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



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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

Some Fremantle Piccies

Fremantle is the port at the mouth of the Swan River near Perth.  It's been done up into a trendy place with cafes and shopping.  Here are some of the old buildings.

Moonlighting

I have been spending the last 3 weeks at Classic FM, our classical music network.  I'm filling in for someone away on holidays.  I'm really enjoying the chance to work on some large classical recordings - something we don't get much of a chance to do at Radio National.  I was trained in classical recording at uni, but I haven't had as much professional experience in that area as I have had in recording contemporary music and jazz.  So I'm pulling out a lot of long lost information about classical recording techniques.  And learning a lot.  It's great.

Wind surfing in Perth

I'm sorry to all my fans - I went underground for a while.  But as a special treat, I'm going to post photos of me trying wind surfing for the very first time in Perth on the Swan River.   My cousin MH who is really experienced had access to a learner board and took me for my own special lesson.   It was a lot of fun.  The learner board made it a lot easier because it's big and floats easily, so I just had to balance on it.  That wasn't so hard as I already had good balance from my childhood skateboarding.   Now I wasn't really good or anythig, but I used to skate up and down our driveway as an 8 year old on my own green fibreglass skate board that I bought for $8 from K-Mart.

So once you are crouching on the board you have to pull the sail up and stand, which is quite difficult with wind blowing around.  And then you sail.   It was hard keeping control of the sail with the wind gusting and blowing it out of my hands, but I managed to have a good surf once I got the hang of it.

The good thing about the Swan River is it's very shallow for a long way out, so when you fall off it's pretty easy to get back on again.  At one stage I got a bit carried away and ended up quite a long way out and fell off and to my shock my feet didn't touch the bottom!.  And getting back on was impossible, so I had to swim the board closer to shore untill i could touch the bottom and scramble back on again.

The other thing you need to work out is how to go back the other way and and sail against the wind do you don't end up way down the other end of the river.  I managed to even turn araound on the baord and sail back the other direction, right when MH wasn't watching.  And then I wasn't able to do it again to prove I could do it.

I had to stop when the wind started to pick up too much and all the experienced surfers turned up.  But I had a decent go.  I ended up with very bruised shins from getting back on the board, plus a really big bruise from a fin scrape.  Plus really sore arms from pulling the sail up.

The damage

Perth

I'm in Perth at the moment for KFs wedding.  There is a 3 hour time difference between Perth and Sydney. It took me 2 days to recover from the travelling and jet lag.  The flight took 5 hours.  What a crazy long time to travel within the same country.
I'm feeling more normal now, on my 3rd day here.
The nice thing is being able to see some relatives while here.  I'm staying at my aunt and uncle's place.  Although sadly I haven't seen my aunt yet as she is in hospital with a bad back.  But I have seen 3 of my 4 cousins so far which is great.
Last night was the hen's dinner.  I didn't eat any hens.  But I ate chilli mussels.  Lots of them.  39 in all!  I had to count them because the pile was so huge.
And last night I saw the sun set over the water which is a novelty for those of us from the eastern states.

Recording Al Green

The Sydney Festival is on at the moment.  I recorded Al Green at the state theatre in Sydney.  That was a pretty exciting gig to do.
We set up in the dressing room under the stage and were able to drop the cables through a hole in the floor.  We used the Sadie LRX.  It was a pretty big lineup - 40 channels in all.  Drums, bass, guitar, 2 keyboard players, trumpet, trombone, saxaphone, 4 backing singers.

Here's some pics of the sound check.

I went for the 2 performances which was lucky because the first night he was in a bit of a bad mood.  But night 2 was great. I was able to go and watch bits of the show from side stage.  And on the second night, because I already had the levels set from the first night I was able to nick out the front for a bit to watch the show.  The only problems i had was a badly distorted vocoder on the first night because I didn't get a level check of it, but Al hated it so much he banned it from the show.  Then on the second night I had a bit of a scare when the show started and it appeared like we didn't have Al's mic coming through.  When I investigated I found out that his radio mic had had it's output level switched lower and no one had told me so the level coming into my recorder was way too low. 

Here's the channel list with mic choice and inserts.

