Michael Bongiorno

Michael Bongiorno faces unusual challenges as a recording engineer. Rather than working in the cozy confines of a traditional recording studio, he sets up shop in a different city every night, but always in the same place — off to the side of the stage at an Ani DiFranco concert. There, Michael captures her performances on a mobile Pro Tools multitrack system, for later release as part of the Ani DiFranco Official Bootleg Series.

How long have you been doing the live recording with Ani?

About a year and a half now. I put the rig together with Andrew Gilchrist — he had the initial design. We had a rehearsal day, all the gear showed up and we put it together in a day.

How did you come to be doing this?

I guess I got into recording like a lot of people: you have a band in high school and you just start doing the home recording thing. Then I went to school for it, started at UMass, did their recording program. It was a music school, very conservatory-style classical, and I just wasn't into it, so I ended up finishing at Emerson in Boston. What I did there a lot was I worked at the radio station, at [W]ERS, and I did a lot of live broadcasts. ERS was great because it had every form of music coming in: a cappella, metal, hip-hop, klezmer, Celtic. It was a tightly formatted station, but all these different shows had bands coming in. It was similar to this [live recording] because you had time restraints — it had to be up by such-and-such a time, and there's no going back and doing another take. That was all live to 2-track though, to DAT. After that I did a lot of assisting, like at Fort Apache. I met Kristin Hersh there, who was working with Ethan Allen, who used to be at Kingsway, which is how I got connected with New Orleans. I moved there for Kingsway, and then [Daniel] Lanois [ Tape Op #37 ] sold it, so that didn't happen. I ended up spending some time at American Sector, which merged with Boiler Room to make Piety Street. I never got involved at Piety. I ended up getting involved with the Truck Farm, which Andrew [Gilchrist] [ #12 ] was an initial partner in. So then Righteous Babe was looking for somebody specific to do this live recording, because before that they would pass it off to the monitor engineer, or the PA tech. They might just trigger the ADATs and not even look at it.

Yeah, I remember when I talked to Ani and Andrew about that [Tape Op issue #12] they described the resulting tapes as sixteen tracks of useless line hum and hiss.

No one was even monitoring it. Yeah, so they decided it was something they wanted to pay more attention and care to, and it wasn't happening by having someone else do double duty. My job at the time was not recording related, but I was spending as much time as possible at the Truck Farm, which is how I got to know Andrew. He suggested me for the live recording, and they brought me on, and it's worked out.

Do you record all the shows?

All the US tours, and Canadian. I won't go to, for example, Australia, because we don't bring any production there. It's very expensive to go there — they bring only who they have to. We might start doing European recording. We don't often do festivals either — that's another situation where it's somebody else's show. You're playing by their rules, using their gear. I rely on our production to get my feed, and we rent the same PA every time. It has a splitter box that has isolation transformers — it goes three ways: front of house, monitors, and myself. I have a totally clean signal coming in.

So that box is just off to the side of the stage?

It's in its own roadcase, with the amp racks and the EQs. I live pretty close to it — I'm actually positioned right behind the monitor engineer. And that's another challenge of producing in a live environment — you're not in a controlled environment for listening. I'm doing everything on headphones. But the mixes I'm doing during the show are rough mixes anyways. The important thing is to get clean tracks to Pro Tools.

Maybe this would be a good time to describe the signal flow of the whole system.

You've got to keep the rig small. It's already two road racks, about five feet high. The way it works is: my split comes in. First they go to the mic pres. I've got a couple of Universal Audio 6176s. One I use on her voice, the other — I've been going back and forth — sometimes I put her guitar through it, sometimes the bass DI. I've also got an API 3124, which is a four mic pre strip. I have a mixer mounted too — the TLA M3 Tube Tracker. That thing sounds great — it's got plenty of headroom when you're doing live because if you clip, well, that's it. That's more of an issue with going to Pro Tools, but I use an Apogee AD-8000 converter, and that's nice because it has those soft limiters on it, which save the day. I've gone to sound check and forgotten to turn that on, and it's just clipping like crazy.

Does that show you when the soft limiting is kicking in?

Yeah, the 8000 does that. When you start to clip, there's a meter that shows you, zero to nine, how far into the red you're going, which is great. So, anyways, everything's going into the mic pres, and I've got some compressors, a Distressor... oh, and a couple of Joemeek boxes.

Pres or compressors?

The Meeks are mic pres/compressors, but I don't use the compressors in them — they're very noisy. So I use them on lesser-important things, like her wah pedal, which she'll use on maybe two songs, momentarily. So from the mic pres, it goes right into the AD-8000. From the 8000, it goes two different places. It comes out lightpipe into the computer, via the [Digidesign] 001, and then there's a separate card, which sends analog out to the mixer.

