2 photos

Here are 2 little wooden toys I treasure.  

This horse and cart was given to me by my Estonian Grandfather.  I can remember him pulling it down from a high shelf thing above a doorway in his Epping house and giving it to me when I was about ten.  I don't know how old it is or where it originally came from.  I was practicing with depth of field photography.  It's sitting on my bed and is about 2.5 inches in length.

This is an Estonian dolly.  It's only about 2 inches high.  I think my mother brought it back from Estonia for me when she visited there with her mother, brother and sister in 1985.  Estonia was still under Soviet rule back then so they got followed around everywhere by Russian spies and weren't allowed to stay with relatives, and my uncle quite strongly believes they got gassed in their hotel room, but they got out and complained about it and it stopped.

How to heal an ear infection

I've been reading the internet lots about ear infections lately, since mine have been such an issue.  An interesting internet sourced piece of information - most ear infections are viral, not bacterial, so taking antibiotics is useless, in fact, often does more harm than good because they lower your immunity and increase the risk of a relapse.  

Here are some non drug methods I've read about or tried for curing my middle ear infections since the two lots of antibiotics I was on didn't work. 

1. put a garlic clove or piece of ripe onion in your ear (not so small or far in so that it gets stuck or touches the ear drum, that would be very bad.) Apparently the fumes have germ killing abilities.

2. Drip some coconut oil in your ear.  If you suspect you have a perforated eardrum best not to do this.  Coconut oil is supposed to have anti viral and antibacterial qualities.  Also good to take it internally.

3. Dilute some oil of oregano in olive oil and rub inside your ear canal.  Not so much that it drips onto the ear drum as it's extremely potent.   Oregano oil is also meant to be anti viral and anti bacterial and good to take a few drops a day internally for immune system.

4. acupuncture - I've had good results with acupuncture for health issues before.

5.  See an osteopath.  If your neck and back muscles are all jammed up this can impede the drainage of the eustachian tube.  I felt a huge improvement in my ear drainage after a treatment.  I mean osteopath in the the Australian sense, not the American sense, they are different over there.

So I've been trying a few of these things.  My ears smell like a tropical herb garden at the moment.

old jobs #1

I've been working for nearly 15 years now in professional audio.  I've done a whole bunch of different types of jobs in my time, ranging from live sound for theatre, music recording, mixing and production, arranging, radio production, and lecturing in recording techniques.

One of the first jobs I ever did was working on a professional production of "The Mikado" in Brisbane and the Gold Coast as the radio microphone operator. This meant being backstage for the show, fitting mics to people, doing changeovers during the show and constantly monitoring the systems to make sure no one went on stage with a dead mic.  Here's some pics from the production.

Before the show I had to go into dressing rooms and put mics on people.  The big thing was to not be able to see the mics, so there were a bunch of different techniques used.  If someone had a wig or a headband we would just stick it to their forehead poking out from the wig a little bit.  Guys with hair got the "pen job".  This took a little while to master.  It involved getting the tube of a ball point pen, with the innards removed.  Take a tiny rubber band which was only about a centimetre in diameter, and wrap it around the end of the tube several times.   Put the the head of the mic inside the tube and grab some strands of hair just above the persons ear and poke them inside the tube as well.  Then flick the rubber band off the end of the tube so that it is now attaching the mic to the hair.   Sometimes this can be rather painful for the person and needs to be done several times before you get a secure fit without it hurting like crazy.  It's best to have the mics attached to the head so that if the singer moves their head they never go off mic.

John English was one of the stars.  I didn't have to put his mic on but after the show I had to go to his dressing room and rescue his mic from his headband which was dripping with sweat.  It was gross.

