Communion #3

I'm really on a roll with this communion thing. On Sunday ML gets up for announcements and not mentionaing any names, mentioned that I had nearly died last week from the communion wine, and therefore this week we were having a 2002 Merlot. Well I don't know how to break this to you, but uuummmm, well, .... Merlot's (unless they are really expensive) don't really improve with aging. They are generally designed to be drunk not too long after being bought, and if kept too long will deteriorate. So...I think maybe a port is the way to go - being a fortified wine they are supposed to last a long time, so you can open the bottle and come back to it a few months later. Unless of course you buy what EF calls hobo port which is rotten to start with.

So anyway I was thinking, "Why have alcoholic anyway?" Just because I like wine is not a good enough reason to serve alcoholic wine for communion. It's not about enjoying a good nip. It's about what it represents. But it has been a long standing tradition (the Jews used wine) and the grapejuice thing is only quite modern. You only have a mouthful anyway, so it's not like you are going to get tanked.

Communion #2

I really felt I need to do a follow up to my original post on communion. I turns out people do actually read my blog, and my minster saw it. He passed on my communion post to the person responsible for communion and I received an email of apology! Wow, this blogging thing really is powerful! Apparently they are rethinking the way we do communion.

I would like to say here that I think communion is an important time for us to remember what Jesus did for us when he died for us, and I never wanted it to become a comedy. But good laughs do come out of serious things.

My Dad, like me, is a red wine lover, and also a retired minister, so therefore loving red wine can’t be a sin. (White wine on the other hand is purely evil). He loves telling the story of the time he came to my church and we were all sitting around tables and on each table was a bottle of red wine and a plate of Turkish bread for communion. He has this idea that we have really stylish communion. Not anymore. Anyway I’m not expecting top grade port, but I don’t remember the communion wine tasting so bad when I was growing up. But I was probably too busy trying to avoid the gooblies floating around in the common cup to worry about the taste. But according to my Dad they always had a reasonable quality port.

great mistakes #8

I thought it was time I return to my own stupidity. The moral of the story today is – When there is a sign on the studio door that says “Do NOT Close this DOOR”, you should take heed to what it says.
This takes me back to my student days at the Con in Brisbane. I was recording a friend’s song one Saturday and Tom S who was clarinettist with Qld Philharmonic had come along to play piano. He had an orchestra gig that afternoon so had to leave by certain time.
The door handle had broken off the door to the recording room. But someone had stuck gaff over the toungue thing that sticks out that keeps the door shut. What is that thing called? Anyway, I thought it was safe to shut the door because the toungue thing was taped in. Except the gaff tape tore and the toungue thing protruded again and the door fastened and we couldn’t get out! Naturally Tom was freaking out because if he didn’t show up for a gig that was his job gone. There was a lot of jumping up and down going on. But then we realised the mics were up on the desk so the people in the control room could hear us. Tom was giving instructions to DC on the other side of the glass to call another clarinet player to get him to turn up to gig, and it was all a bit tense there for a while. Did Tom lose his job? Did he make it to the the gig? Was Goldy responsible for the demise of his career?

Studio time

I had the best day in the studio last week. After 6 years at the ABC I was given the chance to have an experimental day in the studio. As in, no pressure, deadlines or anything, just take my time trying things out and getting it right. Usually we are in such a rush to get things done we just go with what we already know. We have a new mixing desk – SSL Duality. It’s the only one in the country as far as we know. It’s an analogue console which flips modes from being an analogue desk into a Pro tools controller. It’s a little bit difficult to use as they have redesigned the signal paths, by doing away with the small fader and taking your multi track sends from the input gain. There are a lot of options for routing signal and it all gets a little complicated sometimes. Trying to get a pre fade headphone send is not as easy as one would think. But that’s why Dave and I had the day on Thursday – to sort all that stuff out, and also play with different mics.

We had A jazz band called “The World According to James” come in. They were hoping to track a couple of tunes. A free recording for them in return for them giving us their time for us to play in the sandpit. They are a really awesome band.

