Watussi and Garlic

Last weekend db and I took the abc radio recording truck to the glorious annandale hotel, which is in my very own suburb - Annandale. Aaaah the dale…
Watussi are a sydney based band who play Afro Colombian rock type music and they are pretty awesome.
The previous day I was wearing my warmest winter jacket, then on this day the temp decides to get up to 30 degress.  So there we are in the dale, running cabbles in the hot sun about to die from heat exhaustion.

I took some pics. I just recently got into photography and have a canon 450d with 17-85 lense. I thought this would be a great opportunity to try my hand at being a band photgrapher. It's not that easy actually, because the shutter speeds in that light were often too slow and the band just wouldn't stand still!  The one above I took while I was doing the coyote ugly thing - I was standing up on the bar. But no dancing. I was scared of falling off actually. But don't tell anyone at work because that's not very OH&S.

Anyway the Euphonics desk in the truck which is just waaayy too difficult to use for its own good was playing up. Our levels were jumping up and down all over over the place. And the Tascam 48 track hard disc recorders were being silly too. Actually I managed to break one the day before. Better the day before than on the the day…right? But they ended up recording OK after a couple of heart attacks when we thought both machines hadn't recorded anything. But they had!

Now there is nothing that makes me more happy in life than a free feed. And did we get one!! They had a South American BBQ in the arvo. And we ate spicy sausages, black puding (I said no thanks) giant mushrrooms, etc, but boy the garlic sauce that went with it. Lucky everyone was eating it so we all stink. I've never had anything more potent. 

Anyway satisfaction all round… We didn't finish work till 3 in the morning. After starting at midday I guess I was a little bit tired the next day. Actually I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.

Billy Elliot

Last night I went to the stage musical billy elliot at the capitol theatre. It was awesome! I've always really loved the movie. I was a bit worried i wouldn't like the musical so much because of how much i love the movie, but the musical was brilliant. The kids were absolutely amazing. The part of billy is a huge role, especially for such a young kid, and he was really good. The kid that played michael was fantastic - really funny. The only thing I didn't like were some of the emotions were a bit overplayed, compared to the movie, which is really powerfull, but a lot the the reactions of characters are a lot more subtle. However on stage I guess things need to be a bit more extreme so people up the back can get the gist of what's going on. We were in the 3rd row off to the side. I love being close to the front where you can really see people's faces and details in the costumes etc. The problem was i had to keep craning to see around people in front of me, and being off to the side you miss some of the action further upstage. Anyway a great night.

great mistakes #1

So I thought I'd make a series dedicated to the times when I have had things go wrong, at work, on stage, in studio, or funny things that have happened.

The main thing that comes to mind was when I was doing sound on the shows at Jupiters Casino. We're talking way back in about 1996. I managed to stuff up so badly that the curtain had to be brought down for a whole minute and 3 seconds. Which is an AWFULLY LONG TIME!

What happened? WELL, we were about 6 weeks into a new show. Magic, dancing - typical casino show stuff. Anyway most of the music was played off an 8 track digital tape - remember the days of Tascam DA38? The show was given a major reshuffle - dance numbers cut, change of order of routines etc. Which meant a new show tape had been made. I came into work, grabbed the show tape which I was used to grabbing, shoved it in the machine, did all the pre show tests, curtain went up, first couple of numbers were fine, then we hit the Diner scene and guess what? Wrong music. Goldy had put the old show tape in the machine. Dancers were trying to dance to the wrong music and in my panic realising it was the wrong tape I just instinctively pushed stop, no nice fade out or anything. So then the dancers had no music to dance to. And it caused mayhem with the lights because timecode on the show tape was running the lighting board. So it had to be reset which is what took the longest. the curtain came down, i was about to have a fit, thinking I was going to get sacked. Anyway the show finally got going again.

The funny thing is though, everyone thought it was my boss who had stuffed up because he was the one who always made the mistakes, not me or C. So he got all the blame. And unwritten law in theatre is when you stuff up you have to buy the crew a case of beer. So my boss brought in a case of beer the next night. Once I had gotten over the embarrassment of it all I was trying to get the credit for it because R was taking credit. So I was going backstage going "I did it , not R!"
So anyway I didn't get sacked.

work today

I'm currently doing the post production for a classical music concert I recorded which involves the conductor analysing the music. So the orchestra plays the piece through and then the conductor talks about what what is going on in the piece with the orchestra playing bit and pieces here and there. This concert is a couple of sibelius pieces.

I've recorded several of these concerts before but never had the chance to do the post production before. it's interesting hearing the recording in a proper studio. I used a spaced pair of omni Bruel and Kjaer 4006 microphones, hung over the orchestra a couple of meters above the conductor's head. I think the recording is actually lacking quite a bit of top end. So I'm boosting it a fair bit to give it more sparkle. And also the phase relationship beyween the 2 mics is not as good as it could be.