During the show there were many transmitter changes.  SG didn't want to hire enough mic transmitters for each person, so they had to be shared around, which meant I spent the whole show running around grabbing transmitters out of people's costumes as they came off stage and putting them in other's as they were about to go on.  Some of the changeovers were so fast I literally had to stick my hand down people's pants the moment they got off stage, no time for modesty, then run and find the next person as they were about to step on stage.  It was pretty tight.  At times I was sprinting from one side of the stage to another to make the pack change in time.  The stage hands knew when I was coming and kept the way clear.  There were also quick costume changes of the actors as well which meant pulling the packs out of one costume and putting them in another as the person was changing their clothes.  This was sometimes a really complicated operation involving several people as some changes needed to be done in about 30 seconds.  And you don't want to be the one responsible for someone missing their cue on stage.  Yes, hectic things go on backstage of the theatre world.

toothpaste for burns

My brother blogged about this a while ago.  You are going to think we're nuts but it does work.  I pulled a hot tray out of the oven tonight and proceeded to touch it with 4 fingers.  Ouchy ouchy.  I ran to the bathroom, ran my fingers under cold water for a minute, then applied heaps of toothpaste to ouchy bits.  I kept it there until the pain went away And I could feel a cooling sensation.  No more ouchy and no blisters.  Read the technique properly at  http://ausdag.blogspot.com/2008/12/toothpaste-for-burnt-fingers-boiling.html  

audio language lesson 2

If you are going to do any live sound you need to know some basic microphones so as not to look like an eeediot.

58 - short for Shure SM58 - this is probably the most widely used live vocal mic.  It's tough, rough, can be dropped, spat into, thrown around and still work.  Almost.  Whether it actually sounds the best is another argument, but it has pretty much taken the market.  You need to know a 58 when you see one.  This is it, typical ice cream shaped mic.

This next one is a 57.  Short for Shure sm57.  Also widely used in live sound and in studios for instrument micing, mainly guitar amps and drums.  It gives a really bright grungy sound for guitar amps.  On a drum kit you will see it very often on snare drums and toms.  I don't think they the best sounding drum mic, but probably what gets used the most because that's what everyone has and you do get a good result.

So, now if anyone talks about 57's and 58's, you'll be all clued up.

great mistakes #13

Quick lesson in speaker design – they have a great big whopping magnet in them.  Ok that’s enough.

 

Back to the good ol Jupiter’s Theatre.  RF and I had to change a speaker one afternoon.  We climbed up on the catwalk high above the stage.  I stayed safely behind the rail, while RF swung out over the stage to access the speaker.  The is was before the days of strict OH&S so no harnesses or anything.  We didn’t need to change the whole cabinet, just the speaker inside.  Anyway I was there to grab the dead speaker from RF once he unscrewed it and hand him the new one.   Catwalks are made of steel.

 

I thought I’d put the new speaker down until I needed to hand it to RF because it was quite big and heavy.  That magnet was huge.  And then it was like a slow motion film with RF reaching back over to me and yelling “NNNOOOOO  DDDDOOONN”TTTTT  PPPUUUT  IIIIT   DDDOOOOOOWWWN”  (sped up version is “no don’t put it down”)  Too late.  Stuck.  Great whopping magnet and steel catwalk.   Bad.  I couldn’t get it off.

dinner

I ate a whole rainbow trout for dinner tonight.

I cooked it like so...

Make a marinade of olive oil, lemon, thyme, coriander, cumin, tumeric, chillli, garlic.

Put the fish on some foil.

Cover the fish with the marinade and spread some inside.

Put slices of lemon on top.

Wrap the fish with foil to make a little parcel.

Put it on a tray and stick it under the griller for 25mins or till cooked.

Unwrap it, pull the skin back and eat the beautiful moist flesh.  Just pull it from the backbone leaving the bones behind.  Then flip the fish over and eat the other side.

  

phunnny photo

How cool is this this!  No I didn't take this.  This couple set their camera up on self timer to take a photo of themselves and the squirrel jumped in shot, stealing the autofocus.

films

Now that I am hearing impaired, I'm really appreciating subtitles.   Not all movies come with subtitles.  That's annoying.

But foreign films generally do, so I've been watching a few.

A couple of good ones -

Eyes without a face - a good old French B&W thriller made in the 1960 about a mad doctor whose daughter's face is badly damaged in a fire so he does bad things to get her a new face.

Son of a Lion - This is an extraordinary film, made by an Australian film maker, set in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan.  It involved a lot of under cover filming and is about an Afghani man who services guns and refuses to let his 11 year old son go to school because the guns are much more important.  Here's a review of it.  

I really like the way it was made. I feels like you are watching a documentary as it is so realistic and the acting is very good.  The characters are well developed quite quickly because of the dialogue, in a way that they really do come across as normal people.  I really recommend it.

