Cat Empire

The Cat Empire. You know. On the Gogol Bordello tip.
And then there's this band what is called Leningrad. And the song below is called "Fish". And yeah, they're total crazy.

Sapphire Road Tractors

Last night Lou Clark played drums with City Samanas. Slowly but surely I'm getting all the members of Tyrannosaurus Mouse into the City Samanas. Ha!

Now. Here are some things. We played "Blue Shadow" for a good 35 minutes. Also, the experiment that is "Toxic Fruit" did, in my opinion, fail. I asked that we come up with a half-dozen motifs and then play them in a loop and then I edited them together. It seems more like a medly than as a prog-rock piece I thought it would be. Still, there are some nice motifs in there.

Lily rocks out on Ethan's fretless Jazz bass.

 We have like a gazillion (that's an accurate, scientific, number) of new themes we created in Blue Shadow.

Lou has the most conservative playing style where it looks like he's not moving even if he's rocking out.

 I tried to get a picture of Greg but he was looking down the whole time I had the camera out.

3 of the 4 of the gang.

Oh. In other big news we plugged the bass directly into an Aphex tube mic preamp. It's Greg's preamp. I don't really know what I think about it. Does the bass have more, er, "girth"? I just don't know.
There are so many questions I don't have the answer for.
Before we'd been using a Countryman 85 direct box feeding a Lindell preamp. I dunno. What do we think? I felt the bass guitar in last night's recordings was easier to mix. Maybe?
Still, I could totally imagine that much of what we recorded last night could end up on a record.

Measuring the Invisible

Last week's rehearsal's yield.

So. I did a thing. We're recording bass through a Countryman 85 DI and a Lindell preamp. In post I'm running the bass through an automatic level plugin but more importantly (and, er, starting on the second or third track here as of this writing) going through Samplitude's tube-warming plugin.
Yeah, I know. "Tube warming". It's the buzzword from about 5 years ago. But it does the extra thing I felt we want the bass to do. Makes me re-think the Aphex tube preamps that Greg has. Hmm... that might be worth trying actually...

Analogue

Things one needs to know in order to understand A/D and D/A conversion.
It's 25 minutes long but very well worth your time.

Walla

Here's my new walla. I recorded the audience after a RCCNY concert. I think that none of the voices are distinct. There's English and Russian being spoken.

Like a Dream

Jim at Little Dawg amps talks about his "less is more" philosophy regarding tone stacks. Honestly, I have no idea what he's talking about. I do know that if I don't have a good guitar sound within about 20 seconds I'm just not going to get a good guitar sound out of a guitar/amp combination.

Can I tell you what a dream it is to not have to put 2" tapes up on a machine, reset the mixer and re-patch all the outboard gear, hoping you wrote the settings down correctly, and make a pathetic attempt to get the same mix up from two weeks ago but this time with a little more bass guitar? Because it's true. Those days sucked.
And now, discussions regarding the relative volume level of said bass guitar become rather simple. The project is brought up. I make a change. Render out a new version of the song. Everyone listens. Makes new notes. It's like a dream.

RCCNY at MAPC

Recording the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Here's the first thing: in order for the Sound Devices 702 to record simultaniously to the internal CF card and to an external hard drive, the 702 must be externally powered.
Additionally, doing so will generate a LOT of heat.

The location of the mics -- dead center front row of the balcony.

I was surprised that the balcony had audience in it. I hadn't really prepared for that. But I told them we were recording.

RCCNY rehearsing.

It's a very nice church and very comfortable but the pews are creaky. So recording here is nice but it's also kind of like recording on a sailing ship.

Benevolence

Nikolai Kachanov, the director of the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York, wrote these amazing pieces. We recorded them nigh on 6 years ago.

All the vocal performances were done (as far as I remember) at the Interfaith Center up near Columbia University. It was a while ago, so I don't exactly remember. I'm going to guess that we were using Neve 1272 preamps with AKG 460 mics with CK1 capsules. But we may have been using Rode NT1 large diaphragm microphones. Or a mix of those. I vaguely recall recording straight into Samplitude through an Apogee converter.

The music is brilliant. Check it out. Buy the CD.

Russian Recording

So, recording Russian Chamber Chorus of New York. Here are my notes.
I discovered the one instance where I might want reading glasses and distance glasses in one pair of progressive bifocals. That's recording where I have a machine close by and then have to look in the distance at the subjects.

SD 702. Remember that you need external power if you're going to be using an external portable FireWire drive.

But you know what? Not really. Because the recorder (and faders, on a mixer) are really at the 22" computer distance rather than book-reading distance. So if I do end up with progressive bifocals one day they likely won't be reading/distance but rather computer/distance.
I used the Oktava 012 mics. Russian made and from The Sound Room. They sound great.

The Oktava mics are a bit further apart on this X/Y bar than I've been having them. Is that good? Bad? I don't know.

We did some back-and-forth about how far away the mics should be. Personally I'd put them either right behind the conductor or way up in the balcony. I feel like on the floor I get too much of the crinkling sounds the audience makes, but if I'm fairly close I get nice articulation off the voices and instruments. The further back I go, the better the "blend" in the room. Up in the balcony there's much less articulation but the audience is quieter.

These look higher up than they really are. They're only up as high as my AKG tripod mic stand will put them. 

So it's all a compromise.
What I did was set up in the back of the room, but then just before the performance I pushed the mic stand about 12 feet closer to the chorus. This was at Holy Trinity on 82nd Street. The shape of the space is interesting with a huge domed ceiling.

See? I'm cheating. I'm using the marks that are already on the floor for my mic positions. This will make it easier to replicate (or avoid) in the future.

Listening to the recordings last night I was pretty happy with them. But I am far from a neutral listener and after an evening of recording I have no critical distance anymore. I did, however, have some smoked mozzarella cheese and strawberries dipped in chocolate. But that has nothing to do with these recordings.

Just publishing pictures.

I may have already published most, if not all, of these.

The Porcupine's Dream

Wednesday with the City Samanas, we had Ethan Rosenblatt over. Yes, Ethan and Lily did play at the same time although I could not actually record both of them at the same time. I do not know which song(s) Ethan plays on in the following album.

There is much in the way of material which could be edited and then put together on an album. I would go so far as to say that the only things we wouldn't do anything with are the "Eyes of the World" and the "Imaginary Opera". Everything else has at least some portion which I'd be more than happy to put on an album.

I have questions. Like, for instance, should I add a pair of dynamic microphones for the toms? I could throw a pair of '57's on there and use the Apogee converters' preamps. Or something. I just don't know. Do I know? No. No I do not know. Tell me.