AL GREEN INPUT LIST


1 KICK BETA 52 GATE 1

2 SNARE TOP BETA 57 COMP 1

3 SNARE BOT SM 57 GATE 2

4 HAT SM 81

5 RACK 1 BETA 98 GATE 3

6 RACK 2 BETA 98 GATE 4

7 FLR 1 BETA 98 GATE 5

8 FLR 2 BETA 98 GATE 6

9 OH SR SM 81

10 OH SL SM 81

11 CONGA 1 BETA 98 SUB GROUP 1&2 COMP 3-4

12 CONGA 2 BETA 98

13 BONGOS BETA 98

14 TIMBALES SM 57

15 CHIMES SM 81

16 TOYS SM 81 SUB GROUP !&2 COMP 3-4

17 BASS ACTIVE DI COMP 2

18 GTR SENN 609

19 GTR SENN 609

20 LESLIE L 57

21 LESLIE R 57

22 LESLIE LOW 421

23 PNO L AKG 414 OR DI

24 PNO R AKG 414 OR DI

25 MOTIF 8 ES L DI

26 MOTIF 8 ES R DI

27 TRITON L DI

28 TRITON R DI

29 MOTIF 8 L DI

30 MOTIF 8 R DI

31 RHOADES DI

32 VOCODER 58

33 SAX 421 COMP 5

34 TRUMPET 421 COMP 6

35 TROMBONE RE 20 COMP 7

36 COOP KSM 9 COMP 8

37 DEBRA KSM 9 COMP 9

38 RUBY KSM 9 COMP 10

39 AL GREEN WIRELESS KSM 9 COMP 11

40 AL GREEN SPARE WIRELESS KSM 9 COMP 12

holiday snaps

I've been holidaying and then got back to work for some busy times and was not thinking about blogging at all.  Here are some piccies I took on my holiday over Christmas up at the Gold Coast.

Mt Warning

At the beach

Christmas Recipe Meme

I don't even know what a meme is.  But I've been tagged for one.  By Ally.  By golly I hope I spelt that right.

I have to do this -

1. Link to the person who ‘tagged’ you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Post your favourite Christmas recipe – something traditionally festive or something that has become a tradition in your house.
4. Tag four people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged by commenting on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know the entry is posted on your blog.
7. Post your own Christmas recipe within a week of being tagged to keep this on the move.
 
 
Well, the thing is, we don't cook in our household at Christmas.  We eat seafood.  You buy it, as close to the day as possible, if not on the day, pack it on ice with collanders underneath so the water drips out and the seafood doesn't go soggy.  Then you arrange it on a platter.  Then you eat it.
 
The tricky thing is cutting up the crabs.  You have to get all the guts and gills out.  Luckily they have their own builtin can opener thing.  The flap undernneath - pull it up and then pull the top shell off.  Then cut the body down the middle and then run it under a tap to wash away the gills and yukky stuff.
 
Ok here's the recipe bit -
 
 
Cocktail Sauce to dip the prawns and crab in.
 
Some mayonnaise
Some tomato sauce
Some worcestershire sauce
Some lemon juice
Some pepper.
 
Mix it all up. 
Sorry, no quantities, but you use mostly mayonnaise and add bits of the other things till it tastes good.

Now the tricky bit is finding 4 people to tag who haven't already been tagged.  Ummm  Soph, Alison, Bonnie, and Nix.

Garage Hymnal at the ABC

I'm in the video too, with lots of dancing meters.

Gonks at the Chrissy Party

The world famous gonks performed again last week at our work Christmas party.  It was a hoot.  Who are the Gonks you ask?  If you haven't caught up with the phenomenon,the Gonks are the band I play in.  We started up in 2005 after a discussion one lunchtime between me, DB and JD in January that year.  We thought it would be a good idea to put a band together out of the pool of sound engineers and play at the next Christmas Party.  So we did.  The Gonks were formed and this was our 5th Christmas together.  No one has told us they are sick of us yet so we keep playing.  And we had a bunch of guest artists join us (other staff members of RN).  I'm the bass player.  And there were no cools shots of the band taken this year for me to show you.  They were either all out of focus or the lights were in the way.  So instead enjoy the photo of me and LM acting up for the camera.