And another Fellini film - La Dolce Vita.  Not exactly enjoyable viewing and typical of foreign films it is explicit way ahead of it's time.  Interesting mainly because its makes a statement about the futility of the rich society living shallow and exorbitant lives.  And I learnt the origin of the word "paparazzi".  It comes from a character in this film named "Paparazzo", who is a photo journalist and is quite intrusive when it comes to getting the photos he wants.

sonny rollins

And on that note, have realised I haven't posted about the Sonny concert last year.  This was the one and only time he has been to Australia and only played in Sydney.  Pretty crazy coming all that way and only playing one show.  He could easily have sold out a show in Melbourne.  Anyway, I was privileged enough to see him.

Sonny Rollins is one of the most influential jazz sax players ever and hit the big time as a soloist back in the 50s.  So he's getting on a bit now.  Last year he was 78.

I was sitting up in one of the side boxes just in front of the stage, but up high, so soundwise it was great because a lot of the acoustic sound from stage came up.  A friend who was sitting on the floor in the 6th row said it was really loud, whereas where I was it was a pleasant level, not too amplified.

He waddled on stage and proceeded to play with his back towards me and I was worried he was going to play like that all night, but he did turn around.  

Here's a review from the SIMA website.

The set list as listed on his website was...

Sydney Opera House
Sydney Australia
June 1, 2008

1. They Say It's Wonderful
2. Someday I'll Find You
3. In A Sentimental Mood
4. St. Thomas
5. Half As Much
6. Sonny, Please
7. As Long As There's Music

Encore: 
Why Was I Born

funky fred 2

I've decided I need to say more about fred.

He used to be music director for James Brown and also played in Funkadelic.  And for lots of other cool people.

Seeing a gig like that really makes me appreciate living in Sydney.  I complain a lot about it being too big and busy, but for that reason, we get artists playing here who would never go to Brisbane.  Fred didn't play Brisbane. I've seen other artists who didn't go to Brisbane too - Sonny Rollins for example.

I loved the syncronised movement of Fred with his trumpet player - it looked cool.

At one stage everyone had their hands in the air.  I was wondering if we were in church all of a sudden.

The bass player had knobs on his bass that glowed.

funky fred

The other night, with blocked ears I went and saw Fred Wesley play at the basement. That dodgy picture was taken with my phone.  What a great show.  They pulled out the tables from the floor in front of the stage and packed out the venue.  We got a good posy up the back on the steps leading up the back door so we had a full view.  I hate not being able to see so this was good and we weren't really packed in back there so plenty of room to move and not feel claustrophobic.

Fred plays trombone and had a band consisting of trumpet, bass, guitar and drums.  Plus a local girl got up and played trombone on a couple of tunes.  She was great.

So it was a full on funk show.  But they started of with a couple of jazz numbers in a chill out mood and then got stuck into chameleon, before playing Fred's own tunes.

Lines to remember were - "bop till you boogie boogie till you bop bop till you boogie bop bop",

"breakin bread with my momma breakin bread with my momma breakin bread",

"same beat"  which sounded like "saint pete".

Anyway, good times.  And I didn't need ear plugs because I couldn't hear properly anyway.  I wonder if fluid in your middle ear offers the same ear protection as earplugs in the outer ear do?

the other crazy thing...

...going on with my ears is, now that my hearing is starting to come back slowly, things are sounding pitch shifted up.  So people talking sound like they have been sucking on helium balloons.  It's really weird hearing voices you know well that just don't sound like the person anymore.  I first noticed it talking to my mother on the phone and I asked her if her voice was normal because she sounded so weird.  Then Jamie Oliver was on TV and I wasn't looking at the tv to start with and wondered why he had someone else commentating his program.  But it was actually him with a very high voice.  Then I heard Missy Higgins playing.  Well, I recognised the music but not the voice - it sounded like someone was covering her.

the not so joyful times of being a sound engineer

For the last week or so I've had middle ear infections in both ears.  Not something you really want when your livelihood depends on your ears.  My ears filled up with fluid really quickly and were throbbing endlessly and I was pumping myself with painkillers.  I ended up on antibiotics and my hearing loss got quite severe.  I had pussy fluid leaking out of one ear for 2 days.  Don't you just wish you hadn't read that?

