JoeCo BlackBox Goes Live at the Royal Festival Hall

A JoeCo BlackBox Recorder was used to add electronic tracks to a recent live performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The Video Game Heroes concert was part of the Vision Sound Music Festival -- the UK's first festival of music for visuals.

The tracks were prepared for the live performance by project programmer Chris White, who was also responsible for making sure that they were triggered on cue during the actual performance. The BlackBox was situated by the monitor console, with feeds from the recorder going into the console. From there, click tracks were sent to the conductor Andrew Skeet and other relevant performers, while backing track stems went to the front-of-house desk to be mixed with the orchestral channels.

"We discussed various options and settled on using a hard disk machine, as the idea of running on a laptop was too scary." said White. "The things that I immediately liked about the BlackBox were the fact that the screen was so bright and simple (as it was dark during the performance) and the fact that the unit was so compact. We were initially going to have a lot of stems running on separate tracks but were worried about the number of inputs on the Royal Festival Hall's FOH desk (the orchestra were close mic'd so the desks were pretty full!). So we decided to keep it simple and for most items we only had a few stereo stems (main backing/percussion/bass) plus click. The backing tracks themselves were stored in the session folder on my Glyph drive and came up in the order they were to be played. I then triggered each track manually on cue from Andrew. It all ran beautifully on the day and the concert went very well."

Tracks performed at the concert were also separately recorded for an album, which is due for release shortly.