with voice over lyrics in the show, but no vocalist.

But even with that, I liked them more than Scouts...

Colts did the live narration thing for principle in 2014 and 2015 and it bit them in the ###.  I think they're trying to give judges what they want, and from their experience, live narration get ZERO bonus points and can only subtract from your score. 

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All I'm saying-- is last year I heard shotgun mics coming from both Phantom and Cavaliers, and it sounded terrible.  They've fixed that problem, but Colts have adopted it.  It feels like growing pains where the audience is going to have to put up with poor live sound mixing until each group figures it out for themselves.

Yes the audience was on their feet for the colts, but sitting on the 50 and listening to a loud (and potentially great) corps through speakers was not impressive to me.  I guess others thought that was cool.

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2 hours ago, Fran Haring said:

That's an admirable goal, and I hope it's achieved some day.

 Last  summer, our seats for DCI East (the Saturday show) were out near the goal line.... and there were several instances when the brass sound coming through the speakers down by us was, for lack of a better term, artificial. At the time, we didn't know about SCV miking their " featured" players, and there were several "is it live, or is it Memorex" moments during their performance. LOL. It wasn't just SCV... there were various "not quite acoustic" sounds from several horn  lines.

 It made for a less than ideal experience for us.... and please understand, neither I nor my fiance are "get off my lawn" curmudgeons when it comes to modern-day drum corps. We're fine with a lot of the new stuff... but the whole "field miking entire ensembles" thing is disturbing. Like I said up top.... I hope this can be worked out to the benefit of the paying customers someday.

This was my experience last year with two or three corps at Massillon, where our seats were far to the right side.

What's crazy about this is that after about four or five years of assaulting audiences with synthesized goo, most corps from 2013 began to tone it down and were finally achieving a tolerable full-stadium balance .... and then last year several of them all decided to find a new way to make corps sound bad again--and they doubled down this year.

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3 hours ago, Cadevilina Crown said:

So to answer your question...

At the annual meetings, most directors were kind of ambivalent about micing the entire ensemble. Eventually, it was determined that the reason designers were trying to do this in the first place was not necessarily to make the corps louder, but to ensure everyone in the stadium is getting the same quality of sound (i.e. brass sound quality does not suffer if you’re sitting far away from the 50). Tom Blair even held a session in which he explained effective ways of using amplification for modern-day DCI. By the end of the meeting, it was said that there was a shift in philosophy amongst directors on this issue, and that corps would work to better incorporate A&E without damaging ears and/or alienating fans.

In other words, the designers lied and the directors bought it.

Or are they all just so used to hearing the show from the sideline that they really have no idea how they sound in the stands?

The problem have never been that the brass sound suffers. It was that amplified sound from the pit suffered. And that was because of too few speakers not too few microphone, i.e., if your seats were high and up and between the 45s, it sounded decent most of the time, but if your seats were between the 40s and 35s, you were blasted by "thunderous goo" and other synthesizer sound, and if your seats were outside the 30s, the amplified sounds weren't coming through.

An example I've cited before: Blue Devils' championship 2012 used a lot of recorded German, French, and English narration. I only saw the show live at Finals. All year long the sound came through so clearly on the Fan Network that I was able to transcribe the dialogue for a post here. At Finals I had seats high up and far to the left. BD's brass sounded fine there. Their electronic sounds were almost impossible to hear. I was joined there by a friend who hadn't seen any 2012 shows, live or recorded. I asked him what he thought of the narration. He said: what narration?

(Also a professional sound engineer who is a coworker joined me at a show three or four years ago and told me that the speakers he saw the corps using there were second-rate equipment. Not sure if that's still true.)

I've been attending shows since the 1980s and have sat outside the 40s for at least half those shows. Never, ever, ever did it seem to me that brass sounds were too weak. What a bogus explanation from designers who apparently never actually listen to what they're putting out.

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16 minutes ago, N.E. Brigand said:

In other words, the designers lied and the directors bought it.

Or are they all just so used to hearing the show from the sideline that they really have no idea how they sound in the stands?

The problem have never been that the brass sound suffers. It was that amplified sound from the pit suffered. And that was because of too few speakers not too few microphone, i.e., if your seats were high and up and between the 45s, it sounded decent most of the time, but if your seats were between the 40s and 35s, you were blasted by "thunderous goo" and other synthesizer sound, and if your seats were outside the 30s, the amplified sounds weren't coming through.

An example I've cited before: Blue Devils' championship 2012 used a lot of recorded German, French, and English narration. I only saw the show live at Finals. All year long the sound came through so clearly on the Fan Network that I was able to transcribe the dialogue for a post here. At Finals I had seats high up and far to the left. BD's brass sounded fine there. Their electronic sounds were almost impossible to hear. I was joined there by a friend who hadn't seen any 2012 shows, live or recorded. I asked him what he thought of the narration. He said: what narration?

(Also a professional sound engineer who is a coworker joined me at a show three or four years ago and told me that the speakers he saw the corps using there were second-rate equipment. Not sure if that's still true.)

I've been attending shows since the 1980s and have sat outside the 40s for at least half those shows. Never, ever, ever did it seem to me that brass sounds were too weak. What a bogus explanation from designers who apparently never actually listen to what they're putting out.

If somehow I’m perpetrating something that absolutely isn’t true, I’m sorry. What I do know is that there were a lot of things surrounding this philosophy that were never made clear to people outside of the sphere of designers and directors. All I remember is the quote from those meetings “We don’t have a volume problem, we have a coverage problem.” That quote just doesn’t actually explain why they use ensemble micing in the first place.

There was also a lot of use of the term “sound reinforcement,” which feels to me like a euphemism for “amplification.”

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