Film Orchestration - Part 3: Concert Halls, Studios & Seating 2

In the last part, we were having a look at the acoustic properties of concert halls and traditional seating charts of symphony orchestras. The reason why I focus that much on this topic is that film scoring has a fundamentally different target in its reproduction than "traditional" concert music. Film scores are usually not supposed to be played or listened to in a concert hall but they are going straight to a recording and are later being reproduced in the cinema or whatever outlet the audiovisual content is being consumed at, often after being heavily altered or supported by additional elements.

This different approach has a fundamental impact also on the way how film scores are orchestrated, and recorded so it is worth looking at these things.

The prototypical scoring stage is smaller in volume than most orchestra concert halls and of course has no seating for audience except for a few very rare cases (see below). It usually is a shoebox format and one essential factor to make it sound good is a high ceiling.

Here are a few of the well known studios worldwide:

Abbey Road Studio One (London) - one of the largest studio worldwide. The orchestra orientation in the room varies depending on line-up, I have recorded at a 90° rotation to the layout above. The studio can easily fit a big symphony orchestra plus choir at the same time. For instance Star Wars Episode 1 was recorded here with orchestra and choir simultaneously. It is probably one of the most film sound defining venues in the world.

Air Lyndhurst (London). A former church and one of the few rare cases of a non-shoebox layout. The other "benchmark" studio for the film sound. More reverby than Abbey Road.

EastWest Scoring Stage (Burbank). One of the few studios in LA that survived the exodus of recordings of the recent decades.

MGM Scoring Stage - another LA Studio, here's where the last Star Wars scores were recorded

Synchron Stage (Vienna) - relatively new but has been home to many recordings and sampling sessions over the last years

Teldex Studios (Berlin) - Home of many sampling projects and also quite high in demand for scoring over the last years

There are many more great scoring stages around the world but considering the pictures above (and maybe taking Air out of the account) you see that they all look quite similar. I'd like to point out one more stage which is a very special mixed form between recording stage and concert hall (and very dear to my heart):

This is the Funkhaus in Berlin in former East Berlin. It is an insane room in room construction and was used as the main recording and broadcasting stage of the former GDR before the Berlin wall came down. The acoustics of this room is phenomenal and it is considerably larger than Abbey Road in volume. As you can see it has a few seats but is mainly designed to be a recording venue. Unfortunately, it currently has no installed infrastructure for recording and the whole building complex has been under reconstruction for years. There are many smaller studios in the buildings which are still in use, the most famous tenant there probably currently is Nils Frahm (the samples of his Piano have been recorded in this building and Native Instruments sells them as "Noire") - anyway back to topic.

With the recording rooms all being smaller than concert halls, we get a different acoustic balance in these. The early reflections from the walls are more prominent in the recording and some of these studios have a quite short reverb tail which all creates this typical scoring stage sound that we know from most score recordings nowadays. However also the orchestra in itself balances differently. Brass tend to become a bit more dominant and "edgy" in such rooms and the generally shorter reverb times of the rooms result in a more punchy and immediate sound. Depending on the properties of the room, they might have a very specific signature sound to them. E.g. Abbey Road, Air and MGM have a very specific room sound while other studios sound a bit more neutral.

For us as composers and orchestrators who might record in these rooms it means to adjust our expectations accordingly (and possibly write accordingly). Details that might get washed away in a concert hall setting might come out very pronounced and detailed in a scoring stage. Brass fanfares might become way more "in your face" and potentially overpower the rest of the orchestra in some stages and in other stages get more lost in the room. From my personal experience, I can tell that I was surprised of how much Abbey Road "absorbs" the brass. They can really play very loudly and edgy in that room and still balance nicely with the rest of the orchestra while for instance the same playing attitude in Prague would result in the Brass dominating everything.

All these recording stages mentioned above have a fixed infrastructure for recording. They have a control room, all mics etc. in place. Usually all the mics remain in the room and are only adjusted to the line-up and seating so they are fully equipped to record at any time. Usually the studios are run by a fixed group of engineers who know this space in and out. They will probably have refined and perfected the sound of their recording for years, knowing exactly where to sit which musician in the room and where to put which microphone to get which effect. It can not be overstated how essential the choice and placement of microphones is for  a great recording and in some cases, it is a matter of just a few inches to get to that sweet spot in the sound. 

