Recent Work

Originally published on ProSoundWeb

Encore Event Technologies, a Freeman umbrella company located throughout North America, provides event production to over 95 hotel/venue properties nationally. A leading provider of unique, creative, and innovative in-house audiovisual services for hotels, conference centers and resorts, its subsidiary, Encore Productions, is a full-service creative production and A/V equipment rental company.

Encore Event Technologies Beverly Hills location recently purchased a Yamaha RIVAGE PM10 digital audio console from Chicago-area sound company TC Furlong for use at the Beverly Hilton Hotel’s International Ballroom in Beverly Hills, California. Encore has a contract to provide all of the hotel’s production needs including audio, video, and lighting.

The International Ballroom hosts over 300 high profile events per year ranging from televised awards shows like the Golden Globes to the upcoming Clive Davis pre-GRAMMY party, the Academy Awards Oscar nominee luncheon, the Hollywood Film Awards, The Directors Guild Awards and so on.

In early December, the console was used for Ebony Magazines Ebony Power 100 Awards, and the NYC based American Ballets Nutcracker.

“We’ve utilized Yamaha consoles in our venues for a long time, including the PM5D, LS9, QL5 and a number of O1Vs that we have in our inventory, states Rachel Wolfe, director of event technologies, Encore Event Technologies. We love the Yamaha interface, and the boards are supremely reliable, user friendly, and sound great. We have been anticipating the release of the PM10 for some time and are thrilled to finally have it installed. The console seems to have managed to incorporate the wish lists of all our audio engineers into one extremely flexible board.”

Wolfe said the International Ballroom is an unusual and historical venue and hosts a surprising range of events.

“Both the Beverly Hilton and Encore treat this room as a theatrical venue and not as a typical hotel ballroom with back-to-back shows all year long. In any given week, we could have a Broadway review on Monday, Diana Ross on Tuesday, a ballet on Wednesday, Ozzy Osbourne on Thursday, and a televised award show on Friday, so we need a console that can handle this demand. The PM10 has shown itself to be able to do so gracefully. Our clientele are extremely production savvy; we deal with touring road managers and engineers, film industry line producers, television producers and directors, etc. They want to know that we have the top of the line gear available and that we can pull off their event flawlessly.”

“I have had a lengthy history mixing on Yamaha consoles”, states Jack Hayback, freelance front of house engineer for Encore. “Together with help from the folks at TC Furlong and freelance engineers Clint Rowland and Serguei Soloviev, we installed the console and built several templates for the space. Although, I was slightly intimidated at the prospect of getting to know another digital console, the PM10 is remarkably easy to use. I committed a lot of energy to educating myself on it, but as soon as I started using the console, it became second nature. Literally, within a few days, I knew everything I needed to know. With a lot of great features, the PM10 is very definitely a Yamaha console.”

Hayback compares the new PM10 to a brand new Tesla switched to Ludicrous Mode. “I can’t imagine using another console for this application. Any other board would be moving back in time. For me, the defining moment was the inclusion of a 96k, 24-bit sampling rate. This is huge for audiophiles like me because up until now, it has been very difficult to get anything over 48k in a live digital console.”

“The PM10 has been an extremely pleasant mixing experience, from the responsiveness of the EQ to the ease of use of inserts and plugins, says Hayback. The networking capabilities and the fiber optic interconnectivity between components via the TWINLANe network are simple and bulletproof. TWINLANe makes it unbelievably easy to connect various components and find them on the network.”

Regarding the new SILK processing, Hayback adds that “for many years Yamaha consoles have been very one for one; what you put in is what you get out, but now with the SILK feature, designed in collaboration with Rupert Neve Designs, harmonics are added to the sound, bringing a nice texture to the audio. As an example, for an acoustic guitar or on a lead vocal, by adding a bit of SILK, the sound suddenly jumps out of the mix. I’ve used SILK on all kinds of instruments, but one thing I’ve had great success with is that we often drive the sound system with the PM10 and have guest engineers’ consoles patched into the Yamaha. I take the engineer’s master outputs into the PM10 and add SILK on them, bringing brilliance to the entire mix. And, by adding SILK texture onto say, a musical orchestral mix, the whole mix just opens up. With 144 inputs, 72 mix buses and 36 matrixes, the PM10 is a perfect fit for what we do in the International Ballroom. We are constantly pushing the boundaries of what mixing consoles should be doing, so for us, more is better.”

