Research topic videos and articles

There is a lot of interesting information about the MIDI sprout and I thought I’d share

Articles-

http://www.thefourohfive.com/news/article/the-405-interviews-midi-sprouts-creators-139

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/08/cosmic-soundscapes-plants-midi-sprouts

http://nothingmajor.com/journal/511-man-man-eats-electronic-ice-cream/

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19191/1/midi-sprout-uses-houseplants-to-play-synth-electronic-music

Videos-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kCYAUqc8to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsPmnjfs2iE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1-ZQ-beMg8

 

 

Second studio session

This was my second studio session. I set up my friend John with the twin verb fender amp for his polysynth, micd with a fathead and sm 57. We went directly into the rooms instrument in with the SH-101, a monosynth primarily being used for bass. I hopped on the drums and we recorded some improv. The drums had a near coincidental pair of ts-1s as overheads, sm57 on the snare, and the AKG D112 inside of the kick. I’ve provided a short sample of the recording session, after some mixing and editing.

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Guzheng Sessions with Bryan O’Connor!

 

This Guzheng was such a joy to play, and no small feat to record. Though not the engineer for this session, I did make a few suggestions to the effect of the final mic setup. The guzheng has three soundholes underneath, the largest of which is more or less under the s

What an instrument. Wonderful to play, and such a beautiful sound. Impossible to not enjoy.

This session was held by a student in the advanced class last year to work on a recording for the ESMP. I was asked to sit in and potentially play some drums, but we just ended up only recording the guzheng. This guzheng was such a joy to play, and no small feat to record. Though not the engineer for this session, I did make a few suggestions to the effect of the final mic setup. The guzheng has three soundholes on the underside, the largest of which is more or less under the saddle, on the plucking side, about where my right hand is here in this picture. The second largest is in the middle of the underside soundboard, and the smallest is under the achor points of the strings, rightmost in this picture.   Bryan wanted the thing to sound absolutely huge, and really have a “surrounding” quality to it. Sometimes a request like this has a simple answer: surround the damn thing with microphones and use them all. Doesn’t always work, but it did this time, and it went like this: Two Shure SM57′s on either side and above of the guzheng, pointing in from about 1′ 6″ from the edges of the instrument. You can see one of them looking in to my right, next to the lamp in the picture. One Shure SM7B underneath, looking at the main soundhole under the saddle. I believe it was set to flat with no pad. It was about 3″ from the hole. One Sennheiser 421 underneath the center soundhole, set to “M”. Also about 3″ away. One TS-1 overhead, about 5 feet off the surface of the instrument on the atlas stand. There was just something magical about this setup. Hearing the recorded material it really did sound huge. We noticed that just speaking in the center of this mic mess sounded pretty incredible as well, so when it came time to use vocals(this was after I left, so take hearsay as hearsay), they just moved the SM7b up to standing level in the center of it all, and went to town. I don’t know if they ended up using all the mic tracks for the final vocals in the mix, but I know it sounded great.   The track can be found here: http://blogs.evergreen.edu/esmp/2014-album/ It is titled “Humor Melody”, and it is track #4.  Check out the rest of the album as well; some really great work was done last year for this album. I was fortunate enough to sit in on quite a few sessions, and even more so to be asked to play on several tracks. I played drums for the first track, “Love Way Down”, the tenth track, “Bees”, and the Thirteenth track, “Silver Line”, which is a Noodlebird song.

The Multi-track Mix Project

Photo0003 (2)This is where it all happened… the music room. I had been using an old Dell Pentium 4 system before this, but I installed the Cakewalk on the Asus i7 laptop for this project, thinking it would work better. It didn’t. Apparently I have to adjust some settings to take advantage of the other cores available. It still worked fine.

Photo0019Next came the drum track(s)… courtesy of the Technics KN-1000 workstation. I only had to mess with it a little…

Photo0026I played the bass line (which is a combination of two bass line which I completely ripped off from the Batman and Peter Gunn TV show themes) on this Epiphone Viola bass. It’s similar in looks and sound to the Hofner bass played by Paul McCartney of the Beatles. As a guitar player, I really like the short scale and light weight. As part of the “producing” side of things, I must admit that I had to go into the bass track and move some (a lot) of the notes around to keep pace with the drums. Generally, I play guitar in a way that pushes on the tempo a little, but the bass has to be in the pocket to get away with that… doesn’t work for bass at all. You get what you pay for… and the check I wrote to myself bounced.

PT-Tele7The guitar tracks were played through a direct box directly into the board. The track was recorded clean with an 8:1 compression. The distortion was added later with a Sans-amp patch. This track was pretty good, not too much to fix here.

Photo0019The piano track was added through the auspices of the Technics KN-1000. I passed piano proficiency in college (the first time around) but I have never been what you would call a player… more of an operator, really. Anyway, I was attempting to add a kind of Lynyrd Skynyrd/Dr. John kind of rhythm part which I think worked but could be played in a higher register.

Photo0017The vocals were all done with this mic. It’s a Studio Projects B-1, a cardioid, large diaphragm condenser. I recorded two main vocal tracks and 12 total for the back ups, 3 parts, 4 times each. They got mixed down to three total, one high, one low, and one high and low for the oohs in the middle. I used 6:1 compression with a low cut filter to record them and removed the filter and added a slight chorus effect and some reverb to set it back some.

And here is the result of almost 100 recorded and/or attempted tracks…

 

I wrote this song a few years ago and have never recorded it. It makes me happy to hear it after all this time.