Gaudeamus Festival 2018

Who

IEMA Ensemble 2017/18

When and where

08.09.2018 TivoliVredenburg - Utrecht - Netherlands

Program

5 Things That Really Matter in 2018 - Mikolaj Laskowski
Depaysement - Yongbom Lee
a su sinuoso paso - Javier Quislant
Vaporised Tivoli - Anders Hillborg

Setup

In this concert were three pieces involving electronics, all for big ensemble Mikolaj's piece had very loud electronics and needed a lot of amplification for the acoustic instruments.
The prepared piano needed to be amplified in "Depayasement" as well as the vibraphone; both instruments are the protagonists of the piece.

Sound Design

For "5 Things That Really Matter in 2018" . I wanted to achieve a very close-up, compressed pop sound that fitted the piece very well and helped blend the synthetic keyboard sounds with the rest of the ensemble. Instead of trying to make the keyboard sound acoustic, I tried to make everything else sound artificial.
Yongbom's "Depaysement" was very different, a very colorful, nice sounding, acoustic piece. I wanted to make both instruments more hearable but give them a blurry, indefinite character. The amplification shouldn't be noticeable as such but add some color.

Realisation

I proposed Mikolaj to use dpa4099 microphones for the strings and very close up small diaphragm hiper-cardiod (Schöps MK41) for the other instruments, except for Percussion. This gave me a lot of control over the volume of the strings that needed some pushing when playing against the loud winds and made the strings sound quite punchy when compressed.
For "Depaysement" I routed both percussion and piano thru a Convolution Reverb with a church IR before sending them to the PA. This helped me push them in the volume without bringing them to much to the front as both were placed on the back of the stage behind the ensemble.
The PA system in the main hall of the TivoliVredenburg consisted of four line-arrays (two front stereo, and one on each side for the side seats) which I extended with two subwoofers and four near-fields to cover the first seats. The concert was mixed on a Soundcraft vi6 console.