The Sagacious Empathy

 

https://pleasurefortheempire.bandcamp.com/album/the-sagacious-empathy New album. Experimenting with a couple new sounds.

Opera News

In opera news, we (Marc Schmied and I) spent two days (two hours and then four hours) recording the bass for Red Flag of the Future. 

Opera is hard work. Puppet opera is even harder.

He's a dynamite sight reader and he gets a monster sound out of that instrument. I put up three microphones: a Warm U87, a Schoeps hypercardioid, and an AEA 84 ribbon with Cloudlifter, directly into the Allen & Heath SQ5. Of course, for the first day the mixer got real weird. My friend Todd, whose house we recorded in, pointed out that some devices seem to have an "urgency meter" which detects how important things are so they know what would be the most inconvenient time to stop working correctly. 

I don't know. All of the faders decided to fight me and act like their motors wanted to be somewhere else on the board. I reset and recalibrated and rebooted and it helped briefly but then became a pain again. Weirdly, the next day it seemed fine. I have no idea. Even Samplitude was acting badly. I have no idea. Again, things got better on day two.

Marc Schmied on bass.

Also on the second day I brought the AEA down and closer to the bass. I felt the U47 won the contest at about 6 feet from the bass up in the air pointed roughly at the sound holes. So that one stayed up there, but the ribbon got closer in case we wanted more detail from it. 

I need more computers.

Oh, and right, to add to my stress I managed to drop the 47 while initially setting up. I mean, it's not the world's most expensive mic (like it would be if it were a vintage Neumann U47) but it was frustrating to watch it slip from its cage and hit the hardwood floor. Still, it seems to have survived without being visually or sonically impaired. 

Note change of position of ribbon microphone. Also, movie ticket on computer is for Dune 2.

So despite technical gremlins, the recording went very well. Having a great player like Marc really expands and opens up the sound. I realize it's a kind of cliche but it really does make it all sound more organic. I'm very very happy with what we've got. Marc is a spectacular player. It makes so much difference.