Steve Gibson (left) and Kevin Reinen with one of the AMD PC/Nuendo rigs used to record Grand Ole Opry performances.Photo: Chris Hollo
Country music's greatest showcase, the Grand Ole Opry, is a bastion of traditional values — and the home of some seriously advanced technology.
The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville is one of the great institutions of American music. It first opened its doors in 1925 and has been running continuously ever since. Every big name in country music has played there, and the invitation to join the Opry's ranks is the ultimate accolade for any aspiring performer. Shows from the Opry are seen and heard all over the world, allowing musicians the chance to reach millions of new fans — if they can live up to the extraordinary standards of musicianship on display.
With such an illustrious history and wealth of tradition, it comes as a slight surprise to learn that the Opry is also at the cutting edge of technology, not only in live sound but in recording and broadcasting too. It becomes less surprising when you hear the Opry's Musical Director Steve Gibson and Chief Technical Officer Kevin Reinen explain exactly what it is that their technical team has to deal with, day in, day out. "The Opry is probably the largest producer of live music events of any venue in the world," explains Steve. "We do a Tuesday Opry, a Friday Opry, and two Oprys on Saturday. We broadcast on the flagship AM station which is WSM, and we simulcast on Serious Satellite."
"During that live radio show, we're also presenting it to a live audience in the house," adds Kevin. "And then on a regular weekly basis we also present a live television show on Great American Country cable."
"We also record everything that happens, all the artists," continues Steve. "From that we then post-produce a two-hour weekly syndicated radio show for the Western One radio network, and we are also beginning to develop a line of archival recordings. We're partnering with specific retail partners to compile performances from Oprys over the years."
Going Further
So that's a complex live show in front of a large audience, which is simultaneously recorded for posterity and broadcast live on radio and television. Only in actual fact, it's even more complicated than that, because the radio and television programmes adhere to completely different formats, with different presenters, ad breaks and show structures. While the live audience is hearing a performance, the television show might be screening an interview with a different artist live from one of the Opry's TV studios, before cutting back to the stage at precisely the right time to catch the next act. Oh, and then there's the fact that the performances themselves can feature six different artists within an hour, who might give no warning of what songs they will choose to play.
Martina McBride takes the stage at the Opry, with the house band in the shadows.Photo: Chris Hollo
"We have about nine and a half hours of live performance going across the stage each week," says Steve. "As far as the line-up goes, it's a normal sort of setup so that we can manage it. The Opry is structured almost like a vaudeville show, where acts come and go. There's a backline that's static, and is set up for our resident Opry band, and then the front line is also set up with a normal positioning of microphones and inputs, which are then moved around by our very capable stage crew. We have a plan built in for just about everybody, and we have sufficient inputs on stage to deal with pretty much everything that comes across.
"Anything can happen live, you have no idea what's going to cross that stage. You may have a legend come out that performs with a new performer — we don't know. All we get is a basic run-down sheet of what is assumed to be happening that evening, but we have no idea of what is going to cross that stage. The only thing that is rehearsed is the television portion, and believe me, that can change as well. But the artists come off their bus, they come directly onto the stage, and we have no idea what they're going to bring until they actually walk onto the stage, it's a total free-for-all. For television only, we would try to establish what songs are for TV and rehearse those briefly, just to get an audio snapshot. Everything else is a well-orchestrated, disciplined free-for-all."
"The radio portion of the Opry is split into 30-minute segments, and we normally have an Opry member host each 30-minute segment, and it will be sponsored by one specific sponsor," adds Kevin. "During that half hour there will normally be three acts including the host: the host will open the set, and then introduce the individual performers."
Archiving The Opry
"For all of its importance, for many years, not much attention was ever paid to recording and archiving the Grand Ole Opry," says Steve Gibson. This is something he and the current management are determined to change. "Unfortunately, the archives are fragmented and incomplete and on all kinds of formats, so one step at a time for us is to get everything into an open-source, migratable format and then determine where we're going with long-term storage."
"Currently we archive to Firewire hard drives, but me and Steve are in the process of looking into a tape-based backup system," adds Kevin Reinen.
"I think we'll settle for the LTO as probably the best way to go," agrees Steve. "Kevin and I are passionate about making a change there, but we just haven't got to do it yet. We've got to get to a more reliable mass backup and storage rig. Currently, everything is stored on Firewire, we have a very large Firewire base in our archive room. Right now we're just determined to get everything down, and probably within the next year we'll have a tape-based system."
