Finally back at it!!!!!!!

Yes!!! Finally I'm back at it, but what is it? Well, both blogging and the education game. After completing the BTEC I spent the summer months generally working and shamefully doing very little with sound. But now I've just commenced studying a Foundation Degree in Sound Creation Technology at De Montfort University (undertaken at Leicester College) and here I am to blog about it, along with some other bits and bobs I've been up to.

I'm only three weeks into the course and currently there seems little difference from when I was on the BTEC, I'm still studying at Leicester College and it's with practically the same set of tutors. There is so less assignments to do but they certainly seem more intense.

I've already made a start on the recording module by scouting for bands and artists to record with Mr Bryn James. The first mission took us on a trip to Leicester's legendary venue the Shed. A place I haven't been to since I last played there about 10 years and I'm afraid to say that the place hasn't changed a bit in all those years. Unfortunately the first mission was unsuccessful but we did get to see a great singer at the Looking Glass called Amy Wyke. After a small amount of Internet scouring and another scouting trip, we've hopefully secured our first recording artist. So recording should commence in the next week or two, posts to follow.

Last week was busy one for live sound with me being the sound operator for the Little Theatre's last production "Entertaining Angels" and also engineering (amongst other things) at Leicester's Oxjam Festival. The day was a fun and adventurous day with practically everything going wrong us and with the mixing console located on the side of the stage, half of my day was spent standing amongst the crowd making signals to Bryn (located on stage with the mixing console) instructing which instrument levels I think should be raised or lowered. But later on in the day I had to engineer another stage, so that  gave me a chance to get some good, lonesome, hands-on experience with the (lets say) more professional setup.

So that all contributes towards the 30 hours i need to complete the work-based learning task in the business module and there's more work to come this week with me crewing at a couple of the "special" shows at the Little Theatre, but I'll speak more about them later in the week.

Time for a beer, me thinks!

The Long Overdue

As the title suggests, this post is undoubtedly long overdue.

So here is a brief rundown of what i've been up to since the last post:

• Finished College.
• Sat stage side at Ray Davies's show at the Royal Festival Hall in London, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Crouch End Festival Chorus.
• Passed Apple's Logic 101 course, becoming an Apple certified pro level one.
• Did a bit of crew work on the Little Theatre's production of Brassed Off, which was an awesome show. 
• Became 26 years of age.
• Was saddened by the deaths of Ryan Dunn and Peter Falk.

There has been one or two adventures i really should have dedicated an entire post to, especially the Ray Davies show. But i'm a fool and didn't. I'm Also in the market for getting a Tascam 488 Mkii (Look here), it'll be great to have a crack a producing some 8-track cassette recordings.

Album i'm currently listening to is the White Stripes second album De Stijl. It's noisy, distorted and has rhythm issues, but it's an awesome album so go listen.

Book i'm currently reading is George Orwell's classic, 1984.

Here is this,

Listen and enjoy!!!

My Losers Speech

Tuesday saw Richard and I pitch our business plan to a "Dragons-Den style panel" in the final stage of Leicester College's Freeth Cartwright sponsorship award 2011, competing against three other hopefuls.

Yes and as the title suggests, we were unfortunately unsuccessful in our bid. Our downfall was most likely our market research, but didn't help when the presentation took a turn for the worse when the video and audio samples integrated into the presentation, wouldn't play. So the panel got to watch all my actions on the big screen, while i frantically searched through my files for the original video and audio files. I wouldn't have minded, but rich and i purposefully went into the college early to make sure all would work with the presentation, which it did. However, it seemed that the media player used on the system was a totally different version and it made us look a bit daft.

Despite not winning and with all the troubles encountered during the presentation, there are lots to be taken from the whole experience, as well as some great advice for the panel members. It's also pleasing to think that we did beat 30 other applicants to become runners-up. Which isn't too bad i guess and it shows that there is some potential in the ideas Richard and i have.

The full £5000 prize went to a gentleman with some form of photography business (I'm in the process of contacting the winning, congratulating him and also getting the the full picture of what his project is based around), so good luck to him.

Bottom line, Richard and i are failures.

Whats next? 

Well, i was hoping to talk about the guest mix with Paul Tipler, but unfortunately he had to cancel because of the good old train system, but he should be being rescheduled for sometime in September, so hopefully I'll catch him them. Sunday should see an exciting event take place, but I'm tell all after it's happened.

Aside from that, all my efforts are going into swatting up for the Logic 101 Apple Certification course i intend to complete next week and with college finishing in a week or two, its time to find a job.

I'll leave you with this:

So, my third post in three days!!!

