Naomune Anzai is a Music Producer and Sound Engineer who started as a synth programmer, arranger and keyboard player in Tokyo Japan in the mid-80s. He also had a small recording studio and worked as a recording engineer during that time.
Nao moved to Melbourne in 2003 and since then, he has worked as a sound engineer/producer for many artists in studios and live concerts. He has three albums that he recorded that are nominated this year for an ARIA; The Teskey Brothers, Missy Higgins and Mildlife.
Nao has known The Teskey Brothers since 2009 and started working as their regular engineer when they suddenly got big in 2017.
“They like their sound to be vintage, old school soul …. with a bit of a 60s psych rock feel,” he commented.
At Sydney’s Aware Super Theatre, where The Teskey Brothers performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Nao ran the in-house PA system saying he doesn’t mind what model or brand is supplied as long as they are loud enough and tuned and positioned well.
Ideally, Nao would prefer to mix on a Midas H3000 but he realises that’s not a practical option and so DiGiCo is his choice. For the Sydney concert, he ran a DiGiCo SD8 as his main console.
“I mixed all band channels + stereo mix of the orchestra,” he explained. “Jim Atkins mixed all orchestra mics on a DiGiCo SD7 and sent them to my SD8 as stereo. An SD10, engineered by Chad Lynch of Norwest, was used as a monitor console for band and orchestra.
“For me, a live FOH console is a musical instrument, not computer equipment, so playability is the key. More knobs dedicated to a specific function, not multifunction by menu, is very important for muscle memory to play it without “watching” the console rather than watching the performance.”
Nao has a UAD Apollo Twin as outboard, mainly for Josh Teskey’s vocal, saying he needs a real tube and tape sound for his voice and UAD is the best substitute for that. He also had a UAD EMT140 as the main reverb.
“Another thing is playing with orchestra stereo mix volume,” continued Nao. “Jim Atkins made a great mix of them but the master volume of orchestra against band sound is another thing as each song has a different band volume. In most songs, I played orchestra volume in real-time to get the right dynamics as if the orchestra stereo volume is conducted by the conductor Nick Bach. So I was watching Nick’s movement throughout the performance. This is possible only because I trust Jim Atkins mixing the best balance of orchestra. You cannot make a good detailed balance of 80 channel orchestra and make real-time dynamics of the master volume of it at the same time. You definitely need two good engineers working together.”
The Teskey Brothers don’t have their own monitor guy although their stage tech Camila Duque knows actual monitor balance requests. She can check and advise the monitor engineer and if the monitor engineer is not capable, she can jump onto the monitor desk with Nao praising her abilities as a monitor engineer as well.
The Teskey Brothers are a strictly no-IEM band insisting on wedge monitors only. The band has a very good on-stage balance so monitors are mostly vocals only.
Nao insists that the microphone set-up is nothing special but if anything, he’s making 80% of the drum sound out of two overhead (sometimes floor tom side is underhead) mics which are Shure KSM32. Other than that, Beta 52 is on kick, SM57 on the snare top, Beta 98 on the snare bottom, rack tom and floor tom, and KSM137 on the high hat.
“I like the SM58 for Josh’s vocal so I use only SM58 for everyone’s vocal so that we can use the same tuning for all monitor wedges,” he added. “I also use a Shure KSM313 ribbon mic for Sam Teskey’s guitar amp. I really like that sound. We have an endorsement from Jands, the Shure dealer in Australia, so we use mostly Shure mics. SM57 for Josh’s guitar amp, Brendon’s bass cabinet and Leslie’s speaker (hi and low).”
Nao says that one of the biggest challenges at the Sydney gig was packing the semitrailer with three big DiGiCo consoles, an entire system rack with monitor wedges plus all orchestra instruments.
“Bringing up Hammond C3 and Piano shell to the stage was also tricky and required a folk lift,” he said. “It was also a challenge to kill the feedback from the FOH speaker when we really wanted to push up some quiet orchestra sound to band volume (ie, Pizzicato strings) and it took a while to find a good master EQ setting.”
Currently, Nao is working on a new album of Cash Savage & The Last Drinks.
