I have to describe to you a new kind of recording experience I had recently.
No, not the latest in digital, nor a Canby experiment. To my own great interest,
this was on the largest possible scale, as big as anything in all audio.
Television! Big-time network TV. And by a sheer happenstance, there I was,
right in the middle of it.
What really knocked me for a loop, and is the reason for this writing, was the unexpected comparison between our own pure-audio recording session and this, my first experience with the parallel world of TV, sharing so many techniques with our own. It was most instructive and, from an audio viewpoint, heartening. We're doin' OK, we audio people! Just let's not let big TV swallow us.
I do have an alter ego, as some know, conductor of a small choral outfit called the Canby Singers. We sing Renaissance music, unaccompanied, Brahms and Mendelssohn the same; we sing in four parts, five, six, up to eight, and we give concerts. Tough music and no piano to help us. Kind and appreciative audiences of a hundred or so, with luck. No audio. If they can't hear us, we don't sing. Only one professional audio man that I know of goes to all our concerts. He's a top pro in architectural sound reinforcement and lives his life with mikes and loudspeakers. Except when he comes to listen to us. Good for him! Good for any audio man's soul.
Suddenly, early last winter, we found ourselves scheduled to appear "live" (on tape) on a network TV show, one of those daily programs, the biggest. It was for Christmas day hence the singing and we would be heard and seen via hundreds of television outlets at an ungodly hour on the holiday morning hence the taping. Same hour, of course, in each time etc. zone, from New York to Hawaii. I will not name the show since everybody who looks at TV knows it. It is so big that it is incorporated and ends its name with "Inc." The male host, or anchor, or whatever you call him, reputedly achieves some 500 kilobucks per year and his humble female helpmate on the show makes 300. (Scuttlebutt.) Both of these worthies assisted us in person, reading genial scripts in large letters off the backs of the TV cameras big-time, yes.
I am no TV man but I have long been in and around what I now must call pure-audio recording and broadcasting, on my own, inside big studios and little, in concert halls, control rooms and all the rest it's my biz. I don't operate a "board" but I've looked at a hundred thousand of them and am nicely acquainted (though not as well as Bert Whyte) with most of the vast array of procedures we have developed over the years for getting out our audio software, on the air or recorded. I went into this TV show as a conductor of music, but you may be sure that I had eyes and, especially, ears to see and hear how a TV recording session worked, as compared with the same in audio, which is sound for sound's sake. After all, we too have producers and engineers, we have talk backs and red lights going on (ON THE AIR, or RECORDING), people who rush about moving equipment and saying TESTING, TESTING; we have control rooms with glass panels, we have monitors, we have banks of big tape recorders, the works. Pictures aside, the situation in TV is not that different at least in theory.
There is one real difference. We got there first. We in audio developed all this production business, in radio, in recording, in "public address," in taping, before TV ever got there. So they obviously have borrowed OUR techniques. And one would expect, considering TV's size and opulence, it would improve them too, adapting our experience to fit the newer needs of the video art. So I looked forward to this big show with a lot of eagerness. It should really be something.
No Business Like...
Now understand. This daily program runs for two solid hours, divided into four half-hour segments, with commercials (natch) in between. Each segment is treated as a unit and on normal days is mostly done live, in real time (on tape), with prerecorded segments or remotes dropped in, including the news. There's an assortment of artists or groups for entertainment, each taking only a few minutes but reappearing several times on the different segments. We were to be on three of the four segments, including the first and the last.
As any recording person knows, a session like this must be very skillfully managed if there is to be other than sheer chaos, plus enormous amounts of valuable lost time. It's not so different, say, than recording the Boston Symphony, or an opera, or some pop extravaganza. There are always those armies of people, artists, equipment, engineers, producers, all to be marshaled into some sort of productive order. In my own small way I have had to do the sort of careful planning that this requires it is the same even on a small scale. Disaster is always around the corner, crises abound, and time flies at $$$$ per second. Be prepared! Be efficient! Use time for all it's worth, which is plenty. Amen.
