Recording New Classical Music

Recording Nikolai Kachanov Singers. Kind of brilliant piece by Podgaits.

Chorus, cello, and flute. I was gonna do a tree with Schoeps on left and right and an AEA ribbon 84 in the center. Then I was gonna put a Blue ribbon on the cello and an Oktava 012 on the flute.

The Blue, although an active ribbon, picked up a world of electro-magnetic nonsense and was very buzzy. I think that's from the lights inducting some sort of blerg into the signal. So I swapped it out with a Rode NT-1A.

The room the performers were in is small. Nikolai pushed for the bloom position -- which was technically in the next room over. About 10 feet apart and looking through the sort of portico into the room with the singers.

But the AEA started picking up EMI. And that far away, it wasn't doing that much anyway (meaning: it was doing nothing.) And the whole tree wasn't doing a "tree" thing. So I took it off.

The floors at the museum are mightily creaky. And the actual "performance" version had the flautist walking from the upstairs down to our level (which involved a videographer clearing out of her way.)

So I put some de-crackling on the main left and right microphone tracks. And, as always, pulled out a bit of 500-ish Hz (I think it was in the 460's somewhere frequency-wise.) I also put some dynamic EQ on the thing in life which bothers me so much -- the grinding sound of 2.6kHz coming off of parallel walls.*

* Whether this sound is just in my head or actually exists may be open to debate, but it's nice to get rid of it.

Wireless Antlion microphone.

Notes on notes

Fast is Netflix's speed-check alternative.

The Tamarind Seed. Watch the montage scene as a good example of creating a whole thing. Or in the words of my tutor: "Andrew, just found my Tamarind Seed notes, for the montage I talked about. 1:34:04 - 1:39:48 of DVD (Ch. 11) So about six minutes. Airport Montage" Noiiz is out of the UK. Vaughn Williams Symphony number 5 was a thing Goldsmith was listening to. Dig Jack Cookerly. Trombonist and organist. And made a whole bunch of sounds for things like Star Trek.

Squigglewhumpity

The Lisp plugin is a free VST de-esser. So far I like it muchwise.

I've never seen any evidence this thing was ever actually manufactured. This may have been a teaser ad to see if they could get enough interest or orders in order to produce them.

Experimenting with the trigger gate plugin.
Paulxstretch is a time-stretching application for sound design.

Windows 10 download tool. Apparently it's still free for Windows 7 and 8 owners.

Coggle -- for making mind maps.

Cross-cultural emotional recognition.

Fidelity

Man, the music in Westworld is amazing. I'm not talking about the weird versions of pop songs, I mean the score by Ramin Djawadi.
The "sound design" part of the score is so sophisticated and brilliant.

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We need to cast more people from more ethnicities. We need more women in lead roles. More Asian actors, more African, more Native American, Latinx, everything.

It's mostly happening in TV right now. Not nearly enough Asians in TV. And still way too many brown-haired white boys in lead roles. Not that I mind brown-haired white boys in lead roles. Some of my favorite actors are brown-haired white boys. Just, you know, sometimes we could have some non-brown-haired white boys.

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Oh man. I am unsatisfied by the ending of the second season of Westworld. Ugh. C'mon, man, we're due some time in the world. At least go 10,000 years into the future and find that all the guests in the park, the support team, the guys from security, are all hosts (which is what you were leading up to anyway.) And that all the humans are all dead.
Because everything else is all Mac Rogers Universal Robots, why not just finish it?