Skyville Live is a new monthly music series streamed online worldwide from the Skyville Live studios in Nashville. The series airs artists’ performances in front of an audience of around 100 guests in a ‘unique and interactive’ way.

From its origins as an intimate gig in a small bar, Skyville Live has become an internet phenomenon, featuring major artists from ‘all genres and generations’, along with behind-the-scenes content giving an insight into the music and the show.

Beyond bringing its Elevation truck to the event, production specialist TNDV provided crewing and streaming services for the show’s premère, which featured Gladys Knight, Martina McBride and R&B artist Estelle.

TNDV’s turnkey services incorporated a significant, interactive social media element to the programme, using Renewed Vision’s Pro Presenter 5 software to generate a real-time administered Twitter feed in full-screen and lower-third formats.

‘The debut of Skyville Live required a turnkey mobile production service to support several live, broadcast-quality web streams, along with a full crew to capture multiple camera angles for future use in postproduction,’ says TNDV owner and President, Nic Dugger. ‘This shoot required a great deal of creative skill to capture the intimacy of the performances, and called on our technology, expertise and crewing to achieve the desired production results.’

The eight-camera shoot captured the event from three perspectives for the live webcast, which was supported using TNDV’s signal encoding infrastructure onboard Elevation; and multiplatform streaming delivery from Blue Scout Media, a CDN based in Texas. Viewers could switch between the live performances, captured using six Hitachi HD1000 cameras; a robotic camera following the production team working on Elevation; and a separate robotic camera to capture the performances from the backstage vantage point. All HD streams delivered a live multichannel audio mix produced onboard Elevation.

‘The nature of the show itself was pretty unique – with the blend of artists and the approach,’ says Jeremy Witt, in charge of in-house sound. ‘It ended up being an 11-piece band with seven different background singers (four at one time, three at others), plus the three vocalists and a guest harmonica player on one song – most of the band on in-ears and a few on wedges.’

‘From a gear standpoint, TNDVs truck Elevation with the SoundCraft Vi3000 digital broadcast console is a wonderful sounding desk and a real pleasure to work on,’ says renowned Music Row recording artist Mills Logan, who mixed the show in the truck. ‘The remote mic preamps that sit right next to the monitor split and run back to the truck via fibre sound tremendous. Alleviating the long mic level runs is a big plus. We used Audio-Technica AT4060 tube mics on the overheads – those sounded especially nice on Chad Cromwell’s drums. And the Royer R122 active ribbon mics that we used on the horn section were quite nice as well. All vocals were Sure SM58s or Beta 58 mics. Radial JDI passive direct boxes made a really nice interface for all three of the keyboard players on stage.

‘Audience miking was handled by a pair of shotgun mics, two omni condenser mics and various other cardiod mics spaced throughout,’ he adds.  ‘Once in the truck, everything stayed inside of the Soundcraft Vi3000 for all processing and routing to Pro Tools. With the exception of a TC Electronic Finalizer for final limiting before heading out to internet broadcast world.’

‘It was a typical video set-up for a live show, with audio split off in three ways,’ Witt says. ‘One went to front of house, one to monitors, one to video. John McBride – Martina’s husband, who is Blackbird Studio’s owner and all-around front-of-house sound guru, ended up mixing the front of house sound. He’d come in for Martina, but given the nature of the show, with Martina backing up Gladys and artists stepping on and off stage, there was no easy exit point for him once he started. He just ended up overseeing everything, with the house guy [Matt Guice from Spectrum] there, as well. It wasn’t the way we had planned it, but it worked out great.’

‘As in any live recording situation, the FOH is especially critical to the recording quality,’ Logan observes. ‘With John McBride and Matt Guice at the FOH position, everything was spot on.’

TNDV used a Pro Tools audio recording system to capture the feeds for postproduction. All multi-camera, multitracked content was delivered to Skyville Live producers following the event, with the goal of distributing a programme to media outlets in the near future.

TNDV’s experience with programmes such as Bluegrass Underground, a live performance series seen on PBS, and CMA Backstage were among the key reasons TNDV was selected to deliver services beyond a standard mobile production shoot.

‘We needed a full-service company like TNDV to capture the true essence of what Skyville Live is about – bringing a mix of iconic acts, popular artists and emerging stars performing in an intimate setting to a worldwide audience using digital media platforms,’ concludes Skyville Live Executive Producer, Wally Wilson. ‘With music being at the forefront of the Skyville Live online experience, high-quality audio is one of the most important elements we looked for when considering production partners.’

‘Aside from a mix-up with the lighting crew that caused them to miss their call time – which was really our fault and not theirs – there were no tech hiccups that I know of, and the whole thing went pretty smoothly,’ Witt reports. ‘The only other hiccup was that one of the house-band keyboard players had a family emergency that arose two days before the show, so Jimmy Nichols had to fill in for him with just one rehearsal and then the pre-show run-through. Clearly, Jimmy is good enough to do that.’

More: www.skyvillelive.com
More: www.tndv.com