So what’s been going on over the past month? Well it’s been an extremely busy one, with college work taken up most of my time. But there have also been some interesting events throughout the month. My two last posts detailed the two of the larger happenings, but other interesting happens included finally getting a chance to hear the words of wisdom as preached by Andrew Dubber. Speaking of the evolution of communicational mediums, his thoughts on how the Internet should be used and his loathing of MySpace. I have also been teacher assisting on a 4-week HCFE Level one music tech course, which was certainly a new experience and one that took me out of my comfort zone.

What’s this month have install for me?

Well tomorrow I’ve been given the opportunity to sit in on a “Guest-Mix” with Paul Tipler, whos an engineer/producer who has worked with the likes of Squeeze, Placebo, Idlewild, Elastica, to name a few. So it’s going be immense to see how an industry engineer tackles a mix from scratch.

Wednesday, Richard and I are preparing a business plan presentation for the Freeth and Cartwright sponsorship. If won, the £5000 prize would certainly help us take our ideas for location recordings onto the next level.

At the end of the month I’ll hopefully be taking the Apple Certification Logic 101 course. After going through the example questions, it became obvious to me that the course will be both good and worryingly in-depth. So I need to dust of the old revision cap and do me some reading!

Amongst all that, I aim to indulge oneself in the art of music creation with the Ally Barber and I think I should also find a job, as this poor student life isn’t all that fun.

Recording Leicester Symphony Orchestra

On the 21st of May, Dickie and I recorded the Leicester Symphony Orchestra at the De Montfort Hall, assisted on-stage by the theatre’s sound engineer, whom was introduced to us as “Scooby”. The recording was conducted using 4 mics, swung from a lighting bar in the following manner:

·      A spaced-pair of two AKG C414 with Omni patterns, hanging approximately 8 meters above the orchestra and in-line with the front of the stage.

·      A coincident pair of Neumann KM184’s, center stage and again hanging at the same height and in line with the other mics.

Basking in the glory of the moment!

Our recording rig consisted of a Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 and a Macbook Pro running Logic Pro 9. With the session being recorded at 24-bit, 176.4kHz (Sample Rate), I was wondering whether my little MacBook would live up to expectations, but she did us proud and ran without any signs of stress.

Now I'm certainly a fan of classical music, but this was the first time I had ever witnessed a 70-piece orchestra live and for Richard and me to be the only other people present in the auditorium during their practice, was an insanely brilliant feeling. There were two practice sessions before the show, so this gave us a chance to set our levels and ready ourselves for the evening performance.

Me Watching Levels (with an immense looking side-parting)

The program for the night included:

·      Elgar’s  Polonia

·      Elgar’s  Cello Concerto, Featuring guest cello soloist David Cohen

·      Saint-Saens Symphony 3 (Organ)

With this being the first (of hopefully many) occasion that we have recorded an orchestra, we were slightly anxious about our levels clipping given how dynamic an orchestra is. But the recording ran smoothly and it was certainly an awe-inspiring sight to see the orchestra in all their glory.

The Orchestra during a practice session

Listening to the recordings once getting them home, they sound amazing and I’ll be posting some samples as soon as we get clearance. So a big thank you must go to the Leicester Symphony Orchestra for allowing us to record the show, it was certainly a great opportunity for us.  

So now it’s on to the next challenge, which is to conduct a recording in a church or cathedral and hopefully capture some immense acoustics.

(Two posts in two days! I’m getting better)

The Mutech Show

After months of planning, the CD launch party finally happened. The event was held at the Upper Brown Street Theatre (the old Phoenix Arts Center) on the 19^th of May. The crew arrived around 2pm and we started the day with a short team talk and  Elliot handed out awesome crew t-shirts he had made especially for the event. The crew then set about their duties, setting up the stage, instruments, mics and FOH desk in a double quick time. The sound-check went a little pear shaped, but we wouldn’t learn anything if it always ran smoothly.

The show was scheduled to start at 7pm but due to lack of audience members, the start of the show was delayed by 20 minutes. This gave us a little more time to round people up and throw them into the auditorium. The show generally ran ok, although it would have been nice if we had attracted more of a bigger crowd. But I guess that’s the biggest trick to running a successful live music event.

Band of the night had to be the Tall Orders. Not only because I was engineering the sound, but also because they have a stage presence that I’ve never witnessed in an unsigned band before.

Overall I think the show was a success, we didn’t sell all of the CDs but we managed to raise £115 for charity, so that’s never a bad thing. The whole project has undoubtedly been a great experience and it has certainly amplified my ambition to run a record label, although I don’t think I’d too keen on running a live event again.

Read other crew members thoughts about the event at Jake Brennan and Peter Collins blog pages.

All of the Mutech crew, in fetching t-shirts!

It's been a while!

Well, I've not been sticking to my promise of blogging more, but nevertheless here I am. So easter has come and gone ever so fast, with me spending most of my time in a dark room writing thousands of words for college projects.

