HOME

HOME is a project organised by The Robot Needs Home Collective, born out of the 2020 Covid restrictions in which the arts and public spaces in particular were affected. Funded by ACE, HOME is a weekly  series of ten live performances by a selection of East-Midlands artists and musicians recorded in well-known public spaces in Leicester. My role in the project was recording engineer - on location for each of the performances, and mixing engineer - mixing the recordings for video release each week.

A key aspect of the project was to showcase the space as much as the artists performance itself, in consideration of the audio recording as much as the filming. Careful choice of which artists performed where made sure the recordings were captured in a way that the musicians could work with the room and use it to enhance their performance. One of the pleasures of mixing audio to video is the process of achieving a match in character of sound to visual, with a view to enhancing the audience experience without distracting from it. No surprise then that the room mics were essential to the sound of the session.

With help from the RNHC, we put together a recording package that though I’d be reluctant to call a “mobile recording rig”, did fit in the back of an estate car and could be set-up within an hour or so. The brain of the system was a Midas M32R, which pushed all its inputs through to a Pro Tools rig whilst taking care of performer monitoring in the room. The microphones were modest but did mainly consist of condensers - for room mics, acoustic instruments, and vocals. There was no brief as such to use discreet close miking or to lean wholly towards studio techniques, more of a needs must work with what we had. That said it was nice to tow the line between the live sound environment and studio recording. I didn’t worry too much about spill and took the opportunity to use sensitive microphones in non-intrusive ways for the performers and the cameras. This gave space both physically and sonically for the performers arrangements of their songs.

All ten performances can we watched for free, HERE.