The Apogee has analog outs?

You have to have the separate card, but yeah. So it's eight analog outs to the mixer, and then from the mixer, I have a digital out. That's a cool thing about that TLA board, you have a digital out and you can set the sample rate, the bit depth, you can go S/PDIF out, lightpipe, or AES. I go AES out, directly into the CD recorder, an HHB. So that's the rough mix, going straight to CD. And at the same time Pro Tools is recording the separate tracks.

What are your headphones plugged into?

The mixer or the CD player, I go back and forth — or the 8000 has a headphone jack, if I need to check something there. So, in terms of the instrumentation, the lineup is: I have her voice, I have her guitar pickup, she has two amplifiers, her wah pedal, and then I only take the direct bass, because that's all I have room for, I can't take the amp.

Where do you take the bass from?

Well, he splits it. The bass goes to a DI box, he takes the thru and sends it to the amp, and then there's the direct out that goes into the [splitter] box.

So the signal has hit his front end, to deal with the high impedance pickup?

Yes, it has. And then I have two audience mics that only I get. They go into the snake and out of the splitter, but they don't go through the loom. There's a separate pair of XLRs that send me those microphones. And those audience mics play a key role, more than you might imagine, in terms of bringing the whole mix together. 'Cause I'm not using any effects, and the audience mics provide a very nice reverb.

Where do you place the audience mics?

It depends. Sometimes we're in a club that holds 800 people, and then the other day we were at Red Rocks, which holds 10,000. So I'll place them where I think they're gonna sound alright and then play with that during soundcheck. I have to be very wary of the sidefills and the PA. I don't want to put it right in front of the sidefills — it's gonna get blasted! But I do want to capture a lot of the sound of the PA, the reflection, I don't want to just be getting the audience, because I like to use it as a room reverb.

In a smaller hall are they hanging from a rig near the ceiling?

They're always on the stage. I just point them straight out. The height will vary depending on where the audience is in relation to the stage, because I don't want to get any conversation, which can happen. Especially in a club setting there's apt to be more conversation going on — people are drinking and, "Yap, yap, yap" and then you're hearing the conversation as loud as the performance, which is no good. So I'll angle them too, depending on the venue.

Do you always use the same mics?

Yeah, they're Audix SCX1s, condensers. I used to also put a mic right in front of her guitar on her vocal mic stand, which was a wild card experimental mic. Because yeah, it's pointed at her guitar, but she's moving around, the wedges are right there blasting. So it ended up being kind of an ambient mic.

The guitar sound comes from the pickup mostly?

Yes. It works out really well, and the audience mics wetten or saturate things, helping that real harsh, direct pickup sound.

And is that also hitting some kind of front end before it hits you, some kind of high impedance guitar pre?

It's a wireless system.

So the raw piezo pickup has already been buffered by the time you get the signal.

Yes. I'm running it into a mic pre, but she uses six different guitars that are drastically different. She's got three standard acoustics, a tenor (which is a four string) and two baritones. Now, because I don't have six channels to spare, before it gets to the mic pre, those six individual lines run to a balanced passive switcher. I'll get the set list and Ani puts the numbers of the guitars next to each song. That switcher then just sends a mono output into the API pre. But as a result, it all winds up going through the same strip on the mixer, so that's all the EQ'ing I have for the live mixing. So I don't mess with the EQs too much during the show.

Any other patching that happens? Do you run, say, the Distressor going into Pro Tools?

Yes, things are getting compressed to tape. I've got the 610 and 1176 linked [on the UA 6176] on her vocal, so it's getting compressed. It is important to control the levels to some extent. I'm not destroying the dynamics by any means, but her dynamics are all over the place. She'll be playing something very soft and sweet and then she'll just lay into that guitar like a baseball bat. The way she plays, she actually superglues on fake nails, and then wraps them in electric tape to reinforce it, and she'll still break them off. So otherwise, [without compression] I'd run into headroom issues, and things would start clipping like mad. But I also like the sound of those devices.

What do you run the Distressor on?

This Distressor is on her guitar pickup. It goes to one of the API strips, and into the Distressor in opto mode, which works out well. Now the other thing you run into is just keeping everything maintained. I know a lot of people who do remote recording; they own their stuff and take it home at the end of the day. But this is stuff on a pretty big tour where at the end of the night, it goes on a truck and I don't get to touch it again. And I am using a full G4 tower — I'm not using a laptop. The G4 is actually mounted sideways with these Marathon brackets, and I have a flat screen monitor that I just throw on top of the rack when I start up. It works really well, it's been running for over a year and a half and that computer has been very forgiving. No serious meltdowns. I do keep an ADAT in the rack as a backup. Should there be a complete meltdown, I can quickly just pull the lightpipes out of the computer, into the ADAT, on, throw a tape in and I'm running — no other wiring necessary. I just have to make that little jump. I haven't had to do that, but I do have a backup, which is good. You don't have a lot of resources on the road.

