WOMADELAIDE PHOTO DIARY
9 July 2014
Story & Photos: Nick Harrison
This year for the 22nd annual WOMADelaide global music festival I tagged along with veteran ABC sound engineers Steve Fieldhouse and Tom Henry as they produced recordings for Radio National’s The Live Set (formally Music Deli). The South Australian ABC OB Truck was rolled in to record the three main stages, with feeds from SSL MORSE stage boxes running back to the onboard SSL C200 console. Additionally, a swag of Sound Devices 788 and 702 field recorders were set up on the smaller stages to capture artist talks, forums and performances.
Around 90,000 people passed through the gates in 2014, helped along by the great weather. Some of the music highlights this year included: Femi Kuti, Airileke, Carminho, Arrested Development, Roberto Fonseca, Ngaiire, Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen and Asif Ali Khan.
This year, the broadcast featured performances and interviews from four different WOMAD artists in front of a festival audience. Steve: “We build a temporary broadcast studio side of stage in the park. Prior to the broadcast, the pressure is on a bit given this broadcast follows several days of rigging on different stages. The day kicks off with sleepy musicians commencing sound checks from around 7.30am in the morning. Each sound check is pretty quick with changeovers performed during news, CD playback or interviews. The whole event goes out from the park to the world via ISDN.”
Steve: “A few years ago we couldn’t get the OB Truck here so we put together a portable recording system. It comprised five synced Sound Devices 788T field recorders strapped to a makeshift trolley, giving us a portable 40-channel recorder that worked surprisingly well… Sound Devices said it was the first time they’d heard of that many 788T units being synced for a recording.”
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