The 30 April Sing-along is the latest instalment of T-Mobile's Life's For Sharing brand campaign. However, the logistics involved in recording thousands of people singing along to recorded backing tracks - including Hey Jude, Build Me Up Buttercup, Is This The Way To Amarillo?, Baby One More Time and Total Eclipse Of The Heart - were considerable.
To deliver the demanding audio solution, some of the production industry's biggest names - including Britannia Row, Yamaha, Shure and high profile mixing engineers such as Dave Bracey (Robbie Williams) and Snake Newton (Snow Patrol, Sugababes, Duran Duran) were brought in to ensure the audio side ran smoothly.
Two Yamaha PM1D and two PM5D digital consoles were used to record over 330 tracks of audio from 2000 radio microphones which had been distributed amongst the crowd (some being recorded, some not). A Yamaha M7CL console was also used to submix its bigger brothers for various feeds, with the audio recorded by John 'Freddo' Fredericks of Technical Earth to an Apple Macintosh-based recording system, with additional hard disk backup.
"Yamaha really helped us out as the event required more MY8 and MY16 interface cards than we had available," says Britannia Row's Jerry Wing. "We would have struggled to find enough, but a quick call and they supplied all we needed at very short notice."
Given T-Mobile's corporate colour, it was a happy coincidence that American songstress Pink was performing in London on the same night. She came along to lend her voice to proceedings - her monitor engineer Horst Hartmann also taking a break from his own hardworking Yamaha PM1D for a couple of hours to give his support.
Remarkably, the first part of this campaign - the full rendition of The Beatles' Hey Jude - was premiered on commercial television just 48 hours after the event, and it has since become a major hit on video sharing internet sites.
(Jim Evans)