I had a great time experimenting with different mics. On drums I tried 2 sets of overheads. The Royer SF -24 stereo ribbon mic was a much better option than a pair of Sennheiser MKH40’s, which were much brighter, but also really in your face. For jazz, the openness of the royer was much more suitable.
On sax we tried a U87, C12, and Microtech Gefell M930. The U87 won hands down. I was a bit surprised the C12 sounded awful. Then I found out today we were using the one that was supposed to be sent for fixing. No wonder it sounded awful.
On trombone we tried a 414 and a beyer M160 ribbon mic. The 414 sounded much fuller. But I’m not convinced we were using the 160 correctly… And the update on that is I’ve just found out we definitely used it incorrectly. Yes we are professionals, but we don’t know everything. We thought the 160 is a Fig 8 but no, it’s a hypercardiod, which really affects the way you point the thing. So that’s why it sounded awful. All the forums rave about this mic. Can’t wait to try it properly.
Double bass was interesting. Now I’m really giving away the secrets.
MG M930 on the sound hole, plus an MKH40 up on the fingerboard. Solves that problem of not getting the string sound and clarity.

Gonks at the Chrissy Party

What IS she doing playing a guitar? I thought she was a bass player???!!! Absolutely right. And I would like to point out I am a purist bass player – as in, I’m not a frustrated guitarist who switched to bass. I took up bass long before I ever touched a guitar. I actually WANTED to play bass. But here I am in the photo playing guitar at the ABC RN Christmas party. It was only for 1 song – White room. Dave and I swapped instruments just for fun. I like this photo because the guitar is much smaller than the bass so doesn’t look ridiculously big on me. And I’ve got my tongue out, concentrating hard.

Well, all 2 of my readers will be glad to know that “Addicted to Love” went off really well. After several nights practicing in front of the mirror, I nailed it. I worked out that if I don’t move my feet, but only move shoulders, hips and knees, I can keep in time and not lose the bass part. Like all rock stars I like to be really vain and say we were AWESOME!!!

Set lists were

Set 1:
Brass in Pocket – (The Pretenders)
Listen to the Music – (Doobie Brothers)
Come Up and See me – (Steve Harley)
No such thing – (John Mayer)
Cajun Moon – (JJ Cale)
Knock on Wood –(Eddie Floyd)
Moondance – (Van Morrison)
Cool for Cats – (Squeeze)
All Right Now – (Free)
White Room – (Cream)


Set 2:
I Got You – (James Brown)
Superstition – (Stevie wonder)
Instant Karma – (John Lennon)
I saw Her Standing there – (Beatles)
Call Me – (Blondie)
Sisters are doin’ it –(Eurythmics)
Wishing Well – (Free)
Crossroads –(Clapton)


Set 3:
Addicted To Love – (Robert Palmer)
Love Shack – (B52s)
6345789 – (Wilson Picket)
Jackson – (Johnny Cash)
Living for the City – (Stevie Wonder)
Take me to the River - (Talking Heads)
Man, I feel like a woman – (Shania Twain)

Communion

We had communion on Sunday morning at church. We have little mini cups for the wine. You get a choice of grapejuice or alcoholic. Being a red wine lover I go for the alcoholic. It's funny how you have this expectation of what the wine is going to taste like, but then it never meets it. This time the wine was sooo bad, I audibly gagged when I took a sip, so that people all around me heard and turned to see what had happened. I felt like I'd been poisoned. And then tears started running down my face. It must have been the wine frome the $2 shop. Lots of people were laughing, but they probably thought it was because I got a shock from the alcohol, which was not the case. I got a shock from how awful it tasted.

Zwartz

Last Saturday for the music Show I mixed live to air Jonathan Zwartz’s band. I love how his name starts with “Z”. He is a well known Sydney Jazz bass player, played with Jackie O lots. Hamish Stuart was on drums, Phil Slater on Trumpet and a piano player I’d never seen before called Tom.
I started off with a 414 on the double bass, but it was distorting a bit. Not sure if the mic was bit dodgy or what. Jonathan requested an 87 so grabbed one and it sounded heaps better. A much fuller sound. I still needed to boost quite a bit of a large bandwidth centred around 3k. This helps really bring out the string sound of the double bass and because it was his music I wanted to really make sure he stood out. I still mixed the bass in context properly, as in locking in with the other rhythm when the trumpet was soloing, but the bass really stood out well when he soloed.
I loved the music. Really nice compositions.

Photos

This was taken in Tokyo.

Today's theme - statues. All were taken with my 3.2 mp canon point and shoot on my overseas trip in 2005. This was before I knew I was interested in photography.


"Chick looking at Tower"



Freddy Mercury in Montreax

Taken in the Louvre.