Hayback notes that visiting engineers are excited to see the PM10. “Everyone has been waiting for the next most significant console from Yamaha to hit the streets, so now that it is here, engineers want to know how to use it because they know they will start seeing this console everywhere. The excitement for it has been fun to watch. For the most part, engineers are embracing the PM10 greatly and trying to get more seat time behind it. If you are familiar with any of the current Yamaha digital consoles, you will adapt very quickly to the PM10. With Yamaha CL, QL, or M7CL experience, the layout and touch screens will be very familiar.”

For more information about Yamaha’s PM10 Rivage system or anything from our list of over 100 professional audio manufacturers, contact our Sales Team at 847.367.9588 or sales@tcfurlong.com.

Originally posted on the DPA Microphones site

Looking for a solution that would allow them to more easily mic pastors and performers of all statures, the audio team at Christian Church of Clarendon Hills (CCCH) recently turned to DPA Microphones’ d:screet™ Necklace Microphone. This marks the first known HOW application for the company’s latest miniature mic, which recently won a TEC Award. In addition to its regular services, the church lends its auditorium to local schools for concerts and events, so the audio team also keeps a supply of DPA d:fine™ 66, d:fine 4066 and d:screet 4061 miniatures on hand.

Initially trying the DPA d:screet™ Necklace mic on recommendation from TC Furlong, Robert Locklear, Minister of Worship and Music at CCCH has become quite fond of the miniature mic. “It has a lot of the same tonal qualities of a regular headset mic with a little lower-end, which was a welcome surprise because of the high-end frequencies boost,” he says. “We don’t have any of the whispyness that we have with most headset mics that are commonplace in houses of worship. We only have one Necklace mic right now, but it has such a great quality that we’re definitely going to purchase more.”

The size and durability of the mic also appealed to Locklear and his team, who have a limited budget for purchasing new mics. “We do a lot of plays and talent shows, both through our church and for local schools that rent our space, and the biggest problem we were having was trying to mic the children and petite women,” he explains. “For instance, our Pastor’s wife is very petite and when she would wear the d:fine headset mics that we use for the male speakers, we couldn’t mount it to her head properly because we have the longer boom, so the d:screet Necklace is a better fit for this situation.”

It isn’t just the smaller presenters who are benefitting from the d:screet Necklace. “It has been excellent for all of our speaking roles,” continues Locklear. “We had some doubts about it being placed down by the neck and behind the mouth, but those have really been unfounded. What’s more, our Senior Pastor is very comfortable with the mic. It’s especially useful for when he’s done with service as he spends a lot of one-on-one time speaking with people and found that it would often be off-putting for people sharing their life story with someone with a headset mic. With DPA’s d:screet Necklace mic, he just tucks the mic into his collar and sits it right where a tie might be, so no one notices the mic. This setup has given him and his congregation a lot more confidence to have personal conversations.”

Though the d:screet Necklace is proving to be the preferred solution for presenters, the church’s DPA collection began with the original 4066 Headset Microphone, now part of DPA’s d:fine line of headset mics. It was Locklear’s experiences with that mic that led him to purchase the d:fine 66 and d:screet 4061, in addition to the d:screet Necklace.

“We started purchasing the 4066s as we were replacing our competitor-brand headsets because we felt the DPAs were a lot sturdier,” he explains. “We purchased the dual-ear version, which was not available for most brands at the time. That solution has given our speakers a lot more comfortability, confidence and security because the mic doesn’t move around when they are talking. The mics are also great for the students who use them, especially for younger users when we host outside events. The wire is a lot more pliable than most headsets.”

With the new whitespace laws coming into effect, Locklear plans to replace all of his older mics with DPA products. “Over the next year, we’re going to switch all of our AKG beltpacks to Shures. This means we need to update our mic inventory to add more d:screet Necklace and d:fine 4066 microphones for increased options for our speakers. Everything at our ministry and what we do to serve the community is very fluid, so we have to have solutions to accommodate that fluidity, and DPA is a big part of that.”