I've had blocked ears before and had experienced declined hearing ability, but this time round it was really bad.  If I stuck my finger in my ear and scratched it I couldn't hear a thing.  That's a bit freaky.  And the evil internet which always tells you the worst case scenario had all sorts of stories of permanent hearing loss from ear infections.  So not good.  

Anyway my ears are slowly starting to clear.  I can now hear my housemate enter the room and I can hear my fingers rubbing together near my ear so that's a good sign.

It's been interesting researching the internet for home remedies for ear infections.  The one I liked best was holding a steaming onion over your earhole for 20 minutes.  I'm not a sceptic either.  I'm all for natural remedies, but when it comes to ears I get a bit freaked out and go for the drugs.  Although antibiotics are notoriously bad for you, so I'm not thrilled that I had 2 courses.

Anyway I can't work at the the moment because I'm still too deaf to be of any use at work, so I'll just have to enjoy the time off.

a film

Alrighty for all you tour fans out there, today's pick is "Hell on Wheels".

This is a doco that goes behind the scenes of the tour de France with a German team focusing on 2 riders in particular.

I watched it twice.

It contains interesting scenes looking at the teamwork involved in the race, although I would have liked a bit more of this to learn a bit more about the tactical side.

It was really nice to hear some of the live sounds of the race - like the sound of a whole pile of bikes wizzing past, and the huffing and puffing of some riders - sounds which you don't get to hear on the tv broadcast.  You also get to see things which the broadcast doesn't show you either, like the clean up van up the back that picks up the riders who have dropped out, and the promo vehicles that go ahead of the race, and the rubber ducky car.

There are also some wonderful bits of archival footage of old races back in the early days.

Plenty of crashes, too many massages, and unfortunately it's in German so you miss a lot of the pictures trying to read the subtitles, which is why it's good to watch it twice - there are some great pictures taken from really different perspectives.

a joke

A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, "Hey why the long face?"

Great Mistakes #12

I had to put Late Night Live to air a couple of nights this week and I remembered the time I won the prize for being the only person to turn up for a live radio program.  Or should have won it anyway.

I was very new at the ABC, I had only been there about 3 weeks and got put on the transmission shift for Late Light Nive. Which is late at night when there is no one there.  Except for us.  And on one night, only me.

Because I was new to the ABC I didn't know what was normal yet, and had never worked in broadcasting before, so couldn't work out what was normal.  It was only my 4th night on the shift and when i had arrived at work about 6pm the LNL office was open and buzzing with activity.  I did a few other things and went back at about 7:30 to say hi and see what was on the books for the night, but the office door was shut and locked.  Not knowing that that is not normal, I presumed they were out for dinner and would be back, not to worry.  But by 9:30 they still hadn't turned up and I was starting to worry.  It was cutting things a bit fine since we go on air at 10.  So I rang my boss.  

Me...."Ummmm Late Night Live is on tonight isn't it?".   

Him..."yes"

Me..."then why am I the only one here?"

Him..."I don't know"

Bit of panic.

No phone numbers could be found to call anyone to find out what was going on.

So my boss started talking me through looking for a program that maybe was supposed to be broadcast that night or a standby program.

Me being new still wasn't very good at working out what a badly labelled program might look like.

Anyway, I couldn't find a program that looked like it should be played that night.

But I did find a generic standby program.

The minutes ticked away and I played this standby program and sat in the studio waiting for the phone to ring.

It took about 1 minute for the executive producer to ring up and find out why the wrong program was being played.

The story was they had pre recorded the program, but forgotten to tell anyone that we weren't going live - including me, my boss, master control where the switching to the studios is done, plus other people who needed to know.

The phone call was a major understatement...

Me..."Where the hell is everyone?''

EP..."It's not your fault.."

Me..."I know it's not my fault....Why didn't anyone tell me?"

Oud

Last week I went to St Stephen's Newtown to record oud with jazz piano. Jo Tawadros was playing with Matt McMahon on piano, plus some percussion and clarinet.
We had our new Sadie LRX to record with. It's great because it's tiny and lets us record 48 channels via USB to a laptop. No more lugging around huge mixing desks or racks of preamps and huge hard disk recorder.

