Yesterday
On Wednesday we finished recording the percussion for “Dune”, and yesterday we had our first accordion recording session. It went really well. We recorded from ten in the morning to one in the afternoon, and then I kept working by myself until half past six in the evening.
What an amazingly expressive instrument the accordion is! As a kid and young adult I had a very very low opinion of the accordion. The instrument was only used in folk music and was the brunt of many jokes – like banjos, trombones and violas. I did come to love the bandoneon, once I discovered Astor Piazzola, but in the last couple of years I discovered the use of accordion in Arabic music and music from the Balkans.
And luckily there is an accordion player right here in Santa Fe who can play like that! :-)
The new album has a really really interesting sound, a bridge between so many styles and traditions. Its roots dive deep into the ground in many locations, but the trunk also rises high above the traditions and lifts the crown into original air.
2010-12-22
Mix Test
A blade of light near the studio’s entrance:
Today I walked to the studio and fired up the console to do a couple of test mixes. I remembered a bunch of albums from the Sixties, where the stereo field of a trio (((I think the Beatles might have done a few mixes that were similar, once they went stereo, but I could be wrong))) has the guitar or vocal in the middle and the drums and bass off to the sides. That sort of mix uses the width of the stereo field to create a better separation between the instruments.
There used to be severe limits to this kind of mixing, because of the nature of recording in the early days – literally cutting a groove into an acetate disc – and also because of the way vinyl worked: the groove was deepest in the center and therefore the bulk of the bass had to be delivered there. Bass over to the side did not work.
So Jon sent me a track from yesterday’s rehearsals and here is what I did. Mix1 features the bass about half-way left. The drums are half-way right and the guitar is center. Keep in mind the drums had only a stereo mike and the kick mike on it. They will sound much better once they are properly miked up.
This placement sounds great on loudspeakers, I find, and does quite well on headphones. Headphones are the biggest concern, because bass to far on one side feels weird, but this seems OK. Let me know what you think.
Here is a reference mix, where I did my usual stereo field – I usually have the bass at -14 and the kick at +14 (((the stereo field goes from -100, all the way to the left, to +100, which is all the way on the right))), to create a little bit of separation between them. The guitar is still in he middle and the stereo drums are all the way to the left and right. This field, which sounds a bit too narrow here, sounds much better with more instruments, like two or three rhythm guitars and one or more percussion tracks added, which can be pushed out to the left or right side.
Again, this is only a rehearsal, with plenty of clams… Do let me know how you feel about the two different mixes.
Later that Friday
I think Burning Up might be a good title for this one.
Manual exposure: f/4 and 1/20 sec.
Interval: 1 exposure every 9 seconds
Total number of images captured: 2,181
Number of images used: 2,039 (((one candle fell over near the beginning)))
Quicktime movie assembled at a rate of 50 FPS (frames per second)
That means 19,629 seconds, or about 5 1/2 hours, were compressed into 40 seconds…
Inspired by this video on Flickr
Here is the same video on Vimeo. Which plays back smoother?
