Mixing it Up

On the Grand Tier level of the auditorium is a booth with a narrow window of the stage, a giant mixing board, and a chair. In the chair, during the Met’s radio broadcasts and Live in HD transmissions, sits the music producer, whose responsibility it is to ensure that the performance beaming live to listeners around the globe sounds its best. More often than not over the past decade, that person has been David Frost, an audio mastermind with a staggering 25 Grammy Awards to his name, tying him with Vladimir Horowitz, Stevie Wonder, and Jay-Z for the eighth most of all time. The Met’s Jay Goodwin recently spoke with Frost—who stresses that he works as a team with his colleagues Tim Martyn (who has six Grammys of his own) and John Kerswell (four)—about everything that goes into molding the sound of the Met.

What does it mean to be a music producer at the Met?
The role here is different from the traditional role of a record producer, when you’re working with studio recording sessions. Since everything here is live, I have to translate the performance in real time into high-quality audio that musically represents the score and faithfully represents the performance. In the studio, a producer has the option of moving microphones, asking people to try things in a different way, going back and repeating musical sections. None of that exists here. So when the curtain goes up, as the producer and also the sound mixer—which is another part of this job that isn’t typical for a producer—I’m giving a performance as well as everyone else. I’m constantly adjusting the mix so that the singers are heard and represented clearly but also supported by the orchestra, even as they’re running around all over the stage, turning their heads, singing love duets while embracing each other, dying theatrical deaths, and everything else.

What preparation do you do in advance?
I think of the process in three levels. The first thing is to know the score. Second, and just as important, is to learn the production, which guides a lot of what we do and how we do it, especially in terms of what kind of microphones we use and where we place them. So I go to early stage rehearsals in order to understand the layout and acoustics of the set, and where the singers are placed. Then the third level of preparation is to learn the cast, because of course they can change things dramatically as far as the balances and the type of sound they produce.

What is your goal for the way you want the voices to sound?
You want to hear the text they’re singing, so you want to hear detail, but you also don’t want to feel like there’s a microphone shoved down their throat. But we can’t put mics wherever we want. We can’t block sightlines of the audience, and we can’t have visible mics on or above the stage. So we do the best we can and then adjust the sound in the mix—how it’s balanced and how it’s processed with equalization, reverberation, compression, and so on. We pull out all the stops so that in the end, it sounds natural.

You also use individual body mics on the singers sometimes, right?
Yes, and I am much happier with the sound we get on body mics because I can individually tailor them to each singer, and their sound doesn’t change as they move. They’re also very useful when the stage blocking is challenging. If there are different levels on the set, with a singer way up high, or if there are people singing together, but they’re very far apart, it’s difficult to balance them correctly without the extra control of the body mics. But of course using them poses a challenge for the Costume and Wig Department because they have to be well hidden.

How many total microphones do you end up using in a given show?
The number can vary widely depending on the size of the orchestra and cast, and the production. But we use anywhere from 12 to 24 mics in the pit, eight mics at the lip of the stage, and two more hidden just behind the proscenium arch at the sides of the stage. Then there are mics hanging from some of the lighting bridges, and we add more placements when necessary to capture offstage musical elements. Plus the body mics, if we’re using them. All put together, an individual show might easily use 40 or 50 microphones, but we have the possibility of using more than 120 total mics.

It must take an army to set up all of that equipment.
Yes, nobody does anything in a vacuum at the Met. We have a whole team of terrific audio engineers who help place and adjust all the mics. Everything I do is completely dependent on them.

I imagine it’s also completely dependent on your thorough understanding of the score. Can you tell me about your musical background? I know your father, Tom, was a famous record producer himself.
I come from a musical family on both sides, and I started playing piano when I was six. My dad studied violin and conducting at Yale (and had composition lessons with Hindemith) before he became a producer. And because of his work, we would get boxes of free recordings every month. Not just classical things—we had Billy Joel and Simon & Garfunkel and Broadway cast albums, all kinds of music. So I was constantly listening. My dad also worked with the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, so I spent many summers there, practicing piano and going to all of the rehearsals and concerts. Later on, I went to Juilliard for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

How did you end up moving from the performance side to audio work?
A few years after Juilliard, my dad gave me some work making editing plans for him, which back then involved listening to cassettes and comparing takes. It was very tedious. But later, I sat with him for the editing process, and I thought that was more interesting. I could see the results of my choices and start to understand why some things did or didn’t work. Eventually, I got an actual job doing production work, and I realized it was so much easier than trying to play the piano like Vladimir Ashkenazy, which is what I had really wanted to do. I was a good pianist, but I was in no way, shape, or form going to become Evgeny Kissin or Daniil Trifonov. Forget it.

So you didn’t grow up thinking you would go into the recording industry?
Absolutely not. I didn’t even understand what my dad did. It wasn’t until after I was out of college that he explained to me something basic like how stereo works. I mean, I could hear the difference between a recording that sounded good and one that didn’t sound good, but I didn’t understand how any of it happened.

One more question about your dad: He has seven Grammys, which for most people would make them quite confident of having the most in their family. But you’ve long since passed that mark. Was there ever a sense of rivalry?
Well, we never competed against each other in the same category in the same year. And when I started, he was huge in the industry, and I was just a little guy starting out in his shadow. As things progressed and I did more work and he eventually retired, the tables turned, and then people would say to him, “Oh, you’re David’s dad?” It was very funny—for me, anyway.

What is the hardest part of your job at the Met?
The hardest thing is maintaining the level of audio quality  that I set for myself, given all of the challenges and curveballs that come with live opera. I’m not in charge—there’s a production with a director, there are singers, there are noises, there are so many issues that are beyond my control. But I have to find a way to maintain that quality so that, years in the future, when people listen to these recordings, they think: These are good, these are musical, the performances come through.