Great Mistakes #9

My Dad writes books.  The last one he wrote was published with a special American version with a hard cover.  And with a hard cover comes a dust jacket.  And with a dust jacket comes a photo and description of the author.  Usually publishers try to get a photo of the actual author, but sometimes they just grab a photo of any old person and stick that on instead.  So Dad received his copy of the book and low and behold there's some dude who looks nothing like him above his bio.  In the photo above you can see on the left the guy they thought was him, and then on the right, after they sold all the wrong ones, the correct photo of him. (No they didn't pull all the dust covers off  the stock and replace them, they waited till they all sold out and had to do a reprint.)  And apparently no one has any idea at all who the other guy is.

ID

Since I'm on the topic of age and you now all know my grand old age of 34, how's this...In January of this year, while working on a recording at the Sydney Festival, I walked into a licenced area. I didn't realise it was licenced and therefore didn't even occur to me that you need to be over 18 to get in. The security guy asked me for ID. I stupidly help up my ABC ID tag for him to see. He studied it carefully looking really puzzled, and I was growing more and more puzzled myself. What was the problem? I was there to work. Finally he said this ID was no good. I asked in a really confused manner "What sort of ID do you want ?"...He replied, "Something with your date of birth". And the penny dropped. "ooooh THAT sort of ID"
I got asked for ID at 34 years of age. Can anybody top that?

Life Expectancy

If I was Zimbabwean, my life would just about be over. I was watching a doco about Zimbabwe last night on DVD called "Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe". The life expectancy of a Zimbabwean woman is 34. Yes I am that old.

Mixing Camille

Last week I mixed the Camille concert I recorded during the Sydney Festival at Hyde Park Barracks. It’s the 1st time I’ve used the newly revamped P63 studio which has a new SSL C200 console and a super powerful Pro-Tools rig. I was a bit unsure about this as a mixdown suite at first as it is all completely digital. I thought a few 1176’s and pultecs would be nice especially for mixing music. But I’m really happy how my mix turned out. Plug ins of note are the MCDSP Analogue channels which simulate the effects of analogue tape. This was great on the beat boxing which just needed to be squished in and the tape saturation effect worked wonders.

Camille is a crazy French woman, with some great music. She was on stage with a piano player plus 7 other vocalists and beatboxers who did stomping and body percussion.

That photo is from the recording at Hyde Park Barracks taken on my phone of us with the JJJ rack with 48 channels of preamp plus 2 Tascam 48ch hard disk recorders.

photos

I went out with Camera Commandos today.  We were at The Rocks in Sydney.  2 challenges were set.  The first was to photograph red/pink.  

The second challenge was to photograph opposites.  

Opposite colours?

Nature vs non-nature

red vs white

mobile phone camera vs 10d with L series lens  (opposite ends of quality spectrum)

Nature vs non-nature

Big Day In

Sydney Anglican’s Big Day In happened on Sunday. It was a broadcast of a special service for all Sydney Anglican churches to tune into. It was a massive organisational and technical event. I thought there was no way this was going to work, but it did! There were a couple of small issues, but in the big scheme of things, these were pretty negligible. I work in broadcasting, and for this event to go so well was such a good effort and well executed. And for a first time effort, even better. The organisers need to be congratulated for pulling it together so well.

I was there to mix the broadcast audio of the music. Garage Hymnal were responsible for that and they did a superb job! It was a total walk in and mix gig. I didn’t plug in a single piece of equipment (except for my studio speakers) or run a single cable. The wonderful team from Crosstalk did it all and they did a great job. If I needed anything all I had to do was turn around and there was someone waiting there to take my instructions. It makes you feel like you’ve made it as a sound engineer when you do this sort of gig. Turn up, mix, go home again. And it was a privilege to be involved. It was quite a challenging mix actually. I do live to air music mixes all the time at work, but they are not usually this big. Bands this size we would normally multitrack and mix later. Garage Hymnal have eight members – drums, bass, 2 electric guitars, acoustic guitar, keyboards and 2 vocalists. So there were plenty of open mics to muddy everything up. In a live mix like that, the big challenge is to keep the clarity and not end up with a big pile of mush. And then on top of that you need to get a good balance and make it sound nice. I wasn't in a great acoustic space to hear what I was doing, butI think it turned out pretty well. A bit messy on the balance side in some places, but hey – it’s live, that what it’s like. No time to sit and make it perfect, just fly by the seat of your pants.

And the other thing of note – the weather. We were in Kellyville in western Sydney where the temperature was above 40 degrees celcius. RF’s car had no air con. Yep, that was fun travelling home in the middle of the day in an oven. But I stopped complaining when I got home and saw the news about the Victorian bushfires and all the tragedy surrounding them.

films

Films I've seen recently-ish that I'd be happy to see again...

The Black Balloon - Australian Film about a family with an autistic teenager and how this impacts on the the life of his brother.

True North - About scottish fisherman who try people smuggling. Has an ending that leaves you in shock - totally not what you expect.

Bolt - animated, about a dog who thinks he's a super hero. Good fun.

Michael Clayton - intense, but good law drama/thriller.

7 Pounds - This movie ends up not being about what you think it's about for most of the movie.

Photos

Today it's birds.
First up - black swans at Centennial Park. Then geese at Centennial Park.



















Next we have galahs from out the front of my house. This little photography moment ended because of having to go inside to change my shirt. Lesson learnt - do not stand under a tree full of birds to take photos. Luckily they didn't get my camera.

Sydney Festival

These last few weeks the Sydney Festival has been on. I’ve done a couple of recordings in the Spiegletent, which has lots of mirrors in it. And I found out Spiegel means “mirror”. So it’s the mirror tent. It gets really hot inside the tent when the temperature is 36 degrees. The poor air conditioner didn’t really cope with Sydney’s heat wave. I’m just glad I wasn’t in there on the 42 degree day. I was recording lunchtime talks by people from the Moscow Art Trio and the Cinematic Orchestra.
I was supposed to record the Joe Henry concert in there on Tuesday, but my other concert, “Camille” got canned in Angel Place on Friday because we couldn’t get recording rights. But then the record company found out we wanted to do it and desperately wanted us to do it, but it was too late. So I ended up doing the Tuesday night Camille show at Hyde Park Barrack’s and DB had to do Joe Henry. It was really hard to get any info about set up or anything, so we just arrived and hoped to find somewhere to set up, but there wasn’t anywhere. Finally we got permission to set up in the gate house, which because of being a historic house has railing all around to protect the bricks so the space ended up being about 1 metre wide – enough room for the gear and me, but no one else. Luckily I had borrowed Triple J’s gear which is all very compact.
Here are some Spiegel tent pics, but they aren’t very good because I was just using the point and shoot. Sorry - no photos of Hyde Park Barracks - too busy and too much gear to take already without worrying about cameras. The Hyde Park Baracks recording was about 28 channels, so would have made much more interesting photos for equipment buffs. Oh well.


My set up for the lunchtime performances of people talking and playing.


The splitters - what we use to split all the induvidual mics so we can mix our own recording without affecting the PA mix.