OK I arrive at the big New York TV center at 8:45 in the morning of taping day (some days before Christmas itself) and check in at Reception. Or try to. In three seconds I am jammed into a sort of dentist's waiting room, six or eight chairs and a tiny coat rack, along with about two dozen other artists, mostly standing and holding their coats. The official waiting room! Huge TV monitor and the end of the current day's show, a remote sports commentator from Hawaii whose face is a bilious greenish yellow. Phase problems? Can't understand a word he says. They return to the home studio, right around the corner from us, and the color is OK. Good. --- I didn't really want my singers a bilious yellow, thanks.
Coffee. The place gets more and more crowded. Finally we are siphoned off into a set of dressing rooms, one for each "act," next to the big main studio where it all happens. Another monitor and lots of mirrors. Outside our door the studio is only a few feet away down the corridor and I note with amazement that there is no door. Wide open, and people moving in and out while the action is rehearsed inside. They continued even when the show was being taped. So much clutter and so much soundproofing in that huge studio that nothing audible carried more than a few yards. All the sets were already in place, one for each act, around the edges, with all the cameras in the middle and a million vast lights hanging from a steel latticework above, and vast dark spaces on beyond to an invisible ceiling.
At this point I discovered that this entire show, too, was to be taped in real time, half hour by half hour, without breaks. Everybody had to be in place, in the studio, at the beginning--we would each perform in our turn, each from our own set, the cameras swinging around to find us. No walking on and walking off; we were there. We had all of four or five minutes in each segment and would have to wait around and be "on stage" for the entire two hours. Worse, our first appearance, I discovered, was after 26 minutes of real time we were to stand on our set, motionless, with all the lights on and in our faces, for those entire 26 minutes then we were supposed to start joyfully singing! Enough to kill a chorus of horses. Was this the best way they could figure to do it? I was appalled such a clumsy, impossible means to achieve "real time." And WHY? Just the usual, I guessed.
Worse still. Remember, we sing unaccompanied. We do not have absolute pitch. Most musicians don't. All we use is a tiny pitch pipe, one peep at the beginning. Our audiences are impressed by our ability, from this one little peep, to sing complex pieces of music and go on for 10 minutes or so, ending exactly where we began via sheer pitch memory. So Hey, I said to a roving producer, catching him on the fly, when do I get to blow my pitch pipe (after 26 minutes of standing there, listening to all the other musical acts)? PITCH PIPE?? Consternation. They hadn't thought of that. Couldn't we, er, well, just start? Just begin singing? Oh yeah, only minutes after a wah-wah jazz trombone in some unknown key, over across the studio! No pitch pipe, he said. BUT--**it, I fumed.
At that point I was screaming, internally, For sake, do a simple edit! Let me blow pitch, a quarter of a second, then edit it out afterwards. So simple! (So simple in audio, anyhow.) No need to stop the show. But suddenly my producer was swept away in the crowd and I got no further. There was time. No rush. I'd figure something later.
Plenty later. By now the place was swarming with hundreds of people. The artists and all their friends and relatives, vast numbers of producer-like characters, scratch pads in hand, dozens of technicians, prop men, ladder carriers, the coffee lady, the make-up head, millions more coming in every minute. Never saw such a mob, like Macy's. All over the studio, in and around the separate sets, jumbled props and equipment lying all over, lights being lowered, huge elephant cameras tooling around on dollies, eight feet high and almost as wide. The two hosts trailed fat cables for their lavalier mikes (they walk from set to set on the show) and kept backtracking to unsnarl themselves.
Nine o'clock, the starting hour, and soon the monitor shows us one act being pushed around into place, then the host, mumbling script, trips over a cable and runs head-on into a crouching technician, nobody paying him the least attention. Everybody frowning, no smiles until the act starts. We waited, and watched. Then we were made up, one by one, just a dash of powder, mostly, to take off the shine. Glasses! Sudden crisis would they ask us to remove them? We all needed glasses to read our music, including me. No sweat. These people have their video techniques beautifully in hand. We kept our glasses, and on the show not a glint of reflection ever appeared in spite of dozens of huge lights all over the place.
Across the corridor from us was the immense video control room, a dozen or so intent operators each with a console and picture in front of him, a vast main board or something up front (we couldn't see it). Huge operation. Over to one side was a small cubicle with glass front, in it a man and a half-size audio mixing board, sort of rebuilt looking. They probably try to keep it up to date. The audio control room! One channel of sound, out of all that confusion. Mono. One technician. Why more? (Maybe if they had stereo they would use two.) That's TV audio. It knows its place, all right.