The Mutech Records CD launch party is only two weeks away, but there is still lots to do. The CDs have been duplicated and printed, cases arrived mid-last week and the artwork for the CD insert is currently on it's way to the printers. So by the end of next week, the product for the event will hopefully be completely manufactured. Next job is heavy promotion and sorting the crew rota for the event. Managing the project is a challenging affair, especially with 11 loose cannons as colleagues. However, it's still a lot of fun and i'm sure everything will turn out good in the end.

On other fronts, the Wheelband and I are through to the final round of a competition-like-thing ran through the college. If we win, it will see us receive up to £5000 to fund the lauch of our proposed location recording business. So fingers and toes crossed and hopefully the business will be launched towards the latter half of the year.

Right then, i'm off for now. But i'll leave you with something practical and something entertaining. 

First of all, an instructional video on how to create project templates in Logic Pro. 

http://t.co/yjvl6gT

And now for the entertainment, i'll leave you with this.

Stress be gone!

It's been a stressful week, but it's been a productive and worth while one.

I delivered an awesome presentation on analogue and digital audio principles, survived a near fatal bus crash, finally completed GIRP (pointless addictive game) and have continued working towards Mutech's CD launch, which manly consisted of a team building exercise in one of Leicester's finest student bars.

Check out Jake's blog for further development of artwork for Mutech.

Time for a relaxing Friday evening with Alley Barber.

For anyone that cares go check out this site, it has links for a few free plug-ins. Nothing special but there is a half decent frequency analyser amongst them.

Album of the week, is Metric's excellent "Fantasies"

Enjoy

More Of The Same!

Well, I've not kept to my promise of regularly blogging, but it certainly has been another long week.

The Little Theatre has just finished a run of Three Sisters. The show contained two visual scene changes and so more crew members were required to assist than on a usual play.  I managed to work on 5 or 6 of the dress rehearsals/shows, so a valuable experience was gained.

Thursday night, myself along with Ricardo, Roland and Luis ran the sound for the yearly LEBC fashion show, held at the Athena in Leicester. As well as controlling the sound, we were also in control visual effects. The show was certainly run as professionally as could be, with the music run by iTunes and the visuals being run from the shitest windows laptop, it was certainly challenging task to keep on cue. To add to that some of the PDF's and DVD given to us by the acts were a mission in themselves to get working and one act didn't even provide us with music, Paul's iPod to the rescue. However, the show was a success overall with only a few minor sound hiccups. 

Right, time for college work so I'll leave you with this.

Time to snap out of my online laziness!!!!!!!!!!

It's been a while since my last post, admittedly I have been busy but that's no excuse for not keeping this blog updated.

So what have I been up to.

Well, the past couple of weeks I've been running the sound for Billy Liar at the Little Theatre. The show was fairly simple to run, with there only being 14 sound cues during the show. But the experience was invaluable and i'm looking forward to running another. Here's a review!

More exciting recording news as Ricardo Wheelband has just secured us an opportunity to record the Leicester Symphony Orchestra at their upcoming show at the De Montfort Hall. So we're super excited and currently planning how to conduct he recording.

Educational wise, my college class is currently working together to put on a CD launch party for a compilation album, containing bands that members of the class have recorded. I was voted into manage the project and it certainly seems a hard task with each meeting turning into a riot. But it's certainly fun and the project is being to pick up pace. Check out Peter Collins and Jake Brennan's blogs to view their side of the project and also to see design plans.

Check out these:

Right as for now, time to watch a bit of the horrific England Cricket display, then it's off to college, before crewing for the tech run for Three sisters at the Little Theatre tonight. So a long day ahead!

Laters Potatoes 

Comedy Festival and on to Billy Liar

Well the Leicester Comedy Festival is over for another year. Thankfully I managed to be a part of it this year by crewing for 3 of the acts (Jo Caulfield, Count Arthur Strong and Shappi Khorsandi) at the Little Theatre. The work literally involved me sitting and watching the act on the DSM monitor and it got me thinking that if I could do this as a profession, then life would be easy.

Jo Caulfield was good, didn't know what to expect having only every seen her on shows like Mock the Week and Nevermind the Buzzcocks, but the crowd reacted and interacted well. There was a few technical difficulties at the beginning, with Jo forgetting to bring her pre-show music CD. But the situation was easily overcome once all the crew members had listed the CD's in their cars.

Count Arthur Strong was amazingly funny and played to a packed house. This time there was a little more work involved with there being a scene change in the middle and there were a few shenanigans after the show, but thats another story.

Shappi Khorsandi was equally as funny. The show opened with support act Matthew Hardy and as with the Jo Caulfield show, there was little work to be done. Both Shappi and Matthew were very friendly and engaging people, with the show again being played to a packed house.

