Fleetwood Mobiles Record & Mix Live Earth Concert with Euphonix Audio Consoles

Two Fleetwood Mobiles Capture Historic Event

Palo Alto, Sept 5th 2007

Live Earth: The Concert for a Climate in Crisis brought together 150 musical acts in 11 locations around the world and broadcast it to a mass global audience through radio, television, and the Internet on 7/7/07. Commissioned to record artists from the London-based portion of Live Earth was sound engineer and Director of Fleetwood Mobile Studios, Tim Summerhayes who used two Euphonix-equipped mobiles studio to capture this historic event.

“Believe it or not, once we were on site, it was fairly straight forward. It’s the advance planning and set up that takes time and preparation. But if done correctly, the problems stay to a minimum. So much of our success is based on interfacing between ourselves, the broadcasters and the stage,” said Summerhayes, as he explained complexities of recording Live Earth inside London’s Wembley Stadium. “On a “normal recording” event, set up generally takes about four hours – but something this epic we had a complete day for set up and still it was a busy day with a lot to get through, in relatively short amount of time.”

Fleetwood Mobiles, recording for live concerts and audio post production for broadcast, consists of three state-of-the-art mobile recording studios, two of which are equipped with 96-fader Euphonix CS2000 digital control, analogue consoles.

From Madonna to Metallica, The Red Hot Chili Peppers to the Royal Ballet, the London arm of Live Earth featured a diverse array of artists. “We actually brought in both our Euphonix mobiles:  Fleetwood One for the main music and Fleetwood Two for sub-mixing orchestra and choir for myself and for the PA system by renowned mix engineer Greg Jackman.

“The Euphonix console handles events like this perfectly; it’s the best console in the world for what we do. The Snapshot Recall feature is invaluable to me,” he further explained.  “For Live Earth, we would grab a rehearsal of the artist and get two or three recordings of the band while they were getting the camera shots, then throw it to tape. In our down time, we’d lock off some cues, and mix it, then save it as a SnapShots letting us recall any mix at the press of a button. We used a snapshot per song for each artist.”

“To record the main event, we used three Radars totalling 72 tracks, and we used a Sony 3348 DASH machine to track the Orchestra for subsequent DVD re-mix. And by tracking the Orchestra in this way allowed Greg the opportunity to fine tune his mix in the way we were doing for the main production,” Summerhayes continued.

A month later, back at the Fleetwood post production facility in Denham, 30 minutes outside of London, Summerhayes is feverishly mixing a 5.1 surround DVD of select Live Earth artists for release later this year. “In the studio we have a 104-channel Euphonix CS3000 console. The SnapShots we built during the concert now serves as templates for the DVD mix – it saves a lot of time and just attests to the advantages and transferability of Euphonix,” concluded Summerhayes.