Waiting for the Go
We sat and we sat, amid the increasing confusion. More and more people kept arriving, more and more hectic conferences were going on, here and there, the various acts were all rehearsing, mostly simultaneously, people dashed from control room to studio and to dressing room with messages; the tempo was getting faster. We were ushered out, 'mid all the din, for an audio test thank the Lord, the single omni mike was placed right over my head, a good distance from the singers; we would at least have a proper mono blend and no close-up mikes. But the sound would be totally dead. Too bad, since the music was meant for liveness, even a cathedral sound. But a good blend, anyhow.
We were tried for video lovely--Gorgeous color, nice pink faces against a big fake blue-sky background and green and red Christmas wreaths. Nothing wrong there. Back to the dressing room. More and more excitement. Nothing new.
At around 10:00 they said the first real-time segment might be taped at 11:00. At 11 o'clock nothing. Somebody said we might start at noon. More milling about, more rehearsals, more conferences. Around noon, our producer took me into a corner and we revised the order in which our music would come. Now at this late moment! I had been in touch for weeks, of course, and had sent timings, and so on. A better musical sequence, now that I saw what was involved. But could this enormous show be improvised in this casual fashion? Indeed it could, and I wasn't complaining.
We took to watching the monitor again, which was hooked into the studio line and showed us whatever was heading towards the still-inoperative.
tape machines. Really beautiful handling of colors and shapes and designs. A bevy of long-gowned maidens, a string quartet in delicate pastels, their instruments a rich deep brown, their hair beautifully auburn, blonde, black. On the 19-inch tube it was really fascinating this was TV at its best, so sure and right, out of all th [...] a few feet from us. But the and ensemble with piano, cymbals, I saw the cymbals playing but not hear them. No highs. I saw [... ] drums and heard a faint crunch. I, lows. It all came out of a monster three-inch speaker, somewhere in that big TV monitor.
By one o'clock we were steeped in despair. Nothing had changed. We had seen everything; all the acts had rehearsed and got themselves ready. Still, the vast coming and going went on and on. Four hours of it already and we had not so much as started. And, we would have to stand butes before we could even 'a note and this only the [...] I began to think it would ght then, I decided I would kst blow my pitch pipe be-[...] ? could stop me, in the si)efore we began to sing. [...] perfectly well edit it out al ole shebang ground to a hair more fool them. I had to do se. g! Time was crawling.
Did I say improvise? After four hours, the session's entire game plan was suddenly junked. Brilliant thought: Instead of the customary real-time operation, which didn't seem to be working very well for this session (!), we would now do the, entire recording via tape editing. That is, they would record everything on the program in bits and pieces, each act doing its complete offerings all at once, and the program would be spliced together later on. Thus we would not have to wait a dozen or so hours more to tape our real-time segments one at a time.
Brilliant innovation, huh?
If you ask me, any reputable audio producer would have thought of that one in approximately nine seconds from the word go. What have we been learning, all these years? In no time at all (that is, only an hour or so more), we were through our work and out of that place. We went and did our stunt, all the music for all three segments, one piece right after the other, in ONE take, no more, and that was that. It took less than 15 minutes and we got applause from the other acts, around the room on their various sets, when we finished.
I still am dumbfounded. (Or is it dumfounded?) Did they really think they could pull off four separate real-time recordings, no breaks, in this extraordinary fashion? Well, after four hours, they certainly were not going to. Couldn't they have guessed? Where ARE these TV people? Somewhere back in prehistory? I don't think they even KNOW what we audio workers have been doing for so long and with such a wealth of invention.
Maybe in another installment I'll tell you how it all came out when we finally got going the right and proper way, via tape edit. Especially the audio. I saw the show on Christmas morning, and heard it. Not bad sound for a so-so one-channel signal, forced through some sort of drastic compression, sent out to a pipsqueak FM tuner in a home TV and spewed forth through a micro-power amp into a mini-woofer. That's TV audio. But the color the color was gorgeous. Just gorgeous.
Not the sound color, the picture.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1980)
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