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.

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.

I forgot to mention....

A couple of weeks ago I had to go and make a recording of PJ O'Rourke speaking at Luna Park.  The reason I mention this is not because I thought he was especially interesting, but because there was food provided for the media.  That's pretty exciting.  It was a dinner event, and they actually thought to give us some food too. It wasn't a full on meal, just gourmet sandwiches, but still, better than nothing.

Ironically, PJ is a conservative political satirist, and the only media who showed up were ABC, which is predominantly left wing, (me - for Radio National, someone from news/current afairs, and the 7:30 report.)

Not saying that I'm left wing.  I'm not one way or the other.  I just vote for whoever seems least idiotic at the time.

my free feed

I went grocery shopping today and for a treat I went to Harris Farm Markets which I don't go to all the time because it is expensive, but the food is so much better and they have really nice cheeses and my favourite yoghurt.

Anyway it was worth it today because I had a full on feed.  They had sample stations all through the store and I tried everything.

I started off with some pineapple, which I ended up buying because it was soooo nice.

Then I had some sausage, which I didn't buy.  Then I had 2 samples of yoghurt.  I was going to buy some anyway, but I made the lady feel like I was buying it because of the free samples.  Then I had an olive.  Then I had a mouthful of gorgonzola, and then a mouthful of some other white cheese, but without mould.  The gorgonzola was definitely better.  Then I had a sample of steak.  And for desert I had half a mini cupcake.

Then when I went through the checkout I pulled up the checkout guy for scanning something twice.  He was convinced he hadn't so I paid and waited for the receipt to come out and I was able to prove that he had.  So then everyone behind me had to wait ages while they sorted it out and I got my $2 refund.  

That's my tip - alway keep an eye on the scanning - it's amazing how you can end up paying for more than you are getting.  It's happened to me several times at various supermarkets.  Check your receipt before you leave.

photos

I did a walk around my neighbourhood with the 70-300 lens JH lent me. Love the long lens. I shot in RAW and played around with different B&W filters later on. This is great for finding the best contrast to make the B&W more striking.

Neighbourhood Crime update

So, the big muscly bike dude from the garage in the lane behind me...umm...well...apparently he is now in jail for murder. He killed the guy, put the body in a big tool box, put it on a boat on the back of a tip truck, right outside my bedroom window and I was oblivious to the whole thing. Thankfully other neighbours saw the boat and had to give statements. It's good how police catch criminals hey?

James Hunter

The night after doing the Messiah recording LM and I had to set up in 227 for a live recording with an audience of a british git called James Hunter. I'd never heard of him but apparently he is quite popular, doing 60's style blues/rock.

I was mixing the PA and LM was mixing the recording. So we had to set up a PA. Dig were also there with 3 cameras to film the event.

James was just doing a solo act with his Electric guitar, singing and stomping his foot.

The audience came in at 6:30 and he started playing at about 6:40. All was going along nicely and then a bit before 7:00 he says "thanks for coming this is my last one". And it was all over. Everyone was looking a bit surprised when he walked out. He came back for an encore, but yep the whole thing was over by about 7. That was really the shortest gig I have ever seen. It was completely bizarre. Not much of a night out for the audience.

We ate the leftovers from the green room afterwards.

Recording Handel's Messiah

This has to be one of the highlights of my career.  The performance took place at St James Anglican Church, King St Sydney.  This is a very traditional old church with a paid church choir.  They augmented the choir with some extra singers and hired a bunch of Baroque musicians.  I didn't know that the Messiah has been performed with lots of different size ensembles.  The original performance took place in Dublin with a small baroque ensemble in something like 1742.  This performance was a similar version, with only about 6 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, 1 bass, 2 trumpets, timpani, organ and harpsicord.  There were only about 20 people in the choir.  Some recordings have hundreds of voices and a huge orchestra.

So after chatting to Classic FM engineers it became evident that this was a much bigger job than i expected.  A stereo pair just wasn't going to cut it.  I multitracked it so it gave me a chance to experiment with several different mic techniques.

