This is the 12th installment in David Hewitt’s guest blog series chronicling his legendary career working with some of the biggest names in music. Today, David recalls some memorable orchestral recording dates. If you missed his last post, you can read it here.

AT4050 and AT4060 Microphones Take on the Orchestras

One of the great things about the live recording business is the diversity of music that we are called upon to record.

Amongst all of the usual rock bands, star singers and TV award shows, there will appear opportunities to record the great symphony orchestras of the day. I was very fortunate to have worked with some of the great engineers who specialized in orchestra recording for records, television and film scores.

It is a highly specialized and very competitive field; the successful engineers all have their favorite tools, especially microphones! Now, I had a pretty good collection of the classic mics – Neumann, AKG, Schoeps, Gefell, Sennheiser, etc. – but the large orchestras used in live broadcast and film score work often needed extra mics.

Case in point: 2002 in Salt Lake City, Utah. We were there to record the Utah Symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, plus some small groups. These recordings would be mixed down for the many playback pieces needed for the live worldwide television broadcasts.

Audio-Technica volunteered to loan us a number of their AT4050 large-diaphragm condenser and AT4060 tube microphones. This would allow us to set up a wide variety of mics for the different orchestra and choir setups.

We had many different composers and engineers to deal with, and it was an incredible experience. Our old friend, the late Ed Greene, was the chief engineer in charge and would take care of most of the recording. Ed always had his game plan ready; he really was the champion of live music for television.

Some of the composers, like David Foster, wanted to mix their own recordings. I was very impressed with David’s incredibly fast, micromanaging, and musical production – done with a great sense of joy and humor. He used every last minute available to him to mix his compositions.

Composer Michael Kamen, famous for his many film scores, like those for the Die Hard franchise, and also for arranging orchestras for rock stars, was always a pleasure to work with. We had recorded many of those earlier scores with him, so he was comfortable working with us. One of the pieces he wrote was for the revered Mormon Tabernacle Choir. With Michael’s wicked sense of humor, he persuaded them to sing choruses of “amen” as his last name: “Kay-men”! They got the joke and went along with good humor; it was great fun and put everyone in a good mood.

Everyone was very pleased with the performance of the Audio-Technica 4050s and 4060s for the highly critical mission of symphony orchestra and choir recording. I became an Audio-Technica advocate, adding a number of their mics to my Remote Truck inventory.

Our next recording was back on the East Coast in Washington, D.C., at the DAR Constitution Hall for the film score to K-19: The Widowmaker, the Harrison Ford Russian submarine tragedy. The Kirov Orchestra was in Washington for concerts and so was available to record. They were magnificent and were beautifully engineered by Alan Meyerson, deep and dark. Very powerful!

From there it was back out west for the Academy Awards and another great orchestra – L.A.’s finest session players with master mixer Tom Vicari. He always gets the rhythm section to blend with authority, while balancing the often complex arrangements of a full orchestra. Don’t forget, the orchestra doesn’t know which score to play until the Oscar is announced!

The Oscars are always live to air – no remixing here!