The Opry management are also keen to do more to preserve and exploit the slightly haphazard collection of historical recordings that does exist. "There's actually recorded archives as far back as 1939, but it's not consistent," explains Steve. "There are bits and pieces through the '40s, there are some pieces from the '50s that exist in all sorts of formats, there's a pretty good base of recordings from the '60s, and there's sporadic recordings from the '70s, '80s and '90s."
"The first round of CDs that we have produced from the archives were all taken from vinyl transcriptions," says Kevin. "I processed those with Sonic Solutions and SADiE and cleaned them up — the idea was not to make them crystal-clear but to get rid of gratuitous pops and clicks. They were all mono, so we recorded both sides of the groove and were able to choose audio from the side of the groove that was better."
Ready For Anything
As you might expect, managing this sort of show is only possible thanks to an extremely slick house band, and the wonders of fully recallable digital consoles. "We have a specified setup, but it varies for every specific artist," explains Kevin. "We try to have a standard setup for each performer that comes across the stage, so we can actually store it in the audio consoles. Sometimes, someone like Vince Gill will have an acoustic set and then an electric band, so we really have to verify with our stagehands what he's actually doing that evening. There's four microphones and four DIs out at the front in a line, and we have four wireless microphones. Then we have a mid line that's guitar amplifiers, piano, and a steel-guitar amplifier. Then we have a backline where the house band have their amplifiers set up. The basic rhythm section is piano, bass, drums, steel guitar, electric guitar, fiddle, mandolin and two acoustic guitars. We're using Ampeg SVT DIs for everything on stage. We have a five-piece Yamaha kit individually miked, so we have kick, snare, bottom snare, three toms, hat, and two overheads.
"We take everything fairly straight. There is some EQ that comes into play to shape each individual band or artist snapshot, and we have an Alan Smart compressor just to catch the transients out of the control room, but we don't use a whole lot of compression and we also try not to use a lot of artificial reverb, because the house sounds good, and what we use for audience miking we can bring back up. We have mics on two riser towers, stage left and right, and we try to get it as naturally ambient as we can. Sometimes we have to help it, we don't want it bone dry, but we try to keep it natural.
"We actually have the preamps on stage; everything's sync'ed up via word clock and the preamps on stage feed MADI directly into the Euphonix console. Everything is raw going to the individual consoles — there's no sub-mixing. There's a separate FOH mixer and a dedicated live broadcast mixer. We have an XTA splitter that has four active splits. One goes to the monitor rig, which is a Harrison MPC, then we have a split that goes back to what we refer to as Studio A, which is the television portion of the Opry, we have a split that goes to the front-of-house console, and then we have the broadcast console as well. The FOH console is a Paragon P2 [with an HP VZ6000 laptop, using an AMD 64-bit Athlon CPU, running the automation] and the broadcast console is a Euphonix System 5. So three of the four splits are active at all times. For the television portion of the the show we send them a two-mix via AES, so they do not actually take a full split. They append the portion of the live television show with the announcer and side interviews. It's basically two shows run simultaneously. While we run the live television we are also doing the radio portion, so there are times when we are doing radio songs and advertisements, but at the same time they're running interviews on the TV."
On The House
In a world where it seems that 'live' entertainment is, increasingly, anything but, the Grand Ole Opry is a bastion of traditional values. "We really try to discourage people coming out and using the content of their records and playing to that," says Steve Gibson. "What we might see, typically, is that a drummer might have supplemental audio with a tambourine click track on it. I can't think of anyone coming across the stage in two years who did not use live musicians."
The standard of playing for those live musicians is set by the Opry's house band. "It is one of the greatest bands," says Steve. "It is comprised of people with a deep knowledge of the music. A lot of these folks are studio musicians who are playing on the records, they know the artists and they work with them, and they work very hard. Also, the individual artists have the option of bringing their road bands onto the stage."
The emphasis on live performance often means that shows at the Opry scale great heights, but just occasionally, it trips up performers with more experience in the studio than on stage. "We've actually seen performers where we, as country fans, were in awe of the studio performance, and they came across the Opry stage, and it's like 'Oh my God, what did they do?'" laughs Steve. "You really show your true colours."