So here's what I had - 

On a stereo bar just behind the conductor were a pair of spaced omnis -  MKH20's

Plus a pair or ORTF cardioids - MKH 40's

Plus an ms pair - MKG 30 fig 8 and and MKH 40 cardiod.

This gave a choice between the spaced omnis and the ms pair as my main stereo pair.  The cardiods were there to wind into the mix if I went with the spaced omnis.  The purpose being to give a bit more direct sound if needed.  The capsules were as close to the omnis as possible in order to keep good phase.

Then I had 4 MKH40s spaced across in front of the choir, one in front of each section of the choir.  The 2 middle ones were angled to pick up the soloists who moved into position in front of these mics.

I tried putting 2 outriggers as suggested, position out wide in front of the orchestra but found that these didn't really add much except noise.

I put a spot mic on the organ, timpani, and double bass.

we set up out the back in the vestry with a 16 channel Allen and Heath desk recording onto a Mackie HDR and monitoring with a little set of Genelecs.

The performance wasn't perfect but it was really good.  The musicians were spot on.  The only thing that let it down were some of the soloists.  But they are really difficult pieces to sing.

And most importantly, did we get a free feed?  Yes!  We got soup under the church.  There was a choice of chicken or fish soup.  I chose chicken and it definitely had pieces of chicken in it, but it tasted like fish.  I think whoever made the soup got them a bit mixed up.

making a photo banner

On my to do list.
how long will it take me?

The Singing Revolution

Makes me proud of my half Estonian-ness. Watch the preview.

In the studio last week

First I had the stomping banjo player. Old man luedeke.
His banjo didn’t have a resonator, it was just an open backed thing. He had his own mic installed inside. It sounded quite good, but I mixed in a bit of My microtech geffel from in front about a foot away just to add a bit of air. He was also stomping his foot as part of the sound, but on our parquetry floor just sounded like a bit of a slap, so I pointed a mic at his foot and wound out the top end, so it sounded like more of a thud than a slap.

Then I had Jenny Lewis. She turned up with her acoustic guitar, and another acoustic guitar player and a lap steel player. This is how you trick the engineer – sound check the song with 2 acoustic guitars, both with a blend of pickup and mic. Then when you go live to air, only have one guitar and don’t plug in the pickup. So I went from 4 channels of acoustic in sound check, down to 1 channel on air, without any warning. Yep thanks for that one. She has a great voice.

Neighbours

On Sunday my next door neighbour held a BBQ for the neighbours to say thankyou for putting up with his renovations. It was such a nice afternoon. I met neighbours I’d never seen before. Generally people just keep to themselves, so it was really nice to meet all the people who live around me. Everyone was saying what a great idea it was to get together and that we should do it again.

I thoroughly recommend it. Hold a street party. Get to know your neighbours.

The main talk of the afternoon was regarding the alleged murder that had happened behind my house. Behind me is a lane and directly on the other side is a garage. Late one night in February I noticed people in blue overalls in the garage. Which was not normal. Usually there were about 7 motorbikes and an absolutely huge muscly guy in there. He really was the biggest guy I’ve ever seen in my life, to the point where he looks absolutely ridiculous. Some serious steroid action going on there. But the bikes were gone and instead there were forensic police scouring every inch of the garage. I turned off my lights and spied on them through a crack in the blind. It was like watching CSI. They were picking up things with tweezers and there were chalk marks with numbers placed next to them on the ground. A photographer came and took photos of the chalk marks. Then they bagged up some rubber mats.

Then we got letters in the mail from local police asking if we’d seen a boat parked in the lane. I didn’t know if it’s just neighbourly gossip, but one of the guys at the BBQ seemed to have the knowledge that there had been a murder and the body had been hidden in the boat and then it got dumped in the ocean. Then yesterday I found a business card in our mailbox from the homicide squad asking to call them. I haven’t yet…

So yeah, get to know your neighbours. But be nice to them.

morning

This morning was one of those time I wish I had a camera with me. I had to go down to the Opera House early this morning to record a talk during a breakfast meeting. The sunrise was incredible. I don’t think I can recall a time when I have actually watched the sun come up over the horizon. I really don’t like getting up early. But this was worth it. But no photos unfortunately. The sky was all pink and orange and grey. I did get a Danish though! Remember, free food makes me very happy.

