What I like to eat for a late night snack

I think I need to change my blog into a food blog.


Gorgonzola cheese, olives and a glass of port. mmmmm
These olives are the absolute bomb. One of my work colleagues buys these kalamata olives in 10kg buckets from South Australia and we put in for our 1/2 kilo of them. Ironically these olives have no preservatives in them and last about 6 months, if you don't eat them all in about a week and a half. The ones you buy in the supermarket with preservatives only last about 3 weeks. There is something wrong there. I have to put my olives in that little dish to limit how many I eat in one go, so that they last me a little bit longer than a week and a half.

What to do when the temperature is over 40 degrees celsius

Go to the movies.
I did.  Wonderful air conditioned comfort.
I saw The Boys are Back.  An Australian/British production.  Looks at the topic of fatherhood.  A nicely scripted and nicely acted film.  Some films start out happy and get sadder as they go along.  This one starts out really sad, and gets less sad as you go.  I really enjoyed it.

People always come for the food.

It's amazing how you can write a blog with a main theme of sound engineering, but the obscure post about what my family eats at Christmas time continues to pull in the most readers.  This post (click here) -  constantly has the most number of hits.  It's getting close to that time of year again.  I'm looking forward to a trip home to the almost Gold Coast and eating yummy things and experiencing that rare thing of being around family.

Photos I Took For Work

Check out the slideshow of pics I took of a band rehearsing in our studio.

http://abc.net.au/rn/musicdeli/galleries/2009/2730724/


-

Homemade Hommus

I made this today.  It's good.  Quantities are very approximate.  Modify to taste.


1 can chick peas - leave the liquid aside till later
2-3 tbs tahini
2 tbs lemon juice
1 tbs olive oil
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cloves grated garlic
1/4 tsp ground coriander seeds
1/4 tsp cumin
paprika or cayenne pepper to taste
salt to taste


Blend all this up in a food processor and add as much chick pea liquid as you like, depending on how runny you like your hommus.  If it's all a bit tart or salty for your liking try adding a little bit of sugar, but not too much! Taste as you go, you might like more or less lemon, or cumin or paprika.  Choose your own adventure.

Snail

One of the rotters that eats all my herbs.  Except for Basil.  This was before the accident with the garden fork.

Fort Scratchley

We went to Fort Scratchley in Newcastle to record a forum on coal.  We had five guests on stage plus our presenter Geraldine Dougue.  We did it inside the function centre, not around the canons.
That's our gear in the bottom piccy.  We were trialling a system of radio mics made by Lectrosonics.  That's it over on the right with the little laptop.  The roadcase under the laptop holds a single rack unit device which contains 6 receivers for the radio mics.  The laptop holds the software which lets you monitor all the mics' activity and modify frequencies.  Other gear - little mixer on left for providing talkback to Geraldine.  2nd mixer for the PA system, then splitter racks and compressors, and then the 3rd mixer was for mixing the recording.

The adventures of Basil the basil - 9 weeks on.

Poor Basil is really not doing too well.  I really think I need to move to Brisbane so I can grow some decent Basil.  Even the snails don't think much of this specimen.

This is it

If you haven't seen The Michael Jackson film "This is it", you should.  It shows rehearsals for his concert tour which he never got to do.  It's a great film.  Definitely see it on the big screen with the big sound system.  Lots of glorious bass.   It's great to see MJ at work.  Although he was just rehearsing and sometimes only walking through his steps, you could see how precise he is in everything and still looked really cool.  I laughed when the director pleaded with MJ to please hold on on when he was testing out the cherry picker for the first time.

It was also really good to see a female guitarist in the band.  Seeing girls play band instruments is a little uncommon.  I often feel like I'm crashing a boy's club being a bass player.  Now you don't all need to write to me and tell me the examples of females playing band instruments that you know of.  I know they exist, but my point is, they are a much rarer breed than males playing drums, guitars and basses.  Usually if you see a girl in a band they are singing.  So good on this chick for making it into the  band of such a famous artist.

Boyer Lecture Live

Today I recorded General Cosgrove delivering his first lecture live in front of all the important people.  We recorded the 1st lecture in the studio as a backup, but the the live version is now currently going to air as I write this.  All the subsequent lectures will be the studio versions.  You can podcast it from the Radio National website.

There is no gig which you want to stuff up, but this is one of the ones you REALLY don't want to stuff up.  This is a big event for our Network.  So I had 2 recorders going, each recording to flash card and hard disk so that there was no chance of not getting a recording.  I put my own mic on the lecturn, so that we didn't have to listen to the horrible gooseneck mic which was feeding the PA.  My mic was a Neumann KMS105.  Plus we had a lapel mic on the General as a backup in case the microphone fell over or something horrid.  My recorders were the SoundDevices portable hard disk/flash recorders model 744 and 722.

I didn't stuff up luckily.

Then we had to run upstairs and compile the program and get it loaded into the autoplay computer.  I was sitting in the studio playing it from another computer as a backup in case the autoplay didn't work.

Then I freaked out when the producer came running in saying it wasn't the right program going to air.  But really it was, she was just having a moment.

Garage Hymnal at Work

I recorded Garage Hymnal at the ABC the other day.  It was fun being able to record friends.  It was a full on day.  They are an 8 piece band and we only had till 3pm to get 6 songs down.  That is not a lot of time.  It wouldn't be unusual to spend till 3pm getting set up for a band that size.  So it was a speedy set up and record.

The instruments were - drums, bass, 3 guitars, keyboards/piano.
They have two female lead vocalists.
I put all the instruments in the large recording room together and the vocals went in the isolated booth so that they didn't get lots of loud instruments spilling into their mics.  I put baffles around the drums to get some isolation from the rest of the band.  Then the band all played together and and did 2-3 takes of each song before moving onto the next.  All the vocals were recorded live with the band.

Some pics thanks to various band members.

My channel list.  For a setups this big it's good to be ultra organised and work things out before you get into the studio on the day.  I had several of these printed out so I could easily keep track of where everything was going.  The last 6 channels were only for an option if they decided to do some unplugged stuff, but they didn't, so we went the electric band, using up to channel 26.  Plus I added in 2 DPA mics for the acoustic piano, plus a mic underneath the snare drum as well as the one on top.  The other change was to use a 414 on one of the vocalists and an 87 on the other.  It's sometimes good to use different mics on different singers so that you get a slightly different sound quality which makes it easier to blend in the mix.