From June 16 to 18, 2017, the “Monterey International Pop Festival Celebrates 50 Years” event recognized the 50th anniversary of the iconic Monterey International Pop Festival of 1967, and was recorded with a TASCAM DA-6400 64-channel Digital Multitrack Recorder.
An audio recording team of John Baccigaluppi, owner of Single Fin Studio Group, and Sacramento audio engineer John Bologni worked to record all of the music at the festival.
“The film team had a 34-person crew, including the two of us, and they filmed it with six or seven cameras,” Baccigaluppi said. “Recording the festival was a daunting and complex task and setup, especially since we didn’t get confirmed for the gig until less than 10 days before it was going to happen. So we were scrambling to put together a rig. Very early on, we identified the TASCAM DA-6400 as a high-quality, reliable capture device.”
An analog snake brought a 48-channel split from the stage to a Dante network by way of Focusrite RedNet Dante interfaces. Then the digitized audio was routed to a DA-6400 equipped with TASCAM’s optional IF-DA64 Dante card.
The recording team also used 5 audience mics, plus 63 inputs from one band’s completely separate system.
“I just put it in Record and tracked 64 tracks all the time,” Baccigaluppi said. “There are sets where we only used a few tracks-when Regina Spektor played, it was just her and a piano-but it was easier to keep everything on and rolling. Besides, we had input lists and stage plots but a lot of them had changed, so it was safer to record all channels all the time.”
The team also recorded to a DAW for as a safety backup, but wasn’t needed.
“We also recorded to a DAW to have redundancy,” explained Baccigaluppi. “That was the last thing we added to our rig. And in case everything else failed, we had a TASCAM HS-P82 8-track Pro Field Recorder at front-of-house that digitally recorded our five audience mics and the main mix directly from the front-of-house console. “The TASCAM DA-6400 captured every set of 24 bands in 3 days without a hitch. It worked flawlessly. The removable drive caddies were a huge feature because at the end of each night, I just pulled the caddy and gave the drive to the media person from the film crew, whose job it was to back everything up. Then I put a new drive in the caddy, and-bam!-the next morning I was ready to go, without having to worry about anything.”