Set lists were -

Overkill (Lazlo Baine)
Is She Really Going Out With Him (Joe Jackson)
Copperhead Road (Steve Earle)
Money (Beatles)
Total Control (Motels)
Ode To Billy Joe (Billy Jo Spears)
Delta Dawn (Helen Reddy)
Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
The Times They Are A Changin’
Dancing In The Street




Come Up & and See Me (Steve Harley and Cockeney Rebel)
Man, I Feel Like A Woman (Shania Twain)
The Ballroom Blitz (The Sweet)
Besame Mucho (Luis Miguel Armando Manzanero)
Moondance (Van Morrison)
I Got You (James Brown)
Living For The City (Stevie Wonder)
Take Me To The River (Talking heads)
Stray Cat Blues (Rolling Stones)




Boys In Town  (Divynils)
Don’t Stop (Fleetwood Mac)
634 5789
Black Magic Woman
Play That Funky Music
Knock On Wood
Pretty Flamingo (Manfredd Mann)
Better Be Home Soon (Crowded House)
Addicted To Love (Robert Palmer)
La Bamba

Where the Wild Things Are

I saw it.  Yes I did.  I was reluctant, but my friend was keen.  I really liked it.  She didn't.
It was total childhood fantasy. There were big furry creatures and problems were solved by wrecking things, throwing each other around and jumping on each other without anyone getting hurt.  It was fun.  The last half hour or so did get serious when furry creatures did start to get hurt and they got serious about the issues and how people should be treated.
The experience was even more enjoyable for me because the theatre was filled with young children and throughout the whole film you could hear little voices asking "why did the monster...?" and "what's he doing...?" and why this and why that.   I kept laughing because of the kids.  And then in the film the main boy character and the big furry thing howled at each other, so after that kids in the theatre were howling.  Very funny.

Musicals I have seen live (professional productions)

Phantom of the Opera (twice)
Les Miserables (twice)
Cats
The Secret Garden
Crazy For You
Pirates of Penzance
Singin in the Rain
The Lion King
The Boy From Oz
Billy Elliot
My Fair Lady
Wicked

Wicked

I saw Wicked the musical last night.  I liked it.  I like seeing musicals.  Wicked is the story of the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz, but it takes place before the story of the Wiazard of Oz.

It was at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney.  This is a beautiful old theatre.  It lookes like a castle inside and you look around in awe at the ornate decorations.  If you want to book tickets there - the dress circle upstairs is pretty good because it's pretty steep seating so if you are short you won't have your view blocked.  But don't get a box like we did.  Sounded good until we couldn't see half the show because of obstructions.

I liked - the storyline, amazing costumes, interesting characters, set, sound, good production.

What it lacked - amazing memorable choruses and dance routines.

It was a good show, but would have been better if it had some great music to remember it by.  And please don't cast famous people as a drawcard if they really aren't the most talented people available.  Like the Idol reject Rob Mills, who had one of the lead roles.  He can sing in tune and his acting was ok.  But he wasn't fantastic, and he can't dance.  I bet there are unknown musical theatre performers out there who could have done a much better job.

Mixing Garage Hymnal

Last week I had a very short amount of time to mix the Garage Hymnal sessions for the broadcast on ABC.  Yes I was recording them for work purposes, not just for fun.  They'll be broadcast on our religious music program this Friday night at 2105.  Radio people always talk in 24hr time.  We are clever in that way.  Click here to find your fequency to listen to them.

Anyway, because we are churning out so much stuff all the time we don't spend heaps of time doing stuff.  If I was mixing this session for an album release or something, I would have spent up to a day per song for mixing.  Not because I'm slow, it just takes that long to get all the details right.  But for this radio broadcast, I spent a day and a half on 7 songs.  Then I spent a couple of hours mastering it.  So it's a little rough, but it's meant to sound live anyway, otherwise you might as well just stick on the album.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out considering the time limitations.  I would like to go back in sometime and do a bit of polishing, just for my own satisfaction.

So, some tricks in the mix.  Don't tell the drummer, but I replaced the kick drum with a sample, thanks to the Drumagog plugin.  It's really good because it replaces things sentitively and takes into account changes in dynamics, so it's not all the same level hits.  It follows how the player played it.

Reverbs I used were the M6000 - 4 different engines going at once, plus the Lexicon 224.  It is a bit of a luxury having so much expensive reverb to choose from.

The SSL automation is really nice and easy to use.  And because the desk is fully digital I can go abck and recall all my mixes and tweak them anytime.  The only problem is finding studio availability.

I had a bit of trouble getting the bottom end right becasue this was the first time I've mixed on the new speakers we have in the studio.  they are Dynaudio Acoustics Airs.  These are really nice speakers, but I just wasn't used to them so the bass is a bit out of whack.  I really want to go back and fix that especially.

Here's some more photos from the session on the GH facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Garage-Hymnal/9949777114?ref=mf#/album.php?aid=133102&id=9949777114

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.