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IN THE MIX WHILE THE LIVE SHOWS ARE KICKING OFF DAY AND NIGHT THROUGHOUT MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL, SEVERAL FLOORS DOWN, A WHOLE OTHER OPERATION IS UNDERWAY... NEWLY APPOINTED BROADCAST SPECIALIST, JOHN HARRIS, WHOSE CREDITS INCLUDE TWO GRAMMYS, SEVEN EMMYS, AND A PEABODY, OPENS THE DOOR OF THE SPECTACULAR OB TRUCK, RESPONSIBLE FOR RECORDING ALL SHOWS OUT OF THE FESTIVAL’S FLAGSHIP AUDITORIUM STRAVINSKI, AND LETS US INTO HIS WORLD...
Your list of credits is quite a read... How did you get into this game? Well, it’s not as if I can do anything else! [laughs] I started out doing live sound for a while, and then I met up with my future boss, Randy Ezratty, from Effanel Music, and I ended up working for him for 25 years. It was Randy that introduced me to some of the shows I do now, including the Grammys, where I have two of my trucks, plus a lot of other awards show. This is your first time at Montreux – how have you found it? Well, this is only day four, so... [smiles] But this is obviously a spectacular vehicle that we’re working in, and I’m just happy to be here at Montreux in a position where my whole job is to sit and listen – I am overseeing all of the audio, but I don’t need to be in charge of the whole truck like I am at home, so it’s a great event for me. You’ve working with a set of Genelecs here, and it looks like a stereo mix... Yes, the shows are being recorded in stereo, so we elected to just go with a set of 1031s for this application, which work really well. I actually have the Genelec 8250s, the DSP versions, in my trucks, but Genelec on the whole is
a pretty dependable thing for my head. I’m not so married to any one kind of speaker, but with the Genelec line, if you know you’re experiencing something positive when using a set, you’re never going to be fooled by them;
“GENELEC ON THE WHOLE IS A PRETTY DEPENDABLE THING FOR MY HEAD.” what I mean by that is, you won’t get home and watch it back on TV and go, ‘oh my God, what happened?’ because they’re always true. Genelec for me offer stability, and are very reliable and accurate monitors. What is a day in the life here at Montreux? Well, because the whole festival is in one building with three or four venues going on, we come in around 12pm and meet up with the bands, get an input list together, and create a patch for us with the desk. We are five floors down, so generally not many of the artists head down here, though Pharrell’s producer came down yesterday, who I’ve known from other gigs – and he knows a lot of Pharrell’s cues, so that was helpful. And really, that’s what it should be – the artists should always have someone looking out for their needs.
Are you recording the soundchecks? Yeah, we basically just follow the artists on a soundcheck, and record it all in here, so that even if they only play a couple of songs, we can take those songs and play them back. We’re recording flat; it’s just the mic amps straight into Pro Tools, and Pro Tools then plays back through the desk, so we can just keep looping those songs and try to get a mix together. The audience we’ve got up from previous nights, and we’re happy with that sound, so once the show starts, we just take off with the mix from soundcheck, and the room sound we already know well, so then it’s just a case of going for it! What are the latest broadcast trends? Well, I’ve found that in the US particularly, live recording has now turned into live broadcasting. Everybody can now record themselves, and pretty much every PA has got a recording system linked to it nowadays, but they can’t put themselves on TV and do a mix for TV live, and that’s what our industry’s sort of turned into. www.montreuxjazz.com www.genelec.com