Check out New Album of the Week. I find it mildly amusing that the last album of the week was March 12, 2008 This ones a good one though. Check it out.
Archive for July, 2009
It has been another busy season for us at Forgotten Genre Productions. We just finished an album for John Gerdy that should see a September release. We also did some mixing for a hip hop project that we came into contact with. These tracks were done for a live show to act as the back up for the MC’s. It was an interesting project. I had a stereo track that they took a classic song and sped up and then put beats over and then each song had about 3 mc’s rapping over the track. Each mc had like 4-6 tracks of vocals from rapping to shout-outs to echos to yeas, boys and other expletives. So it ended up to about 16 tracks of vocals and 1 stereo track of music. This was very unusual for me. I am used to spending hours getting good drum sounds and mixing other musical elements into it. With this I was limited because the music was a stereo track. So it was more of a mastering approach to the stereo track and then spending hours trying to find ways to let all those vocals sit in the mix in the right place. You use a lot of filtering and different delays and verbs and some distortion to help it sit. On June 21 Switchfoot was in town for a show at the American Music Theater and I got a chance to stop over and catch up with Andrew Shirley who plays guitar for the band. Andrew and I met years ago when he was working with his prior band Alltogether Seperate. He also was close friends with Kevin from Smalltown Poets and we hung out in San Diego with him briefly while we were taking some time off. He is a great guy and also a humble guy. We were able to discuss Switchfoot’s new album and how they did the lion share of the production and recording in their studio and, the fact that with technology today you can take an mbox and laptop on the computer and record or produce while your touring. This is great because with established artists there is a lot of downtime between sleeping and sound check and gigs. It is helpful to be able to do something productive while touring. We also have met with quite a few people that are looking to do work in the future. June 27-28 saw the return of the Celtic Fling to the Renaissance Faire and I got another chance to run a stage and do live sound for the weekend. I will post more info on this but it was a good day. We also saw music released on the Music for Everyone vol.2 Compilation. The Faux Minxhad a song selected that I mixed and engineered. Congradulations to those guys. Stay tuned there is more to come from Forgotten Genre Productions in the future. Feel free to contact us if you have music that needs to be captured. |
On June 27th and 28th I was out at the Celtic Fling at the Renaissance Faire doing live sound at the End Game stage. There were two bands that performed at that stage, the Town Pants and Ceann. It was a great day and the weather was perfect. I enjoy doing these live sound gigs because they really are such a different thing from the studio. In the studio you are in a controlled environment and not as bound by time. If I need to fix something in the studio I have the time. If I am mixing and I hit a wall I get up and go for a walk or go to bed and call it a night. The immediacy of live sound is invigorating. If something goes wrong you have to fix it right away, the show depends on it. On Saturday I show up and I have amp racks and speaker stacks set up but I need to build everything else and connect it and get sound and tune the system. All by myself. I had a stage manager that has very limited sound knowledge. There is no one to ask a question no one to fall back on. The schedule was set up to be the first band plays an hour set and then we strike that band and mic up the next band in a half hour. They play for an hour and then you have a half hour for changeover and the first band comes back and plays their second hour long set and so forth 5 shows a day. This year things went really smooth and the only issues were, at one point, the mandolin player from the one band thought his mandolin wasn’t working so I had to rush up to the stage to discover that the preamp he was using in his rig was not fully plugged in. So I plugged it in and we were in business. Throughout the 2 days I did discover that since I was re-patching at the console or soft patchingas we call it I had to be careful because the tension on the snakes was causing some connection issues. So I would lose the violin in the mix and as I would reposition the xlr connector in the input it would come back really loud. I remedied the problem by supporting the snake in a different way so the downward pull didn’t lose the connection. 
Notice in the picture the snake laying across the front of the console at the top. I was working on a 40 input Soundcraft Spirit desk. One significant thing that this reminds me of is how important troubleshooting skills are in audio. I often speak to young engineers and students that come out of programs like Full Sail or other schools and the significant hole in their learning tends to be troubleshooting. Because they lack the necessary experience in doing audio they freeze up when there is a problem. The other common pitfall is to have something that you know is wrong but to say oh well I can’t change it now. So the show suffers and you do not learn. Often if I am working with an assistant or stage crew I will know there is a problem and I will tell the to go onstage and fix a mic placement or switch out a cable. I always seem to get this look of horror. Like, now? Can’t we wait? This may come from touring and playing night after night in different venues but when there is a problem I was always told to fix it. No one cares if a roady runs on stage if they fix a problem. You learn to know your gear and anticipate any problems in the system so you can get to the heart of the issue. You must know signal flow. I was paid by the band so I learned to always take care of them so I could keep my job. One thing you learn about musicians is that their lives are always in someone else’s hands. This tends to make them feel a little paranoid. They have a record company that are speaking for them a publicity department that may or may not be representing them accurately. They have a manager that is doing his thing. When it comes to their live show that is them. They pick a sound crew that they trust. All the gigs I got on the road were word of mouth, people that I knew and had a chance to work with at some point. I had a reputation of loyalty to the artists and musicians. That is why troubleshooting is so important. It helps you keep the gig. Enough of that. Celtic Fling was a great day.