And yet we’re hearing only half an orchestra. Today, woodwind and brass have convened for the second, and final, day of recording for Killzone 2’s 28 minutes of cutscene music. Later this evening, the choir will arrive to perform its parts before the session ends at 10pm.

Though 28 minutes doesn’t sound like much, it’s a punishing schedule for two days of sessions, and when we arrive in the late afternoon, they’re already running behind. The music’s composer, Joris de Man, who also wrote the scores for the original Killzone and PSP follow-up Killzone: Liberation as a founding member of Guerrilla Games, has had to hurriedly tweak the orchestration for sections that didn’t quite go to plan during yesterday’s session, in which they recorded the strings. And the conductor, Jon Williams, is finding the session particularly gruelling because he broke his collarbone only a couple of weeks previously.

But experienced from a balcony above the control room, it sounds incredible. Even without the strings and choir in place, the music is full, angry and dramatic, with sharp trumpets punctuating phrases of the final piece of the day, The Helghast March.

On the other end of the scale are the loud, low, vicious barks of a cimbasso, but there’s room in the score for almost every instrument to take a role, from mournful oboe to processions of dramatic horns. Williams completes another take and quietly waits for de Man and the engineers in the control room to confirm over his headphones that all was well. The players relax.

Conservatively dressed and generally middle-aged, they’re all session musicians, and many play principally for the London Symphony Orchestra. You can’t help but wonder what they think about playing music for a videogame. Eventually, with two minutes to go until the wind section’s session time is up, the control room confirms it’s a wrap.

read the full article on EDGE

Selection and Placement of Microphones.

Microphone Techniques
Vocal Microphone Techniques
Spoken Word/“Podcasting”
Acoustic String and Fretted Instruments
Woodwinds
Brass
Amplified Instruments
Drums and Percussion
Stereo

Fundamentals of Microphones, Instruments, and Acoustics

Microphone Characteristics
Instrument Characteristics
Acoustic Characteristics
Shure Microphone Selection Guide
Shure Recording Microphone Lockers

DOWNLOAD A PDF FILE OF THIS GUIDE FROM SHURE.COM
Shure’s Performance Listening Center
featuring state-of-the-art recording and product testing
capabilities. Photo by Frank Dina/Shure Inc.
Internal application photography by Cris Tapia/Shure Inc.

The protocol of that job required that we do it all by hand, and I worked for 36 days without a break, 8-10 hours a day. Despite our usual precautions of slanted table-tops, good posture, adequate lighting, etc., I still found myself about a week later conducting a recording session with a right arm that was growing more sluggish by the minute. The quick of the story was that 36 days of being locked into a position had caused the muscles in my neck to inflame and spasm, pulling it out of position enough to rupture a disk, with consequent pain and diminished nerve flow. Fortunately, most such neck problems relax and work their way out in several months. (Mine did.) The moral of that story is that too much of anything, even work, isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Obviously, now that we do the job with lasers and toner instead of pens and ink, our posture has changed, but not the potential hazards of physical overwork due to poor planning. Let’s start with the basic setup. For each micro-task we do, if we could mentally draw a graph, with one axis measuring time spent and another showing how often we do it, the resulting plot would help us prioritize and strategize the positions of our tools to save time and avoid personal injury. Take into account things like standing and sitting (knees,) leaning (spine,) head position (neck,) unvarying depth of visual focus (eyestrain,) chair height (leg circulation,) speaker placement (ear strain,) etc.

Here’s how my analysis dictated my basic setup (your mileage may vary…)

(1) Monitor placement: directly in front and slightly down, since my emphasis (scores, parts, etc.) is graphic and therefore visual. I use two monitors stacked vertically, as notation primarily demands vertical real estate, compared to sequencing’s obsession with the horizontal.

(2) Computer keyboard/trackball: at elbow level, directly in front of and nearest to me, as more time is spent editing than strictly inputting.

(3) Midi keyboard: front-to-back, between computer keyboard/mouse and computer monitor, and slightly elevated. (Not the optimal position for hours of playing, but the need to maintain body orientation through constant back-and-forth on the two keyboards wins out.)

4) Workstation orientation: When possible, and for both acoustic and ergonomic reasons, placed with its back to one of the short sides of a rectangular room, but not forcing one to look at or out a window (glare and shadow.) Allow space between workstation and back wall to minimize speaker/wall interaction, allow access to component/network wiring and, not insignificantly, for video monitor placement at a different focal depth from the computer monitor, forcing you to change focus frequently to avoid eyestrain.

(5) Telephone: within easy arm’s reach without leaning, preferably on the same side as the more skilled arm (for dialing.)

(6) Printer: Again, within arm’s reach, both for retrieving completed prints and for manual feed access.

(7) Easel: For holding scores, manuals, etc., at eye level. Since this is used less often, but for longer stretches, I built one onto an old-style computer/video monitor platform with a swing-out arm to be available when needed, or quickly swung back and folded out of position when not.

read the full article on www.filmmusicmag.com