For more information about microphones from DPA, please contact our Sales Team at 847.367.9588 or sales@tcfurlong.com.

A Pro Sound Web writeup on one of our recent sales: We were happy to help Freddie Breitberg add 13 Shure KSM313 ribbon microphones to his personal mic locker.

Originally posted on Pro Sound Web on January 14, 2015.

Chicago engineer/producer and sound designer Freddie Breitberg recently utilizedShure KSM ribbon microphones in recording the debut album of big band jazz artists The Great Postmodern Nightmare.

With some of his collection of classic RCA ribbon mics were due for ribbon refurbishing, Breitberg decided that the time was right to try Shure’s distinctly modern ribbon technology.

“Ribbon microphones are like old friends: You love them for their warmth and personality,” he says. “They have always been a key tool for me in music recording, and I’ve always had a collection of vintage ribbons to offer my clients. This project, which was actually a crowd-funded CD, gave me a great chance to explore the personalities of the Shure KSM ribbon mics.”

The sessions took place over two days of live recording at I.V. Lab Studios on Chicago’s north side, with Breitberg deploying Shure KSM313s on all the horns and using the KSM353 as part of his mid-side stereo room miking arrangement and on amplifiers.

“I’ve done a lot of big band work live in the studio, and came up with a sort of horseshoe layout for the horns to take advantage of room acoustics and the figure-eight pattern of the ribbon mics,” he explains. “I spot-mike each instrument individually, and I use Mid-Side stereo miking to capture the room. It gives me both room sound and isolation.”

Specifically, to capture horns, Breitberg used a set of KSM313s, which have a unique ribbon design in that the two sides of the microphone produce distinctly different frequency responses—neutral from the front, slightly brighter from the rear.

“The 313 sounds fantastic on horns,” he says. “They are as warm as my vintage RCA ribbons, but with more high end. That means less EQ and less processing in mix – and that is always a good thing in recording.”

In working with a large group of identical KSM313s, Breitberg was also struck by a couple other things. “They are just wonderfully consistent from mic to mic,” he reports. “Compared to other ribbons, they have plenty of output, and their null points in the figure-eight pattern are tremendously deep, which really helps with isolation in my room scheme. The results were really compelling.”

Breitberg’s big band technique, which he calls “working in perpendiculars,” places the band in a U-shaped seating arrangement with the drums at the base. For this band, one leg of the “U” had four trumpets directly across and parallel to the drums, with the bones and saxophone sections perpendicular and directly across from one another. The rhythm section of bass, piano, and guitars was arrayed on either side of the drum kit.

Rather than the traditional distant ambient room miking technique, Breitberg places two mid-side stereo set-ups inside the “U.” Mid-side stereo combines two mics, one bidirectional and one cardioid, to create a controllable, phase-cohesive stereo image. For this task, he used the Shure KSM353 with its flat, uncolored response in the side position, paired with a KSM32 cardioid condenser to capture the on-axis sound.

“I cut my teeth on orchestra and big band, and I’ve developed this technique over the years,” explains Breitberg. “It’s killer because it locks in your phase. The mid-side mics act more like EQ and compression as opposed to ambience—in a positive way. The matching Shure ribbons really accentuated that.”

Recording the 18-piece group live was a real test of the microphones and of Breitberg’s technique. “The first time I played back the tracks, it sounded like it was already mixed. It produced nearly perfect phase coherency for a really natural blend, and the deep null in the figure-eight pattern gave me enough isolation to do punch-in fixes if needed. When you think about it, to do that, recording an entire big band live, is pretty amazing.”

As a result, Fred Breitberg decided to add the KSM313 to his mic locker. In fact, he purchased 13 of them—the largest documented sale of ribbon microphones in Shure history. “These are great-sounding mics, and add so much more flexibility than a ribbon that’s identical on both sides,” he says. “They have the warmth and personality of a vintage ribbon, but with higher output and SPL handling that vintage RCAs never had. Though they’re perfect for horns and guitar amps, I’ll also be using them on strings, nylon guitars, piano, drums, and whatever else they test well on. I decided I had to have them.”

Interested in Shure Ribbon Mics for your next event?  Contact us at 847.367.9588!