Compared to the concert halls, the seating in scoring stages has become considerably more specific in recent times.

The technical ability to record sections of the orchestra separately and therefore not being forced into certain seatings based on the limitations of space has allowed for way more creative usages of the space. Particularly Air Lyndhurst has become a playing field for people like Hans Zimmer. The room has galleys and balconies and he has used these extensively to place additional musicians up there and also explore every corner of the room with microphones to get to the sound he wants. But even if a composer is not so experimental, it is possible to record huge sections (e.g. 12 Horns as in How to Train Your Dragon) and have them cover the entire space of the stage (and therefore stereo field) to create a sound that is "larger than life" as is often preferred in scores these days that would not be possible in a "normal" recording.

So when composers nowadays record the orchestra in sections, they quite often don't do this in the traditional seating but they tend to book the sections for different recording days and rearrange the seating for each section using the entire room. 

For instance here is a Brass session in Air:

You see it follows the traditional seating more or less but has the musicians moved more into the center of the stage and can allow to have them all sit in single rows (more on this later).

There is indeed some benefit in this. For instance the classical seating has Double Basses usually far off the middle axis of the orchestra. In a concert hall, this will not be a big issue as lower frequencies tend to not be very directional, however in a scoring stage that is smaller than a concert hall and has closer mics that pick up the higher harmonics and give them a directional impression in the stereo field, it can quite quickly happen that the recording feels "limp sided" due to the basses being noticeably off-center.

For this reason, it has become quite common in sessions where the strings are recorded separately to place the basses in one row from left to right behind the other strings or accumulate them near the center there.

So this freedom of seating that is being allowed through recording sections separately really can help to shape the sound of a recording. For instance, even in a tutti session, if the space allows I would in most cases try to have the horns seated in one row rather than two rows behind each other, especially when it needs that epic unison horn sound as this just fills the acoustic space better than the traditional seating where they sit in a "cluster". 

Of course there are also downsides to all these practices. For instance having the horns sitting in one row makes it trickier for them to hear each other and intonate with each other. Also, if you use the space of the room more excessively and have musicians sitting at remote places in the studio just to use the room more will result in worse interaction between the musicians as they can not react that well to each other.

So we're having to balance out two interests in such cases. For the musicians it is most ideal to all be sitting as close as possible together and in an ideal world everybody would hear everybody, not through headphones but with their own ears. From a recording standpoint, it is desirable to spread them out more in the room to get a nicer stereo field and use the properties of the room.

Additionally, the practice of recording orchestras in sections makes it quite tricky for musicians to find their role in the music, especially when it is relatively sparsely orchestrated or orchestrated in a way that essential musical information is missing in one section. E.g. the absolute nightmare would be to record for instance strings and woodwinds separately where the woodwinds play one line that is part of the harmony of a voicing that is otherwise played by the strings. In a tutti context, it will not be much of an issue for the woodwinds to find their place in that voicing but if you record them separately from each other, it is just like walking blindly for them.

So you see in such cases, it becomes essential for the orchestrator to be aware of how things will be recorded. Also, the seating in the room is highly relevant for the orchestrators. Knowing who sits next to each other is essential in order to make an informed choice when orchestrating complex harmonic situations or things that need extra care when balancing.

So the job of orchestrating for scoring stages is way more often orchestrating for specific musicians in a specific room being recorded in a specific way for one specific instance and not - as in writing for the concert hall - orchestrating in a way that it hopefully works in most spaces with most musicians. This specification of orchestration is one of the key elements of orchestrating for film. 

It is not like applying "standard procedures" of orchestration for film scoring will result in catastrophic consequences on the scoring stage but being able to orchestrate with specific knowledge of the room, seating and musicians will allow to sculpt the sound with way more care. Of course that requires experience as there is not a list of "do's and don'ts" for every stage that you can simply follow.

In this regard, it is enormously helpful as composer and orchestrator who is going to record the music live to plan and know beforehand as many details about the recording as possible and factor this knowledge into the writing. We don't always have this luxury and I have more than enough orchestrated for project where I didn't know a single bit about the recording situation for different reasons. In this case, I just fall back to "standard procedures" but in cases where I do know (especially when it is my own music), I factor in the room and seating into my writing quite specifically.