The adventures of Basil the basil - 6 months on.

Well here is Basil

Amazing isn't it?!  Actually it's not Basil.  It's another lot of basil I had to buy because Basil just wasn't coping with life.

This is Basil

Sad huh. Refuses to die, refuses to flourish.

redback

I found a large redback spider living in our outdoor furniture today.  In ten years of living in Sydney this is the first redback I've seen here.  Growing up in Brisbane we saw them all the time in our backyard and sometimes in the house.  Once I pulled the mail out of our mailbox and there was the biggest one I had ever seen sitting there on the letters just near my fingers.  I dropped the mail and ran.  For you non-Australians, redback spiders are highly poisonous.  Adults will generally survive a bite but it will make you pretty sick.  Children can die from it.

Anyway you should be proud of me.  I managed today to be brave enough to run and get the camera to take a picture of the spider before freaking out and killing it.  However it did shake me up a little bit as later on when a cockroach ran over my foot I have to say I reacted quite unprofessionally.

Classic Tracks

Read up on how some of your fave songs were recorded.

http://mixonline.com/classic-tracks/

Mixing Al Green

Well this has to be one of the hardest mixes ever.  With 40 channels of audio, and heaps of spill going everywhere, it's really hard to control the sounds.  If I could leave all the vocals out it would sound really good.  But the vocal mics all have heaps of drums spilling into them, meaning that you lose all the clarity in the drums.  When you turn up the vocal channels the reverb on the vocal also adds to the drums reverb, plus the indirect sound of the drums in the vocal mics makes for mushy drums.  So lots of compromising has to be done as far as reverb levels and drum levels go.  Also we have to remember that vibe is good.  Try to get across the feeling of being at a live concert without it sounding too crappy.

 The other thing to deal with mixing a live concert as I've mentioned in other posts is to remove all the mud from the sound.  With loud PA systems and foldback on stage you get a lot of general low to low mid frequency wash that just muddies up the sound.  So this needs to be removed, sometimes at the expense of the induvidual sounds.  But that's part of the trick of making things mix well together.  Soloing a particular instrument and making it sound good on it's own usually does not mean it will sound good mixed in with all the other instruments.  So you need to treat each element in the context of what everything else is doing.  I've gone through and edited the tom tracks and the percussion tracks cutting out sections where nothing is going on on those channels to reduce unwanted noise.

The other thing throwing me into turmoil is learning to use the automation on the SSL.  It's great having this so you can record all of your fader moves. In such a large band with so much going on it's good to be able to shift the focus and also help in reducing the mud and spill, and the automation is very handy for this.   But when you don't know the automation system very well you get yoursef in all sorts of trouble with faders jumping all over the place.  It's a good way to scare people into thinking there is a ghost in the room, but not a good way to get a mix done when time is so limited anyway.  In the long run it saves time because you can keep going back finessing the mix, so it's worth the pain learning how to do it.

Apple

We had to clean out our pigeon holes at work for refurbishing of our lounge room.  All that was left was my apple.  A great opportunity for some artistic shots.  But I wasn't as successful as I'd hoped.  Most of the shots didn't turn out very well.  This was the best I got.  The dark background made it really hard to get a good setting for the lighting to look good.

Gonks

The world famous Gonks played a gig on the weekend for DBs niece's 21st.  It was in the smallest venue ever.  I had to leave all my extra basses at home.  Here's what we played -

A Whiter Shade Of Pale

If You Leave Me Now

Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)

Better Be Home Soon

Besame Mucho

Light My Fire



634 5789

Stuck In The Middle With You

I Saw Her Standing There

Pretty Flamingo

Midnight Hour

Knock On Wood

Is She Really Going Out With Him

Moondance

After Midnight

Living For The City

Take Me To The River



Happy Birthday



Listen To The Music

Cajun Moon

Black Magic Woman

Cocaine

Eagle Rock

Ode To Billy Joe

I Got You (I Feel Good)

Johnny B. Goode

I Shot The Sheriff

Superstition

Sultans Of Swing