Christmas in October

Last night the world famous Gonks played at the earliest Christmas party in history.  We were rock stars as usual.  Actually we were pretty rotten.
The set list was -



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I Saw Her Standing There

Play That Funky Music

Pretty Flamingo

Knock On Wood

Midnight Hour

Don't Stop

Is She Really Going Out With Him

I Got You (I Feel Good)

Make Me Smile

Moondance

Dancing In The Street



Brass In Pocket

Overkill

I Shot The Sheriff

Living For The City

Take Me To The River

Boys In Town

Superstition

Eagle Rock

Listen To The Music

Call Me

Sultans Of Swing

Collard

Last week for CFs birthday we went to the Vanguard and saw Collard Greens and Gravy, a blues trio who play heavy old timey, Mississipi style blues.  The Vangueard is a great venue - small and plenty of vibe.  we were upstairs where the air con was freezing. Here's a taste of the band.

The Swell Season

Yeah I know this happened weeks ago, but I've got a bit of catching up to do on my life experiences.  This blogging thing is after all so that I can remember what has happened in my life.  So, easter monday at the Opera House from the very back row right in the middle I watched the Swell Season. I loved it.  It was one of those concerts I wasn't sure how much I was going to like it, but I did.  Ali has written things about the concert that I can't be bothered writing. In short, they sounded Irish, because most of them are, so the music has that Irish sound about it.  The fiddler from the Frames did a fiddly solo which I loved. There was too much kick drum in the mix, probably because we were on the back wall.  But you'd think the opera house would have perfect acoustics.  Haha wink wink. NOT.  UUUmm ... they write nice songs and play well.  If you want a taste of who they are, watch the movie "Once".  And the bit in the movie where they are in the recording studio take the cassette of their recording for a ride in the car to hear how it sounds in the car stereo - stuff like that really does happen.  We used to go on many a car trip around the block to listen to the mix. And here's one you can watch on youtube, not the whole band, but still cool.




Check out his totally shredded guitar.

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.

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

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

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)
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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

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.

Chick Bass Player - It's in My Blood!

Picture posted on Eeesti Stiil. Taken in 1968 in Estonia.  I'm probably not related to them, but you never know!  It's just cool to see female bass players, especially from 40 years ago.

Bo Kaspers Orkester

This is one of my favourite bands.  They are Swedish and you have to order their CDs from Sweden.  I found out about them when I worked in Sweden for a month in 1998 on a magic show.   Their music ranges in styles from jazz, funk, pop and folk. They are a little bit confused, but I like them. This video is of a kind of chilled out jazz kind of song. Of course i have no idea what he is singing about. Hope it's not rude.

Top 5 concerts I've been to

1. Dave Matthews Band 2007
2. Herbie Hancock 2007
3. Hothouse Flowers 2006
4. Sting 1993
5. Stevie Wonder 2008

Pocket Violin

I'd love to get one of these.

Click here.

Top 5 albums

According to Ben it's Top 5 week.  Even though it's Thursday already.  Aren't you supposed to start a theme week on Monday?

Anyway I thought I'd join in the fun.

Here are my Top 5 music albums

1. "Songs From the Rain" - Hothouse Flowers
2. "Bring on the Night" - Sting
3. "Crime of the Century" - Supertramp
4. "Kind of Blue" - Miles Davis
5. "Busted Stuff" - Dave Matthews Band

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.

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?

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.

Mixing the Messiah

I had 2 days in P63, so I loaded all the files up on Pro tools and had a listen. (for the report on the recording process seee this post...click here

Here was my dilemma - the spaced omnis sounded better in stereo and MS pair sounded better in mono. And we broadcast in mono, but will podcast in stereo, and when we go to digital radio soon we will be stereo. So which do I use?
I ended up using the MS pair and lushing it up as much as possible. It was a lot drier than the omnis, so I added some Lexicon 224 rich chamber. I boosted a bit of top end around 5k upwards. And added a bit of bass.
The only spot mic I used in the mix was the double bass.
And then I mixed in the choir mics, which doubled as soloists mics. These had to be mixed in to varying degrees as the different soloists were not all the same loudness. It was interesting how little of the vocals came through the main stereo pair. They were there, but nowhere near enough clarity and level, so it was good to have the vocal mics there.
I listened to several different recordings of the messiah. I heard one really awfull one where they mixed the vocals so up front it sounded like they were in a small studio. I wanted mine to still sound like they were part of the same acoustic space as the orchestra, so i turned up the mics, but no so much that they took over.
I put some light compression of the vocal mics, just to keep a bit of control, but apart from that, being a classical recording, I let the dynamics of the music do their thing.
The only other adjustments i needed to make were the few sections the timpani played in. I had flatten the bottom end out because it was too full on with the timpani. Oh actually i did compress the orchestra little bit in these sections too.
I recorded the stereo mix back onto protools. Basically I just let it run once i got my balance right, stopping occasionally to fix levels if needed.


Piccies below - this first one is the stereo bar.
The 2 outer mics are the MKH20 omnis.
Working your way inwards, the next 2 are the MKH40 cardioids. See how their capsules touch the omnis so that you could wind some of these signals in with the omnis and not have any phase problems. This could give you some more directivity if the omnis were sounding too washed out. But I didn't end up using these at all. If I had gone with the omnis, I wouldn't have used any of the cardioid, because the room was surprisingly dry for a big old church.
Then in the middle, you can't see so well, there is MKH30 fig8 sitting on top of MKH40 making the MS pair.




You can see the 4 mics across the choir. That's not all of the choir members. The spacing looks a bit strange from this angle.
That's the harpsichord in the middle infront of the conductor.


You can see the chamber orchestra in this one in front of the choir.