On the oud I had a Schoeps CMC5-U cardioid mic.

Piano had DPA 4021 piano kit mics.

Percussion and clarinet had Sennheiser MKH40s.

No free food.


That's the oud with the percussionist behind.

el cheapo el crappo

Well the cheap set top box I bought the other day got taken back to the shop. After 1 week it started going a bit mental. The channels would all scramble together and I would have to reboot to fix it. Then the remote stopped working. Oh well, the Tour de France is over now - I don't need it anymore.

buggy hoon

I nearly got taken out by one of those motorised 4 wheel buggies that old people ride in today. I was in the shopping centre and had to duck out of the way of this guy who was speeding around a corner way way fast. Then he went up on 2 wheels on the side. I thought he was going to tip over, then he kept riding along on two wheels like the Dukes of Hazard. He was doing it on purpose! Too bad if he kills a few people in the process.

Great Mistakes #11

RF reminded me recently of the time when I was working at Jupiters and I managed to drop the realllly expensive TV camera just when the curtain was about to go up on the show. This caused a little bit of mayhem, because having the camera was an integral part of the show. It was used in the magic show for the filming of all the close up hand magic that got projected up on screens. And I dropped it. Well not really. I just didn’t put on the bench very well and it fell off. And the transmitter broke off. So we had to quickly run a cable to where the magician was going to do his hand magic so we could still project the pictures. It was a bit messy. The curtain went up late.

You know very few things would warrant the late start of a show. Even when someone had a heart attack in the audience 5 minutes before the show they didn’t postone. Curtain went up on time and the ambulance officers wheeled her out on a stretcher in the dark.

The only other time I remember the curtain going up late was the night of Princess Di’s funeral which was being broadcast at the same time. We had one minutes silence before the show.

le tour

I have become a tragic follower of the tour de france.  I've liked riding bikes for a long time, but never followed bike races.  Last year after meeting someone who was sitting up every night watching the tour de france, I was really intrigued as to why someone would put themself through this.  So I watched the race one night and I was hooked.  The problem was I had missed all of the critical stages of the race that really set up the race leaders.  So I decided that this year I was going to watch as much as could to really see how the race is won.  But much to my horror, SBS who are the race broadcasters also won the rights to Ashes this year, so instead of showing bicycles, they are showing cricket players.   AAAAhhhggggg.   But the cycling is on the SBS digital channel and I don't have digital.  And my internet is not good enough to stream it.  I'm just not one of those people that needs to buy all the latest stuff, so I haven't bought a set top box.  I'm still using our family's original colour telly we got in 1979 and it works a wonder.

But today I splurged.  I'm so annoyed at SBS not showing the tour on regular analogue TV.  I went out looking for the cheapest set top box I could find so I could watch SBS digital and get the tour.  Tonight I'll be settling to watch the cycling.  Yay.  The cheapest box I found was an SD one for $80.  But there an HD for $100, so I got the HD.  I'm really glad I understand inputs and outputs.  I had it all hooked up and working within 10 minutes.  It looks great.

Goldfish

I’m a little concerned with my housemate TR’s pet little fish. I was away on holidays and so was she, so she asked our other housemate TJ to feed them. She nearly killed them by overfeeding them. I came home from holidays and the fish tank was a murky brown. I said to TR “what’s going on with the fish tank” so she cleaned it out and found all this uneaten rotting food in the tank. TJ said they didn’t look like they were eating so she kept putting more food in. Honestly, what sort of logic is that?
Anyway they haven’t been their energetic selves since. They used to always dance for me when they saw me. Now they just sit there. Except for when they go a bit crazy. This morning one of them was darting around the tank and hitting the edges so hard you could hear his skull banging the glass. And then he ran into another fishy and pushed him into a corner under a shell so he was stuck there for a while. I think they’ve gone a bit mental.

My brother had goldfish years ago. He had about 8 because he had quite a big tank. He managed to kill them all in one afternoon. He changed the water and didn’t know you need to dechlorinate the water. Poor fishies all died from chemical poisoning. I came home one afternoon and he had bowls of water everywhere with sick fish in them, plus the dead ones lined up on a tea towel. I came in and he said “all my fish are dying”. “Why?" "I changed the water and they are all dying now”. “Did you dechlorinate the water?” ”No.” Before long all 8 were lined up on the tea towel.

