From the May 1989 issue of Radio And Production

Tips & Techniques

Concert Spots:
"Effects to Get That 'Concert' Sound"

by Jerry Vigil

The "average" concert spot probably has several cuts of music by the performer(s) nicely edited together for the bed. The voice is then added with or without special effects. Here are a couple of things you can do to add more of a "concert" sound to the music bed of the spot.
Since most of the music used to produce a concert spot is taken from albums recorded in a studio, there are no "live" effects on the music. Even an album of a live performance lacks the acoustic characteristics found by the concert goer in the average seat (almost anywhere but on the floor in the center) because live recordings are done using a mix from the console and those mikes are on the stage, not in the upper balcony. More specifically, "live" recordings don't have the echo bouncing off the walls or the natural reverb of the hall as heard by the concert goer. If you add the delay (of the music echoing back to you) and reverb to the studio version of a song, you can come very close to creating the effects of a concert hall.

If you don't have delay, see the other tip on this page for one way to get it. Let's assume you're producing this spot on a 4-track machine and you have the stereo bed ready and on tracks 1 and 2. The delay effect heard in the average seat of a concert hall can be achieved by adding about a 60ms delay to one of the channels of the music. Playing the bed back with the delay doesn't quite give you the effect you're looking for yet. Now add reverb to both channels. You need a lot of reverb here. Use a decay time around 3 seconds and a mix around 20% wet to 80% dry. Play with these settings to get the sound that best suits you and the music being used.

At this point you have a mix of music that should resemble the sound of a concert hall as heard from someone standing near an exit or in an upper balcony. This perspective of the music is good for a concert spot while announcer copy is being read. For extra effect, when the announcer stops talking, you can bypass the delay and go to straight studio version of the recording leaving the reverb where it is. This little trick is best used with this next and last item.

Throughout the entire spot, mix in the sound of a concert crowd. During portions of the spot where the announcer is talking, reduce the level of the crowd. Bring it back up in segments of the spot where just the music is playing. An extra boost of the crowd at appropriate times in the music (right after a key lyric for instance) will imitate an actual crowd's response to one of their favorite songs.

These effects work best on up-tempo contemporary music. A problem that arises with this much activity in just the bed of a concert spot is the level of the crowd vs. the music. To make it all a little easier, run the entire mix through a compressor and crank it up to around 8 to 12 db of gain reduction. Play with all the settings and suggestions in this tip. Nothing here is written to be the "rule".◙