Which version of ProTools are you running?

6.0, and I'm on OS 10.2. I was about to upgrade to Panther the other day, and one of the techs was like, you don't want to do that on a show day. Our next tour, we have a couple of rehearsal days, no shows, so I'm going to try and do all that there. But at the same time, if it's not broke don't fix it, and it's been operating so well.

You probably don't run any plug-ins live either.

Nope, and it's just eight tracks, so it's not working the CPU that hard.

What sample rate do you run the sessions at?

Everything's at 44.1k, 24 bit. I did have to step up the Hardware Buffer, and when you're running Pro Tools for ninety minutes straight, it gets tired. That did happen a couple times at the beginning, where it just locked up. I kicked it up to 512 samples and since then it's been fine — it hasn't locked up.

As far as I know, the only tradeoff you're making is with latency if you're monitoring back out of Pro Tools. But that's nothing you have to worry about, so just go for stability.

Yeah, actually, before I made that change, this show [Atlanta 10.9.03] locked up on me, and on the second tune I had to retrigger it, so for about ten seconds I didn't get the song. What I did was, later on, I took another show, different city, St. Louis I think, and I cut those ten seconds out of that song from that night and dropped it in and cleaned it up. Did some crossfades and volume automation. It's not perfect, because you're in a different venue and the whole show just sounded different, but the edit's good. That was a drag having that happen.

I was wondering about how you handle swapping out hard drives and doing backups.

I have an independent audio drive on the G4. I back up everything onto a Firewire drive, right when the show ends. I stop it, save it, drop it on the Firewire drive — it takes like two minutes to copy over. It has to be quick. I have to tear down and get the rack on the truck, because there's a certain order for the truck pack. You've got to think about everybody else — I'm definitely in my own world, but I've got to work with lighting, front of house, guitar tech. And then the next day, I'll put everything on DVD-R. Sometimes I need to split the show over a couple DVDs — the shows typically are 4 to 5 gigs, and those DVDs are like 4.7, but really you can only put 4.25 on them! I try not to do any editing out on the road unless there's something glaring. I just put what was done on the drives and worry about it later, if they decide to release that particular show. So I typically have one 80 gig hard drive per tour, and the whole tour will be on that drive. And then at the end of the tour I just wipe the whole [internal] audio drive on the computer clean, and I've got it on two places, the DVD and the Firewire drive.

What kind of documentation do you keep on the sessions?

I drop a marker at the top of the songs, and also hit save after every song.

Are you keeping any written documentation?

I've got a pile of set lists, and she goes off the set list sometimes, so I'll just scratch it out and write in whatever she's actually doing. At the end of the night I'll write up a sleeve for the CD. 'Cause at the end of the night, I've got the CD, I finalize it — it only takes like five minutes. I keep CD and DVD together, and really that CD serves as the reference. So if she goes back a year from now and wonders, "What was this tour like?" Rather than having to bring up every Pro Tools session, we just throw the CD in, and get a pretty good gauge on whether it's something she wants to use or not, regardless of how great the mix is. So that's pretty much it — obviously label all the drives with what's on there. Documentation's important for this sort of thing, because there's just so many shows, and everything gets sent to the main office at the end of tour, and they have someone who archives everything. They've got a whole closet of stuff.

Are they doing their own backups?

No, but they're putting everything in order and documenting.

So Ani goes back, picks out a show and you remix it? Or sometimes you like the rough mix and use it?

No, it always gets remixed. I'll listen to the rough and say, "No, this has gotta get fixed, this has gotta get fixed..." But the strange thing about my situation is that she doesn't get involved. We're out on tour; she's got a million other things to think about. She completely leaves it in my hands — she trusts my judgment. I have a good idea of what she wants, and I'm always trying to get that for her, knowing she may not even hear it. Her manager will ask her, "Which shows do you think were good?" — she'll ring off two or three from the last tour. "Okay, we'll release those." Then I do my thing and remix it. I use her guidelines of what she wants out of her live sound, and there it is.

When you go back and mix it, are you adding any effects?

Well, some things I will play with, like the audience mics. I'll use them as the reverb, if it's suitable from that particular show. Now you have to be careful, because if you bring them up too much, like I said, I can get some of that conversation that's going on. But besides compression and EQ, no. It's folk music, you know? Acoustic guitar — she's got a couple of amps that she drives, puts a lot of crunch on those amps, that I really keep kind of buried in the mix, just to warm things up a bit. But I don't really use any plug-ins.