Great Mistakes #10

One of the great rules we have at our work place is “always check it in mono”. Because as much as I hate to admit it, we broadcast in mono. Yes we go to all sorts of effort to make programs with the highest quality of audio possible and we make a lot of effort to do beautiful music mixes and it all ends up in glorious mono on AM. HOWEVER, we now have digital radio in STEREO. YAY.

Anyway, I once was responsible for Sarah Blasko going to air out of phase. Now what happens when something is out of phase? All of the mono information cancels itself out when you mono the signal so all you get left with is the stereo information. So for speech, this means you get zilch. For music it means everything that you had panned centre get cancelled out. So you get no voice, just the reverb. This is what happened with Sarah Blasko. She sounded like she was singing out the back in a very large bathroom.

I had prerecorded her in the studio doing a couple of songs for the music show. We usually go live to air with these things, but for some reason we pre recorded the day before. And because it was pre recorded she made mistakes and had to redo things which meant I had to do some editing in wavelab. That’s why going live is so much better – no chance to do things again so people make sure they don’t stuff up.

Anyway I edited it up and rendered the session and by some freak thing, it rendered out of phase. I know this wasn’t my fault because I checked the edit session later on and it was in phase. So wavelab had stuffed up. I was sitting in the studio when it was being played to air and it sounded ok because we were listening in stereo, and weren't paying too much attention to it - if we'd been listening properly we would have noticed it sounding out of phase. But the Melbourne producer who was listening off air in mono came on line saying “what’s going on with the sound, she sounds really distant and echoey?” The other engineer and I immediately knew what this meant – it was out of phase. Poor Sarah Blasko. She got fixed before the song finished but for a while there she was just a wash of reverb with some guitar. Excellent

SWF live to air

On two mornings of the Sydney Writer’s Festival we went live to air for the Book Show. This was the first time I have organized a live to air outside broadcast. So much can go wrong with these things, so it can be a rather daunting task.
The first thing I had to make sure of was getting Telstra to install a line at the venue for the ISDN hook up back to Master Control in Ultimo. We were broadcasting from an unused pier at Walsh Bay in an old wharf building right down the end of the pier. So Telstra had to tap in to their junction box and basically just run a long cable down the length of the pier to where we were going to be.
Then we take our ISDN codec and plug in to this line and dial up the number to connect us to a similar machine back at master control and then go to air.
We split all channels coming from stage so we could do our own mix. Then mixed the program with our mixer output going into the ISDN codec. Simple as that. We also had so signal coming back to us from master control so we could play the news through the PA. So I had a line out from my mixer going to the PA system of my mix post fade, plus a pre fade send of the return line from master control also going to the PA. It was pre fade so it didn’t go out my mixer back down the line. That’s called mix minus. One of our favourite terms in broadcasting.
As a backup to the ISDN line, we had a 3g wireless dial up thing, but it didn’t work. So if the ISDN had fallen over, we had no back up. It didn’t fall over. The 3g thing just couldn’t get enough bandwidth to maintain a connection. We had heaps of signal, but being right in the middle of Sydney, there was just too much traffic on the network for us to get on. Bad idea.

Anyway here’s some pics, thanks to Jen.
That’s me mixing away.
Gear wise I’m using –

Allen and Heath 16ch mix wizard
Denon CD player
Then in the rack on the right –
On top is a Sound Devices Hard Disk recorder.
Then some compressors
The thing in the middle roadcase of the rack with the digital display is the base station for the GPS clocks. Being live to air we have to be right on time. This clock picks us a signal from the GPS network and the transmits the time for the satellite clocks like the one at my feet to lock to.
The bottom roadcase is the ISDN codec.
One the floor behind the clock is the splitter rack. The red thing is my back pack.
Everything else is the PA system.
The orange thing on the right is a residual current detector power box. Like a power board, but it is extremely sensitive to current surges and will trip before we have a chance to be electrocuted.
Also on the right you will see coffee and chocolate brownie – all important things when you have literally had no sleep and you are live at 10am.


