As well as being the first album in 20 years, The Very Best – Live aus Verona Italian pop act Al Bano and Romina Power, The Very Best – Live aus Verona is the first major label album release to be recorded on Steinberg Nuendo Live with a Yamaha CL5 console.
Released on Universal Music, the album was recorded at the duo’s Arena di Verona concert and simultaneously broadcast live on Rai 1, Italy’s premier national television channel. The multitrack recording was made through Francesco Spadaccino’s CL5 console with Rio3224-D I/O units.
Spadaccino has worked with Al Bano for many years, used a variety of digital mixing consoles along the way. ‘This show was huge – we had a 48-piece orchestra, seven-piece band and 16 special guests singing with Al and Romina in a two-hour show, which had the added pressure of being broadcast live,’ he says. ‘I had a heavy workload and the CL5 made a potentially very stressful show manageable. The Arena di Verona has a massive stage and being able to operate the console with the StageMix app really helped to make it a success. And I love the Premium Rack.’
The production had a day for set-up, another for rehearsal and the third was show day. Unlike most live albums, which are usually recorded on multiple shows during a tour, Spadaccino only had one chance to get it right. ‘Nuendo Live is an invaluable tool for virtual soundchecks and produces the best possible sound quality, so using it for the live album multitracks was a no-brainer,’ he says. ‘It is incredibly easy to set up – we are always just a few clicks away from a very reliable 64 track recording. In terms of both audio quality and simplicity it has revolutionised live recording.’
In addition to the stage microphones and DIs, Spadaccino used four ambient microphones to capture the feel of the sold-out audience. The album was mixed at Al Bano’s own studio in Cellino San Marco, Italy, by Alessandro Vanara.
‘The microphone preamps of the CL system are excellent and the quality of the recorded tracks was absolutely pure. The artists, engineers and record company were all really impressed,’ he says. ‘A few years ago such a project would had needed a big budget to make a 64 track recording and there were tremendous practical difficulties in recording with no loss of audio quality at the end of a 100m multicore.
‘The combination of the CL5, Dante and Nuendo Live means there is no need for expensive additional hardware or audio interfaces. All you need is Dante Driver/Controller, Nuendo Live, one Cat cable connected to any laptop… and that’s it. Nowadays, the internal hard drives in most laptops are more than capable too. It’s so easy that any engineer can do their own multitrack recording and virtual soundcheck.’
