And so we reach the end of the first day (if we don't include the 4 hours noodling about with cables yesterday) of the McFalls Electronic Project. It was a slightly longer day than I expected, but it has been very satisfying and a learning experience on so many levels...
I mainly work in live sound so it is slightly odd for me to be in a pseudo-studio environment where the same piece (or pair of pieces today) are worked on for a long period of time. I like the space that this gives you to explore things, but I miss the spontaneity that a stage and an audience forces onto you.
Not being one who believes in making things simple for myself I thought that I'd try a different configuration of my computer audio system so we had <nerd>a metric Halo 2882 accepting analogue inputs from the players, emulating various preamps, feeding them to logic for recording, and feeding them via some low latency compression to ADAT out to Martin's rig for processing which fed back processed audio and non-live compositional material via ADAT into the 2882 up to logic for further recording which was itself outsourcing quite a bit of the processing to the powercore</nerd>. It all worked surprisingly well once I'd beaten it round the head with a large stick and persuaded it that a monitoring latency of 500ms was not permitted - especially when you are basically in the same room as the musicians as there is a maximum length that you can send optical ADAT without scattering bits to the wind...
What still requires work is monitor placement so that the bottom end is more predictable. I think that I'm probably going to remix the rough mixes that I did today as the sub off Rick's bass is a little bit excessive at home (although that could also be my daughter Daisy playing her new game of playing with the frequency and amplitude controls on the REL). However, speaking of basses - I really liked Ricks "jazz bass" with the Wilson pickup - by far the best pickup sound that I've ever got from a bass...
I enjoyed mixing Sea Longing very much and I feel it is starting to hang together quite nicely. I like the relationship between the electric strings and the abstracted electronics coupled with the very down to earth tone of the voice.
The second piece (which I have saved as Dochas and which I haven't a hope in hell of being able to pronounce it's proper name) is more tricky. I like it, but I don't feel that I've nailed the mix yet. I want to get more of the layers being built up and I think that the delays are obscuring it at present. But at the same time, I really want it to deteriorate into overlapping chaos at the end. I suspect that I'll have another quick go at this again in the morning with a fresh pair of ears and maybe upload a new mix with an alternative perspective...
All in all I am very pleased with how the week has started off. This is my last professional engagement as a noisy person before I get all sensible and get A Proper Job at the start of June and it makes me very happy that it is a) something that we've never tried to do before and b) something that looks like it is going to produce some very interesting work!
Roll on tomorrow...
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