On the Mark stuff
Oct. 31st, 2001 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI think I finally have the bowed-psaltery part for a new OTM song down. (This is "Rasputin's HMO", which I'm looking forward to springing on an audience. We stole it; we can't write stuff that funny.) I wrote the line, because I'm the one who's playing it and no one else knows the instrument, so I can write around the hard stuff. :-) I think it'll sound pretty neat with the mix; Robert and Kathy are coming for a min-rehearsal next week and we'll try this out before Andrea's next visit to Pittsburgh.
I hope the sound guys at Darkover are ok with miking a bowed psaltery. We usually have two concerts at that con, one in the large hall (requires amplicification) and one in the smaller room (no sound reinforcement). I usually try to save the weirder stuff for the small room, so Siggy (the sound guy) doesn't lose hair on our account. But this year they just gave us one (longer) concert in the large hall, so we'll see what we can do.
Close-miking us (that is, one mike per thing to be miked -- instrument or voice) is a real pain; we play a lot of instruments and everybody sings. So there's always this huge mass of mike stands and mikes between us and the audience, and it's harder to play that way. It would be great if they could just point a few broader-range mikes at the stage and let us do our own balancing, but I'm told by people who know these things that that trick only works in rooms that are already accoustically decent. (This one definitely is not.) So, for example, when we did our local concert last spring and hired Mike (our engineer for recordings) to tape the show so we could mine it for a live CD, he set up five or six mikes a few feet out across the stage area and that was it. (They were actually on the floor pointing up at the stage, if I recall correctly.) The recording sounded great from a technical perspective. But it was a good room (a concert hall) and he had about three hours available to set it up and test everything. When you've got that luxury, you can get rid of a lot of stuff on stage...
I hope the sound guys at Darkover are ok with miking a bowed psaltery. We usually have two concerts at that con, one in the large hall (requires amplicification) and one in the smaller room (no sound reinforcement). I usually try to save the weirder stuff for the small room, so Siggy (the sound guy) doesn't lose hair on our account. But this year they just gave us one (longer) concert in the large hall, so we'll see what we can do.
Close-miking us (that is, one mike per thing to be miked -- instrument or voice) is a real pain; we play a lot of instruments and everybody sings. So there's always this huge mass of mike stands and mikes between us and the audience, and it's harder to play that way. It would be great if they could just point a few broader-range mikes at the stage and let us do our own balancing, but I'm told by people who know these things that that trick only works in rooms that are already accoustically decent. (This one definitely is not.) So, for example, when we did our local concert last spring and hired Mike (our engineer for recordings) to tape the show so we could mine it for a live CD, he set up five or six mikes a few feet out across the stage area and that was it. (They were actually on the floor pointing up at the stage, if I recall correctly.) The recording sounded great from a technical perspective. But it was a good room (a concert hall) and he had about three hours available to set it up and test everything. When you've got that luxury, you can get rid of a lot of stuff on stage...