Six Music Productions

SIX Music Productions specialises in location-based recordings, mainly in the musical fields of classical and jazz. Although we frequently work in studios (Air Lyndhurst, Abbey Road, Olympic, the Warehouse, and others), the majority of our work takes place on location; in concert halls, recital venues, churches, cathedrals and elsewhere. We are able to record with our custom designed "carry-in" rig, or using Floating Earth's mobile recording truck, depending on which suits the situation the best.

 

SIX Music Productions usually fields it's own carry-in recording rig, supplemented with additional equipment as required. Suited to recording everything from solo instruments (from violin or voice to organs with high cases) through to a full symphony orchestra with soloists, our high quality equipment is nonetheless extremely portable - most rigs will fit in a large estate car, and even larger rigs will fit in a mid-sized Transit van.

 

In the control room, we ordinarily use a 48-channel digital mixing console (Yamaha DM1000 with additional external pre-amps), connected to a Pyramix hard disc recorder via AES (with ADAT backup). The console is often additionally connected to a secondary Pyramix or alternative DAW for backup, as well as sending the mix to one or more two-track recorders (CD-R, DAT, etc.). Monitoring can either be on small bookshelf speakers (KEF RDM2, concentrtic tweeter/woofer, B&W 805 Nautilus etc.) or larger floorstanding loudspeakers (B&W 802's, 804's), and a variety of headphones are supplied (Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, Sony...). A well-specified talkback & CCTV system links the control room with the live area, with a red-light cue system and both a loudspeaker for the producer to talk to the musicians as a whole, and a telephone system to enable private conversation between the conductor, soloist and production team.

 

The sound in the live area is captured with an array of superb microphones (Schoeps, Neumann, DPA, Sennheiser, AKG, Calrec & others), expertly positioned, and connected with good cable using our comprehensive multicore(s). We also have a custom-built slinging kit for the unobtrusive recording of live concerts. 

 

All this equipment, along with a variety of accessories and additional items (single-sided headphones & headphone amplifiers for recording to a click-track, lights & heaters for cold churches. . .) packs down into easily-carriable cases, ensuring a quick and efficient load-in and load-out.

 

Click here for more details of our recording rig.

 

The Floating Earth truck has been designed from the outset with the very highest audio specification in mind. It is fitted with the first SSL C200 digital mixing console in the UK, replacing the 48 track Sony console previously installed. The console has 128 remote microphone inputs and is capable of 5.1 and 7.1 monitoring. There are optic fibre connections to the stage boxes - which provide high quality A/D conversion at the stage end at up to 96 kHz. In the truck there are two multitrack Pyramix recorders, running the latest Pyramix v6 + mMassocre, and connected to the console by MADI (giving a possible 128 channels of recording). A MADI bridge provides very flexible routing options, taking feeds from the remote microphone preamps, the stage ring and elsewhere, and providing feeds to other units (eg TV OB, documentary crew, stage...) as MADI on fibre or coax, as AES or analogue. Recording is made to high-speed disk drives with RAID safety, and in broadcast situations "clean" archive tracks can be laid down at the same time as an on-air mix is made.

 

Internally, much attention has been paid to the acoustic design, taking into account many of the inherent short-comings of mobile trucks from this point of view. In particular Floating Earth have addressed the issue of obtaining an accurate and comfortable listening environment that allows proper balance decisions to be made on the spot rather than later during a mix.

 

Also central to the design has been the inclusion of true surround sound monitoring in 5.1 audio format. The SSL digital console allows easy switching between stereo and surround monitoring and this has been fully implemented in the truck. The stereo monitoring is flexible, allowing a range of different speaker systems to be used, while the surround monitoring is provided by an active Genelec system including a sub-woofer.

 

On board Editing
The truck is equipped with 128 channel Pyramix editing systems, offerring unparalleled flexibilty for multitrack editing and mastering. Among the huge list of features are automatic conform to picture and instantaneous play of large numbers of tracks via 128 output channels. It is also compatible with ProTools and other DAW's, allowing recording projects made in the truck to be taken away and edited directly on external systems at a later date.

 

Communications and Webcasting
This truck is supplied with an fully integrated communications system appropriate for live broadcasting. The vehicle can carry encoding computers to allow live streaming on the internet via fixed ISDN link. We are currently encoding for RealAudio, QuickTime and Windows Media, amongst other formats.