The Staves are an English indie folk duo of sisters Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor from Watford, Hertfordshire, England. Formerly, their third sister Emily was also a member of the band.
The Staves performed a special series of intimate live tracks and concerts at Wilton's Music Hall in London around March 2015. These stripped-back performances celebrated their second album, If I Was, and featured guest appearances by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver).
Live recordings from these sessions, including "Damn It All" and "No Me, No You, No More," were later released on deluxe editions of the album
Bowerman Audiovisual were brought onboard to capture the audio for a one-off mesmerising concert in a mid-19th-century music hall in London.
The production featured eight musicians on stage, comprising drums, percussion, bass, keyboards, electric guitar, acoustic guitars and ukulele, led by three female vocalists.
Alongside the audio capture, the event welcomed a live audience of approximately 300 people, which meant working closely around the existing production team while operating within tight setup and soundcheck time constraints. With lighting production also forming part of the stage environment, the space was busy and had to be carefully managed. Our approach therefore needed to be both discreet and efficient, ensuring our equipment and crew integrated seamlessly into the wider production without obstructing the many moving parts, while still delivering a professional and impactful audio capture.
Two independent recording systems were deployed to provide full redundancy and ensure a reliable, uninterrupted capture. The primary system was built around a Midas M32 console, supplemented with high-quality studio preamps from Neve, API and DAV Electronics. The Midas USB interface provided the analogue-to-digital conversion, with an Apple MacBook Pro running Pro Tools used to record the resulting multitrack audio. The Midas M32 also provided an efficient monitoring solution, allowing signal levels to be monitored directly through its metering, while the dedicated headphone bus enabled flexible monitoring throughout the session. The main Front of House and monitor console was a Midas PRO2. From this system, the digital AES50 signal was routed via a Dante converter to a second Apple MacBook Pro running Pro Tools, providing an entirely separate backup recording path. Both recording systems were independently fed from XTA analogue microphone splitters, ensuring that the primary and backup systems remained isolated from one another. This dual-system approach provided a robust level of redundancy and significantly reduced the risk of losing the live recording due to a failure within any single part of the signal chain.
Both recording systems performed flawlessly throughout the session, with the dual-redundant setup delivering a secure and high-quality capture.
The resulting recordings were subsequently mixed and mastered for release as bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of "If I Was" by The Staves, released through Atlantic Records.