Are you mixing in the box in Pro Tools?

No, I go back out through the Tube Tracker. I love the way that thing sounds.

Do the preamp settings have to change much from night to night?

Well, it depends on what it is. The audience mics change drastically from night to night. She likes a lot of monitors. Goatboy [Andrew Gilchrist] used to joke that it's not loud enough until her pants are shaking. I mean, it's acoustic, but it's loud. A lot of times I'll flip her voice out [of phase], and sometimes (we noticed this when we were mixing the Trust DVD), we flipped the audience mics out of phase. Because of the relation to the PA, you've got the audience mics pointed at the audience, but you've got the PA going out and coming back, and that was enough to warrant the audience mics being flipped.

What was the audible difference when you flipped them?

It was one of those things where we're flipping them out, and the bass is sounding a lot better!

So listening for the bass...

And that's usually the first thing that you're going to notice when something's out of phase — the low end. And that's what we were hearing — the bass was sounding clearer. Things aren't always 180 [degrees] out. I just know it sounds better if I flip it out. And I'll also play with the phasing on the amplifiers from night to night, depending on how loud she's got them on stage. That's the other thing. She controls the level of the amplifiers with foot pedals, so I'm constantly keeping an eye on them, 'cause from song to song, she'll just kick it on and I don't know what level it's coming at. It'll be, "Oh look, I'm blowing that mic pre sky high, I've got to back it off." But fortunately, those are two tracks that are getting mixed very low anyway. A thing that's important live is, I have to be able to see her or at least be near the monitor engineer. Because sometimes there's a change — she's not going to this guitar, she's going to that guitar — and if I don't know, I'm not going to switch it in time and I miss the first couple bars or whatever. And that's another thing I was going to say about the DVD — it's very interesting mixing for picture. They did another video where they took the reference CD — they didn't even tell me about it, I never remixed it or anything, and they were like, "You know, this doesn't sound very live." And I saw it and was like, "You're right, this isn't working at all." Because when you're mixing for picture, it's important to have what you're mixing sound like what you're looking at. And when you're making a record, you never have to think about that. With video, there's a whole environment, you're in a club or a theater, and, "Does what I'm hearing sound like what I'm looking at?" And that was one of the unfortunate things about this DVD — they didn't have the video ready. I got to see a rough cut and do mixing and panning of the 5.1 [surround] in relation to where they're standing. You don't want to pan it if a person's standing stage left — you don't want to pan it stage right. Especially working with audience mics — if people go nuts and the camera's on them, but you don't hear them... so that's something I learned on that project.

Besides all the gear we've mentioned, what else is in your kit that you take out on the road?

I keep one of those little air tanks to keep all the connections clean. We were in Santa Fe last week at this place out in the desert — there's a construction zone, there's dirt flying everywhere and it just gets into everything. You've just got to keep things as clean as possible. The first gig in Las Vegas, I opened up the rack — the Distressor was just bent off its face! So I spent a day installing L-brackets underneath everything to reinforce the back.

Now, here's the last big question: for someone with much less of a budget, how would you recommend they might do multitrack live recording? And the first thing that would go for anyone doing this in smaller clubs, would be the splitter box, because you've got to work with their system.

Well, it would be a good idea to have your own splitter, because some of the gear in clubs is so abysmal. You don't want to be getting a send from anyone else, because you don't know what they're doing. You want a clean, direct sound. Obviously, don't try to just y- cable the mics — that would be disastrous. The primary thing is, get the clean signal first. You can get a splitter that will send to front of house and monitors, and let them just patch into you if they'll go for it. You're always going to run into some kind of hurdle wherever you go, especially when you're not bringing in your own production. I'm in a fortunate position where it's all of our stuff, every day. But for somebody who's trying to do it on their own, start with trying to get a splitter, and you can do this on a laptop. I tell you, putting that [G4] tower in the rack was a nightmare! So I'd recommend doing this with a PowerBook if you're doing this yourself. And obviously, you don't need to bring a board if you don't want a reference CD at the end of the night.

Do you see any way to do it without a splitter?

I guess what you could do is take direct outs off one of the desks — get a prefader, direct send from someone else, and send those to your AD converter, whatever that is. You want to cut out the middleman wherever you can.

We hardly ever talk about live recording in Tape Op, but it's a huge thing, especially as systems get smaller and cheaper.

Yeah, it's getting bigger now. A lot of the jam bands really started getting into it at first, like Widespread Panic. I know Dave Matthews records everything, and Pearl Jam. I'd be curious to talk to one of their guys and see how they do it, because I haven't met anyone else who does my job! I'm in a bubble... 'cause I'm not working with other recording engineers, so I don't have those peers on the road with me.