That’s me looking very smug.



They are the GPS clocks which hadn’t locked into the proper time yet and we wanted them to really badly.

Sydney Writer's Festival

I know this is a bit behind time, but I thought I’d write a little bit about the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May. This was a really big event for me because I had to co-ordinate 24 recordings, plus organize 2 live to air broadcasts.
Most of the recordings happened over a 4 day period and involved 7 different engineers, 4 PA companies, 9 venues, and it all took quite a bit of work ensuring everything was going to be OK.
The big thing with my network, Radio National is we don’t like to just take splits from the front of house mix. Sometimes it can be hard to convince PA companies that this isn’t good enough for us, because it seems to be good enough for every other media network. But we at RN are more interested in top audio quality than anywhere else, so we don’t just do what everyone else does. So why is a split from front of house not good enough? Often the mix that sounds ok in the room on the sound system does not sound good as a recording, for these reasons -
1. The balance between different mics may sound fine in the room, but record it and the levels are often all over the place.
2. If the room is not very big, you hear a lot acoustically anyway, so the PA levels can be a little bit wonky without affecting how well people can hear what’s going on on stage, but recordings can be really rotten.
3. PA operators often love to mix with mute buttons – this sounds awful on a recording – we like smooth fade ins and outs.
4. PA operators cut everything as soon as the last words are spoken, so you don’t get any applause or ambience for your recording – things which make for a nice radio program.
5. If the room acoustics are out of control, you get PA operators doing harsh EQs on voices to try and stop feedback, so you get thin, awful sounding voices on your recording.
6. If you have several mics open at once you can get a very echoey recording. This might be fine through the PA but not for us. We like to mix out any mics which aren’t being used at the time. PA operators often just turn everything up and leave them up.

So therefore, what we need to do is put splitters in so that we have control over the level of every mic coming off stage, independent of what the PA mixer is doing. We split all channels and then have our own mixer and mix our own wonderful recordings and then it doesn’t matter how bad the front of house mix is, ours will still be OK. That’s as long as they don’t have heaps of feedback and crazy noises as they will still go on our recording.

So I had lots of equipment to organize, lots of PA companies to liaise with, lots of discussions with Festival people etc. I was flat out for over 3 weeks on this. You wouldn’t think there was that much to do but there was. Plus I had to look after all the risk assessments for OH&S and this took ages with all the site inspections and paperwork.

I’ll talk about the live to airs in another post.

proven wrong

Well that sucks. Thanks to Gus i've been told that someone already thought of it. Niblings that is. I really did come up with it myself, but someone else did before me. Looks like I'm not that original.
Oh well, more reason to use the word.

word invention

I invented a word a little while ago. I remembered last night while talking to friends and word invention came up and I said I had invented one. It's now time to tell the world. I'm not sure it's really going to take off with only 2 people reading my blog, but feel free to use it and give all credit to me.

"Niblings" - noun - the collective term for nieces and nephews.

Good hey? Isn't it so much easier to say, "I have 12 niblings", than to say, "I have 12 nieces and nephews"?

I don't by the way. I only have 3 niblings.

There you have it, here June 17 2009, the world 'niblings' is official.

films

I'm back!

It's been ages since i saw a good film, but finally I have one to report on that really is worth seeing.



The Diving Bell and the Butterfly


A French film, but not made by french people. Well, the actors were French. Based on a true story of a French guy who had a stroke and then suffered from locked in syndrome - he was parylised from head to toe and could only communicate with one eyelid, while he could understand everything.


This is totally not a midday movie z grade telemovie tearjerker. This is truly a piece of art.


The story is fascinating, emotional but not soppy, and the story telling techniques are very clever. The camera work is great. It's amazing to see how this guy manages to break out of his self pitying and even manage to write a book using his one eyelid.

posting

It's been a while huh? This blogging thing takes a lot of effort. I really don't know how those people who post 4 or 5 times every day have time to do it. Do they ever do any work? And as for reading everyone else's blogs...how does one find time for that? Anyway I've been snowed under workwise, which is why I'been so silent. Some highlights to follow. Maybe. If I get round to it. No more murders in my neighbourhood as far as I know either.