The Reformation wall in Geneva. John Calvin is 2nd from left.

Gonks

Gonk rehearsals are well under way for the ABC RN Christmas party on Friday. I'm the bass player. This is our 4th Christmas together as a band. We are mostly all sound engineers at RN and we got together originally to provide entertainment at the work christmas party. And we are still together.

Thre most challenging things I have to work on before friday are - Getting the footwork right for "Addicted to Love". I'm the only chick in a mini skirt who has to actually play for real. This is what we are trying to pull off. I'm useless. Too busy concentrating on the bass part so I forget to move. Also am trying to nail John Mayer's "No such Thing". The bass player goes nuts on the recording. And hopefully we will remeber how Superstition goes, because we haven't rehearsed it in a while.

Christmas Bus

Do you live in Sydney? Have you seen the Christmas bus? Last night I went on the Christmas bus. I thought we were going to take off into the air like we were on Santa's sleigh. I’ve never seen anything more over the top. It’s just a normal State transit bus on the Newtown route. The driver had decorated it with every tacky bit if Christmas stuff you can think of. I like Christmas decorations, but they need to have some style. This had no style, except kitch. Stuffed toy reindeers all over the front dash. Santa pictures all over the windows. Tinsel on every pole or hand rail. Bells hanging, things hanging, stuff everywhere. There was no space left plain. And then to make the trip more amusing, a girl sat down opposite me wearing a huge badge saying “lose weight now, ask me how” . Sure, OK. Not your standard but trip conversation nor much of a fashion or political statement.

My Fair Lady

Last night KF and went to My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal in Sydney. I’ve never been in this theatre before. I like it – it’s quite small and intimate, good for a musical. Except for hearing the trains rumbling underneath every 10 minutes.
I’m not going to rave about My Fair Lady like I did Billy Elliot. Don’t get me wrong. It was a thoroughly enjoyable night. I’m really glad I went, especially as it is such a famous renowned musical, and one you must see at least once in your life. But I can’t talk about especially captivating performances, or emotional choruses or extremes of emotion. It was a great story, well performed with some nice songs, but I guess the more modern musicals are just a bit more out there.
My favourite scene was at the races. The costumes were spectacular, with everyone’s colour scheme consisting only of black, grey, white, and apricoty-pink. The pretentious characters watching the races were very funny.
A great line which everyone laughed about as if ridiculous was by Henry Higgins – “you hear better in the dark”. Which is not ridiculous. It’s true. Especially in this day of digital recording where you have a computer screen in front of you with wave forms going past. Often when I’m trying to hear a detail better, I shut my eyes. It’s like you can transfer more energy to your ears if you shut down your eyes. Lots of blind people have amazing hearing.
Anyway that’s off track.
Richard E. Grant was the lead – Henry Higgins. Well played. I’ve met him. Last year he was in Sydney promoting his book and I had to go to his hotel room with the brekky crew to record an interview. I’m not a huge fan of Withnail and I, but I loved his film Waa Waa.

November in review

A bit late I know, but here's the briefest wrap up of November things from work and some other stuff.

Katie Noonan, The Herd, Steve Earl, Jordi Savill - Hisperion 21, My Street Sampler, recording café sound effects, Sydney Peace Prize at the Opera House, Discovery at Angel Place, tidying up Rupert Murdoch for the Boyers (anti-spitting), Selah gig, IFILWAM, Tanya's canned BBQs, Pattersons bbg in Fairlight, K East visited, filming the Living Room.

Great Mistakes #7

I heard this story the other day couldn’t resist including it.
Many years ago when the ABC was in a different building, there was a guy called the commissionaire who was responsible for keeping track of all people coming in and out of the studios, sort of like a front desk job. One day two guys rocked up with a truck and said they were here to pick up the piano. The commissionaire showed them where it was. The piano was never seen ever again. Woops. Imagine trying to explain that one.

Photos

Todays theme - Dogs

Dogs are really hard to photograph because they won't stay still and when you crouch down to get at their level they all come running over for cuddles.


This is my fave. Taken at Centennial park.
450d with 17-85 lens
as with all these black and whites. Except the one below taken at Glebe Point.

Does this count? Taken in Helsinki with my point and shoot. C H-J wanted to buy one of these dogs but the shop was shut and we were all leaving Helsinki next day so couldn't get one. But we discovered a shop in Aus that has them.