Vic Simms

Last week Vic Simms' recording of "The Loner" was added to the National Film and Sound Archives Sounds of Australia. I personally find this significant because I recorded Vic in 2007, for a special recording of some the Loner tracks which he has hardly revisited in the last 30 years. Vic is an indigenous Australian who became a recording artist at 15 years of age. In 1973 he found himself in jail and RCA took a mobile recording unit in and he recorded "The Loner" album. Click here for more info on Vic.

And to hear the program we made about the ABC recording sessions with Vic talking about his experiences and bits of the recordings I made click here. Unfortunately the online audio is a bit distorted, not my fault.

audio language lesson 3

The audio language is filled with a lot of numbers. I've already taught you about 87's, 57's and 58's.

Microphone manufacturers love using numbers to name their mics. I think they should use names like Nigel, Herman and Nancy. But no, instead we all have to try and remember a bunch of numbers. Here are some more you should know, which are standard additions to studio microphone cupboards.

This lovely egg is the AKG D112. Just call it the D112. Commonly used for micing kick drums.

This is the Sennheiser 421. It sounds great on toms for a really fat sound. Great for brass as well. Just call it a 421.

This the AKG C451 B. This is used commonly for micing hi hats, and sounds great on strings as it's got really nice high end detail. Drop all the letters and call it a 451. You can see people singing into older models in old 80's film clips too, but they are not commonly used as vocal mics these days. In fact people would look at you rather strangely if you stuck it up as a vocal mic.

And finally, the AKG 414. There are several different models, but we just call them 414's. Great for anything - vocals, acoustic instruments, guitar amps, floor toms, overhead mics for drum kits.

Camera Comandos

I was meant to post these ages ago. This is the Autumn edition of the Camera Commandos outing. We went to Carriageworks for the Finders Keepers markets. It wasn't a hugely successful day. But I got a couple of keepers.
Challenge 1 - shoot anything out of context
Challenge 2 - shoot triangles



I just liked this.


Triangles? Circles?


Triangles

Triangles

Cooking With Sound Part 2

Today's lesson - mud.

Cooking with Sound

Earlier this year I posted some behind the scene pics of making a short film which I did the filming of. Well it's finally up on youtube. Pick the shot where we forgot to turn the lights on. What a bunch of amateurs! And spot my cameo appearance at the end.

photos - walsh bay, Sydney

I took these when I had some time out from the Sydney Writers Festival back in May.

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?"