Blue mountains music festival

2 weekends ago DB and I went up the Blue Mountains music Festival to do a live to air broadcast. The plan was to record a duo from England, While and Matthews, at 7. Then at 8:05pm go live with and Australian Folk/rock group called Bluehouse. Then at 8:30 ish we would playback some of the recording of While and Matthews till 9pm. It was a great plan, except that there were huge problems with the PA, so While and Matthews didn’t start playing till 7:45, meaning that there was no way that Bluehouse were going to be ready to play at 8:05 and we wouldn’t have enough recorded material by then of While and Matthews to play at the top of the show. So after some mild panic, we cued up a recording of a recording made the previous weekend at another festival to play at 8:05. In the meantime we recorded While and Matthews and edited up a section to play back at 8:30. Finally Bluehouse got on stage and then at 8:45 we crossed to them live to play out the rest of the show. So, not what we planned but it all worked out fine.

We split all the channels from stage so we could do an independant mix on an Allen and Heath console. Then the mix output was split 3 ways. The first split was to get to the ISDN encoder. This is a little thing we call the Glensound, which looks like a mixer and has an ISDN output for sending the signal back to the ABC master control. We had a line run over to the Clarendon otel, which Telstra had set up for us. Well, they installed the line, but we had to run it over to the backstage area, so DB was climbing the ladder hoisting the cable in the air so that it was off the ground and not in danger of tripping anyone up.
Split 2 went to the laptop with Wavelab for recording the music mix. Split 3 went to a portable hard disk recorder, to be a back up recorder and also to be primary recorder while we were playing off wavelab.

The presenter was backstage with us doing live announcements. DB looked after the music mix and I looked after the broadcast mix.

We stayed the night at the Clarendon motel. It was really nice to not have to drive back after the show. We got to pack up and then sit and relax over a glass of wine and not rush to get back.


The back view of the mess we made.


Starting from the left - laptop with Wavelab,
Little black box - sound devices USB interface for getting the audio into the laptop,
CD player,
Glensound,
underneath the glensound - rack of compressors and lexicon reverb.
Allen and heath mixer.

audio verbal diarrhea

I need to draw attention to a comment on my previous post....

"I know a couple of guys who spend way too much time obsessing over their sound gear, I definitely don't want to use the word U87 around them as that would trigger a long and boring brain dump about every time they've used this or that mic until they're satisfied that they've established that they know more than me. Is that part of the culture because it's happened to me more than once!"

Can I say, I totally relate to this. I can't stand it when guys go on and on about sound gear, to try and prove how much they know. I'm just not interested. So, please tell me you own a U87, but do not dare to try and tell me about every single piece of gear that you have set eyes on and which studios they were in. I get bored to tears.

Is it part of the culture? Well I think it's a guy thing. The amount of times I have had to leave a room because of guys on this tell all mission thinking they really have to prove how good they are. I've never met a girl like this. Although most girls couldn't care about audio in the slightest. But I do know other female sound engineers and they just get on with their work and don't worry about trying to verbalise their skills or bore me to tears about the tech specs of some rubbish new piece of equipment that has just been released. I hate it whe guys give you a big speel about the jobs they've done and make out that it was such a huge gig and go on and on and on and on. I think if you have to tell everyone how good you are you can't be that good. Let your work speak for itself.


End of rant.

audio language

I have often said that I quite regret the fact that i can't speak a foreign language. But then Irealised tonight that I do. I speak the audio language. I was out tonight recording a lecture -not a very challenging gig, but part of the job. Anyway when i told the woman from the venue that i was taking a line out of the PA she freaked out a bit saying she didn't want me pulling any cables out. So I said "no, when i say i'm taking a line out I really mean I'm putting one in", which really didn't help the situation. She was completelt confused. So I had to show her the cable I had plugged in to the PA system, which was the line out I was taking. Are you all confused now?