Now that the Comedy Festival is finished it's on to Billy Liar which I'm co-running the sound with Mr Atter. Hopefully this opportunity will be a massive learning curve for me and help me to hone in on some vital skills.

On with the busyness!!!

More Barbershopping and Comedy Festival

Well it's been another busy week again. The Barbershop recordings have been fully mixed and are currently being mastered. So hopefully they'll be finished by tomorrow afternoon and then it's time to think about packaging. Thursday night i participated in a recording session as a musician for the first time in a long time, helping Ed out with his recording project. Me and Rich blasted out Teenage Kicks, it's a little loose and my guitar playing is somewhat rusty but i'm sure it will sound alright after some tweaking. 

Saturday i was paralysed by a titanic headache, but nothing a little set destruction at the Little Theatre couldn't take care of. Tonight I'll be back there crewing during Jo Caulfield's performance in the comedy festival.

I'll Leave you with this snippet of audio i found on my old PC. It's a radio shout-out from DJ Hype from a few years back. Not overly sure who DJ Hype is, but nevertheless, at least i was on the radio.
Hype Shoutout by Paulie_h3

The Barbershop Chorus Recording

After weeks of planning, last thursday finally saw Rich and I orchestrate the recording of a barbershop chorus. Overall the session was a success, the chorus were brilliant and we managed to capture 12 tracks in a two and a half hour session. A few initial problems included the theatres PA speakers pouring out a horrid hiss and the kick drum of a band practing next door almost breaking down the walls, but they were quickly overcome. Unfortunately there are a few issues of spill on the recordings produced by suffering feet. But short of carpeting the theatre and stealing the shoes of the chorus members, there was very little we could have done about it and i'm sure the final production will be great.

The session was recorded using an X-Y pair, an A-B pair, four spot mics, a large diaphragm condenser with a figure-eight polar pattern and an omni mic, so ten mics in total. As i mentioned above, we managed to lay down 12 tracks so theres plenty of mixing and mastering to be done over the coming days. I've posted a quick mix of one of the tracks below to help give an impression of what the session was about. I've also posted a time-lasped video of the evening for one and all to enjoy.

As for the rest of the week.It's been one of continual research for potential business and website opportunities and a touch of music making with Alley Barber. I also discovered the sounds of Atticus Ross, the gentleman was responsible for the theme music of the film "The Book of Eli" as well as other great songs, so go listen.

As for now, it's time for a drop of wine and some Super Bowl Sunday!!!

Yesterday - Barbershop Choir by Paulie_h3

Super Long Sunday To End The Week!

After the laziest of lazy Saturdays, today (Sunday) i attended the fit-up for the Little Theatre's production of "A view from the bridge". Arriving at 10:30 this morning and leaving just after 8 this evening, its been a hard and long day indeed. However tiring it has been, it certainly feels good to be creative using hammers and drills. Today saw the crew constructing a raked stage with a surrounding set mimicking 1950's New York city. A full and rewarding day and topped off by my return home to a sunday roast made by my darling lady.

As for the weekdays preceding the weekend, the final preparations have been made for Thursday evenings recording of a barbershop choir. So a full report with pictures and hopefully a time-lapse video will be posted soon after. I've also been developing an idea for a new website with the needs of sound engineers at heart, so i'll soon be begging, stealing and borrowing whatever i can to make it a success.

The week ahead looks set to be a musical one, with Alley Barber soon to be visiting for some synthesis and electronica experimentation.

Right then, time to watch the football highlights and mix a few drums.

TTFN

This week I have.....

Well it's been a busy week again. The main focus this week has been planning a recording session  for a Barbershop choir of 25 strong. After multiple e-mails, phone calls and a meeting with the choir's secretary, all is about in place. It looks set to be an exciting session, with it giving Rich and myself the opportunity to use our own recording rig.

This week i have also realised that i need to get back to grips with playing guitar. Having mostly listened to Placebo's debut album this week, i awoke Thursday morning feeling positive and hungry to pick-up my guitar again. However, these feelings were short lived when my Marshall DSL100 literally blew-up.

Thankfully Arron and Alastair (the band) where round on friday, so i managed to get a guitar playing fix. We're still trying to get things together as a band, having still not written any material and still being unsure of the direction we want to take the band in. But we are ever so slowly chipping away at the project and hopefully we'll make a breakthrough soon. 

The highlight of the week came when I came across a remix of Bloc Party Vs Katy Perry, so click on the link to have a listen.

Toodle-oo

The Great Dictator Vs M83

A Great video. The creator has simply spliced together M83's "By the kiss" off the album "Digital Shades Vol. 1" with the audio and visual from Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator". A simple video, but certainly a compelling one. Enjoy.

Testing

Testing testing one two