Going Against The Grain
Steve and Kevin's responsibilities don't only extend to live and broadcast sound: these days, everything that happens on the Opry stage is recorded in multitrack format, and the aim is to make more Opry performances available on CD. "The bottom line is that what this system allows us to do is acquire these assets for the Opry — and believe me, they are assets," insists Steve.
When there are no second chances, reliability is crucial, so some would be surprised to learn that the Opry uses a host-based computer recording setup: specifically, Steinberg's Nuendo, running on dual-core AMD Opteron-based PCs, which have replaced their previous Pentium 4 machines. "The AMD rig has been so stable, so reliable," says Steve. "I would venture to say that we are recording more music than anybody, and the AMD rig works and works and works. The Opry House has one of the new dual-core systems. We actually upgraded from a regular single-core, dual-processor system in September, and since that upgrade, it has opened up a new world for us. We can actually play back directly from Firewire — where we had to download the performance back onto the local RAID drive before, now we can plug in a Firewire drive. We're playing back 56 tracks off a 5400rpm Firewire drive with zero issues, zero dropouts. We've got to have that kind of flexibility for what we're doing, and I'm not aware of anybody else out there making a processor or a product that will deliver that kind of performance with that kind of reliability. We don't even defrag. We used to defrag weekly with the P4, but I can't think of the last time I defragged our hard drive. It's a 1.7 terabyte hard drive, and we actually keep, locally on the RAID drive, close to two and a half months of assets that we can access directly."
A Euphonix System 5 console is used to set up the broadcast mix from the Opry, and its preamps feed the FOH and monitor mixers as well as the multitrack recording rig.Photo: Chris HolloSo what of the decision to opt for Nuendo rather than the alternatives? "Nuendo was chosen before I came on board," admits Steve. "I've been there three and a half years, and Nuendo was a format that had already been purchased by prior management. I have mixed feelings about it from a producer's point of view; it's a little more cumbersome to use because it's not quite as widely exploited as Pro Tools, but its actual sonic quality and its sonic value is better than Pro Tools."
"It tends to deal with larger wave files better than Pro Tools," adds Kevin. "We've found on occasions that Pro Tools has a hard time importing files over 2GB, and our performances can be 3GB for each individual file. Nuendo copes extremely well with those large file sizes."
The killer feature, though, is Nuendo 's ability to run within a MADI digital environment. "What really led us towards the PC platform is MADI," says Kevin. "The ability to run everything into the computer via one coax cable and one sync cable is really helpful for us."
"Pro Tools does not support MADI," adds Steve. "They are strictly their own protocol. That is something that could be a downfall for Pro Tools, but it really helps us, the fact that the console is MADI. The preamps and converters we use are the Euphonix ones and they sound fabulous: we could not use that system unless we went to a very large AES system with a Pro Tools rig. You can use AES, but it's very much more complicated to do that."
"We have two Nuendo machines," continues Kevin. "Everything going to Nuendo and the AMD rig is straight off the preamps. We use the direct outs from the mic pres in the Euphonix console. These route directly into Nuendo via an RME MADI card, so we have 56 tracks, 48kHz, 24-bit. When we put this rig in we considered recording at more than 48k, but the actual quantity of tracks, as well as the size of the show, sort of limited us to 48k."
"We also found that our TV partners live in a 48k world, as well," interjects Steve.
"You have to realise we do about 300 gigabytes per week, so that would be 600 at 96k. We have turned the rig around and recorded at 96k, though. We did a Wynonna shoot where she recorded her last DVD at 96k. Basically all we have to do is restart the system and configure everything for 96k, it's fully compatible with that platform."
History Repeating
In the unlikely event that anyone involved in the technical side of the Grand Ole Opry should get complacent in his or her job, there's one further twist to deal with. For four months every year, the entire circus uproots itself from the home it has occupied since 1974 — a purpose-built entertainment complex nine miles outside Nashville — and returns to the historic Ryman Auditorium, where it first played in 1943, and where the Opry's technical setup is largely duplicated. It may seem like a lot of effort, but history is important in the business of country music, and it's a determination to record that history that drives their technical crews. "To me, what we do at the Opry is not only an American icon, but it is such an important thing to get, and it only happens once," insists Steve Gibson. "When these performances are captured, we've got to get them, because they're never going to happen the same way again. Over the years, that has not been the priority of those who came before us, and it's very, very important that things work, because if we miss them, they're gone forever."