So my high school is putting on our annual play this spring. We got the rights to do the musical Sweeney Todd. In addition to the singers we have an 30 piece orchestra including brass and woodwind sections. Also there is a percussion section. The whole orchestra and percussion will be down in the pit in front of the stage. The pit is open with tile floors and sheet rock walls. The pit is about 2m sunken down in relation to the audience floor and then there is another meter extending beyond the floor so the audience would have to come to the wall to look over. There is 3m of wall in the back of the pit extending to the stage floor. The pit is roughly: 5m x 15m. The output speakers for the whole show is closer to the audience than the pit so feedback hopefully wont be as bad. We use 2 rows of 4 overhead mics on stage when they sing in a chorus form. The strings are most definitely going to be an a semi circle but the woodwinds and brass are questionable.
I need suggestions on miking the orchestra, woodwinds, brass and percussion. Also seating arrangement suggestions would be very helpful too.
From all I have read on the internet, which is mostly about studio recording orchestra which isn't helpful, says that the XY pair with stereo is a good choice for studio. I don't know if in a live situation this will work considering we have singers, brass, woodwinds, and percussion to deal with also. We don't have a lot of money to spend because we just bought a really nice new light board. I'm thinking probably at the most $2,000. Probably less than that. We don't have any mics in our inventory that we could use.
Will solely the XY pair give me clarity of the string with all the woodwind and brass or do I need to sit the woodwinds and brass away from the strings and mic them seperately. If I was to do that how would I mic them with the little money we have? Then how do we mic a percussion section that includes a wide variety of instruments? Will using the XY pair be hard to isolate just the strings and move the other instruments and singers out of the mix? I'm guessing the orchestra will consist of 15-20 players so it isn't too big. The two main problems I have is the cost and getting clarity out of the instruments especially because there is going to be so much noise with all of the percussion, brass, woodwinds, strings, and singers combined. Thanks!
I need suggestions on miking the orchestra, woodwinds, brass and percussion. Also seating arrangement suggestions would be very helpful too.
From all I have read on the internet, which is mostly about studio recording orchestra which isn't helpful, says that the XY pair with stereo is a good choice for studio. I don't know if in a live situation this will work considering we have singers, brass, woodwinds, and percussion to deal with also. We don't have a lot of money to spend because we just bought a really nice new light board. I'm thinking probably at the most $2,000. Probably less than that. We don't have any mics in our inventory that we could use.
Will solely the XY pair give me clarity of the string with all the woodwind and brass or do I need to sit the woodwinds and brass away from the strings and mic them seperately. If I was to do that how would I mic them with the little money we have? Then how do we mic a percussion section that includes a wide variety of instruments? Will using the XY pair be hard to isolate just the strings and move the other instruments and singers out of the mix? I'm guessing the orchestra will consist of 15-20 players so it isn't too big. The two main problems I have is the cost and getting clarity out of the instruments especially because there is going to be so much noise with all of the percussion, brass, woodwinds, strings, and singers combined. Thanks!