So that's how I got to thinking that we really do speak a different language sometimes. I might say to you, "Gee it's all sounding a bit wet, and I'm not sure about the 421 on the hats. Deifinitely use the 421 on rack but put a 451 on hats and put a 414 on the floor. Wind up some sparkle on the pultec and widen the image a bit. And I think we need to put a pad on the DI and get rid of the pod and bring me a vox. Oh and the vox track (not like the vox from the previous sentence) needs to be in your face a bit more so squash it as much as possible without making it pump." Got it?


So I'm going to start teaching you my language bit by bit.
First some basic vocab.
Mic = microphone (easy one)
XLR - the proper name for the connector on a mic cable.
XLR cable = microphone cable
Neumann (pronounced noi-man) - German company that make really nice, expensive microphones. It's normal to use the word Neumann as a noun in it's own right - eg. "have you got any Neumanns?"
U87 - a standard studio microphone made by the Neumann company. Quite expensive, so it's quite good to say you have U87. No need to say Neumann U87. Just say U87 or even just 87 and we all know what you mean. eg. "I used a U87 on lead vocal."
This is what one looks like.






Ok that's enough for lesson 1. stay tuned for more next time.

Films

Today's top films to see are - 

The Italian - A Russian film about a 6 year old orphan who is about to be adopted by an Italian couple but decides to run away in an attempt to find his real mother.

Cool Hand Luke - Paul Newman plays a guy who ends up in jail for cutting the heads off parking meters.  Shows his time working in chain gangs - great acting , great script, great photography.

This is England -  a 12 year boy in northern england in the early 80's joins a gang of skinheads after he is repeatedly picked on because of his trousers.  They are a friendly bunch to hang out with until the ringleader gets out of jail.  It's a pretty rough film, but so are the lives of many people.  It's based on the real experiences of the director.

Slumdog Millionaire - this really was worth all the awards it got - Jamil who grew up in the slums of India goes on "Who wants to be a millionaire" and does really well.  The movie tells the story of how he happened to know all the answers to the questions.  Great storytelling...  

I started working my way through Federico Fellini films after hearing an album by an Australian band called The Umbrellas who did a recording of arrangements of the music to Fellini films written by Nino Rota.  That was long sentence. Anyway I was loving the music so much and I have never seen a Fellini film before, so now i'm on way...

The first one i saw was La Strada.  This is about a young woman who is sold by her mother to a travelling entertainer to be his assistant.  Interesting story, good acting.

Then I tried watching 8 1/2, and unfortunately it didn't survive my 30 minute rule - that being, if i can't get into movie within 30 minutes, I give up, it's not worth wasting my time.  I know I am at risk of missing some good things by employing this rule, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.  So 8 1/2 was just way too abstract for me and subtitles were so hard to read I just couldn't get into it.  All the reviews go on about how much of a masterpiece this film is, but I guess I'm just not arty or intellectual enough for it.

Which leads me to the dud film of the week - "Dingo".  An Australian film with Colin Friels and Miles Davis about a young jazz trumpeter in outback WA who dreams of going to Paris to be a professional muso.  Sounds like the type of story I'd like, but the movie was just awful.  The acting was pathetic for a start.  The only reason it survived my 30 minute rule was because the music was so good.  So i stuck out the whole movie, being completely infuriated by it, but enjoying the music.  The first shot is Colin playing his trumpet and it was immediately obvious he was miming.  Pathetic.  If you are going to act in a role, make it look genuine.  (the guys who played the band memebers in "Control" were not musicains, but they learned to play their instruments so that they looked genuine - that's proper acting.  I'm not expecting colin to suddenly become a jazz trumpeter, but at least learn to blow it and learn to play something so that you look like you are actually blowing the thing).  Then Miles Davis' character does an impromptu concert on the tarmac of this outback town.  He's in a 6 piece band, and the soundtrack plays this piece which sounds like a 30 piece big band playing in a studio.  Pathetic.  How about making it sound like a 6 piece band playing outside to match the pictures?  What director would do that?  If you are so ignorant about music that you can't see a problem with this, then don't make a music film.  And, love you miles davis, but you really can't act.  If someone can't act, don't cast them in a film.