Penguin Cafe engineer Jamie Orchard-Lisle talks to Erica Basnicki about mic’ing up unique voices and instruments on stage (and in the studio)
JAMIE ORCHARD-LISLE has a passion for acoustic instruments, mechanical sounds and fitting strange noises into a musical context. Or, as he calls it, “the weird and the wonderful”. Odd, then, that the FOH and studio engineer got his start in audio 14 years ago when he was called up to do work with the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. It was a useful gig, but after three years, Orchard-Lisle’s passion called on
him to move on and set up his own studio in east London. “I set up indigostudio and quite quickly got a fairly good name for being someone to go to if you’ve got a weird instrument, and no one quite knows how it’s supposed to sound,” he says. This reputation led him to
working both live and in the studio with artists such as JuJu – a quartet lead by Juldeh Camara and Justin Adams – Ladino singer
(L-R): Walter Samuel (Sound Network), FOH engineer Jamie Orchard-Lisle and Ralph Dunlop (Sound Network)
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Yasmin Levy and Penguin Cafe. “It’s been like that for the past eight or nine years, focusing on acoustic stuff. The quality of the sound is what’s important to me. I love getting in there and messing around with noises,” he says. “There’s an album I made a
few years ago by a band called Blue Blokes 3. We ended up micing a guitar amp and we grabbed a miniature DPA, I think it was a 4061, and stuck it in a wine glass in front of the guitar amp and got this amazing, weird, resonating thing with the glass interacting with the sound wave. It’s that kind of thing that’s exciting… But it’s also great to put up a really beautiful set of mics and get an honest, natural sound.” Orchard-Lisle has in fact been
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a fan of DPA microphones since the Brüel & Kjaer days, and was recently given the opportunity to try out the new d:facto vocal mic. “It was very lucky that I had the chance, over a one-week period, to try it with a very dynamic female voice (Yasmin Levy), and then to go to almost the exact opposite, a male, African voice (Juldeh Camara). The fact that it worked perfectly on both of them is one of the things that really got me.” Curiosity about the new 4099 instrument mics also took hold of Orchard-Lisle; after hearing of their release, he called up UK distributor Sound Network and asked to try a pair out for Penguin Cafe’s festival tour. “We had the standard thing
with live strings where we had a DI or a pickup, and a microphone, but throughout this whole tour of festivals, I didn’t use the DIs once. The monitor engineer loved them because he could get a load of level on stage without feedback, and the players were happy because it sounded like their instruments.
At FOH I had no issues with feedback or anything so I didn’t need to use the pickups. We quickly bought six of these things from Sound Network. They allow us to have a really high-quality, almost orchestral sound, but get a huge amount of level.” Off the back of Penguin Cafe, a sister project was established called Sundog. Its purpose is to allow the legacy of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra to exist without too much movement from the original concept, while allowing musical experimentation, still in the vein of the Penguin Cafe sound. Their debut album, In So Far, was recorded exclusively using a pair of DPA 4015 small diaphragm condensers. “These mics are the most honest mics I’ve come across,” says Orchard- Lisle. “They allow very accurate capture of the source, meaning that during the mixing process, you can really control what's going on, even if it means that by the end, the original sound is heavily modified.” Between touring with Penguin Cafe and Sundog, and his work with Yasmin Levy, JuJu and others, it is amazing that the man who has already racked up passport stamps from 24 countries this year has time to do anything else, and yet his expertise in quality sound extends beyond the studio and FOH to a position as technical manager at Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. “To see the old photographs
of these guys singing down a gramophone bell, writing straight to a disc of cylinder, is amazing. To appreciate what technology can do now, you need to know what was happening back then, and the development over the 100 odd years we’ve been able to record sound.” n www.dpamicrophones.com