Last week we returned to Harris Hall in Aspen to engineer a live broadcast of the Aspen Music Festival and School‘s winter concert series. The concert was a piano recital played by Orli Shaham on a brand new Steinway grand, and the concert was broadcast live on Colorado Public Radio.

An event like this requires the collaboration of several people working behind the scenes – stage manager, piano technician, engineers in Aspen and Denver, production crew, radio announcers, and, of course, ….. the artist!

Command central on the Aspen end looked like this:

Note the venerable Yamaha DM2000 console, and the laptop for monitoring the broadcast stream via CPR’s online music streaming channel. The audio is delivered to CPR’s Denver studio via a dedicated ISDN line, and it is a unique experience to sit in the control room and listen to the audio come back to the laptop via WiFi with only a second or two of delay! Not pictured is the second laptop running Google Chat to allow direct communication with CPR in Denver, so they can be advised of the live action such as stage entrances, houselights, and whether or not the artist is coming back for an encore…

The stage setup looked like this:

At around 500 seats, Harris Hall is a fantastic intimate venue for an event like this. Background noise levels are wonderfully quiet. The acoustics are lively yet warm. Based on our previous experience recording in this hall, the piano technician’s voicing of the new instrument, and Ms. Shaham’s concert repertoire,  we chose a combination of microphones placed at varying distances from the piano. The hanging microphones were Schoeps MK4 capsules in a fixed ORTF configuration, flanked by a widely-spaced pair of Schoeps MK2h omnidirectional capsules on CMC6 bodies. The close mics on stands were DPA 4006-TL omnis, which gave a beautiful sound – clear and transparent – and formed the foundation of the audio mix.

Thanks to the careful preparation and collaboration of the whole production crew, the event went smoothly. We were pleased to be a small part of bringing this wonderful music to a larger audience beyond the concert hall.