Graduation 2017

Up in the rafters of the Great Hall, adjusting lights and stage dressing.

Well it’s that time of year again! This year we’ve got Matt from IT cross-training with us as we (quite literally) show him the ropes. First thing we’re up in the wings of the Great Hall, where we adjust the height of the stage lights and bring down the curtains so we can attach the stage dressing and put the banner up. After that we’re onto the floor lights for the stage. These are static and seperate from the main stage lights we control from up in the projection booth. They just add a splash of colour to the curtains round the back of the stage.

This year we’re in a bit of a rush – partially thanks to yours truly as I was on holiday for the week prior – however as much as people were concerned I assured them that the day we had to set up was more than enough now we had good solutions in place!

One of those being the previously mentioned GLD-80 digital desk. Sadly due to being a complete muppet I recently deleted all the scenes from it (including a useful graduation-based one) when I updated the firmware – but thankfully it’s an intuitive interface once you get your head around it so we had it up and running again in no time.

Once the mics are tested and the system is up and running smoothly we can breathe a sigh of relief. We’ve been getting faster at this process every year and it seems to keep running smoothly, but it’s still a good feeling knowing you’re ready to go in advance.

The ceremonies themselves went largely without issue, but there’s also a bunch of other events I end up working on around the ceremonies. One of which is the childrens’ choir performing in the Atrium, which has now become a regular staple of the ceremonies. This is a good opportunity to get the Behringer X32 out, which keeps earning it’s keep as a useful portable solution for a whole host of events. This time we used a couple of venerable AKG pencil condensers, although using the Atrium’s own PA system is a challenge as there’s not a great deal of headroom. Thankfully the kids belted it out on the second take and managed to rise above the noise of the busy atrium floor.

The kids’ choir performed on the first two days between the first two ceremonies, so due to not having a lot of staff to cover this whole event I was legging it down from the projection booth to ensure that it all set off smoothly.

Another additional event is the VC’s dinner – where the same space in the atrium is converted into something of a restaurant and there are speeches from some of our more senior staff. Thankfully from an AV perspective this is an easy gig as there’s only a single microphone required.

Although I forgot to get a picture, there was also some mobile VR setups showing a virtual tour of the university as a promotion for the dinner guests to check out. While part of me was saying “well my GearVR is better”, I have to admit it’s nice seeing the university embrace such tech for promotions – I’ve been a fan of VR since I got hold of one of the old Oculus devkits and hope to get my own system running again as soon as I can afford one.

Friday had the least external events but was probably the busiest day with 3 long ceremonies to get through. Once we’re done we decided to get all the 2-man jobs and heavy lifting out of the way – rather do it now than have to get in Monday morning and have to do it.

Thankfully though everything went without issue or major incident, and we’ll be back to do it all again in December!

The Kemper Profiling Amp

Now, after spending much time creating a pedalboard with a whole host of stompbox effects controlled via a dedicated looper pedal, I have done the obvious thing most gear heads do after a few months and have packed it all in for something else! This time it is the infamous Kemper Profiling Amp –

After realising the sale of quite a few of my analog gear could finally fund this digital behemoth, and after my band giving me an advance on some studio gear I was trading with them I decided to go shopping. Surprisingly my posts on social media with my blatantly lowball offer of £800 got a response, and not only that but at my asking price. The Kemper comes in two form-factors, one is the recent rackmount version, but the other is the slightly odd “toaster” or “lunchbox” version, as it is known. I was after the former, and offered the latter – but at that price I thought “why not?”

For those not familiar with this rather space-age looking piece of kit, the Kemper basically “steals” the sound of any amp setup, using a process called “profiling”, where the profiler sends a variety of signals (including you playing your guitar) through an amp in order to recreate the exact sound. Amazingly this can not only accurately replicate most amps, but appears to be able to seperate the sound of both the amp itself and the speaker cabinet the sound is profiled through – Kemper do describe the process on their site – it appears to be some kind of extremely complex version of convolution sampling on multiple levels – but so far I’ve just been telling people it “uses witchcraft and satanic magic in order to steal your amp’s soul”. The specific technology and techniques are sadly proprietary, so perhaps we can just settle with that for now anyway.

As it stands I have so far set it up using a “live” rig, with a power amp and physical speaker cab output, while disabling the cab simulation on the Kemper itself (obviously you don’t need to simulate a cab while using a real one). Loading up a Peavey 5150 profile and having a quick tweak, I have to admit the sound out of the box is phenomenal, and I look forward to experimenting properly with it. The Laney IRT Studio pictured beneath, while hardly a boutique bit of kit, will likely be my first “experiment” in profiling, and I will be posting a tutorial and video on how this process is achieved, and how successful I am.

As a side note, this purchase actually hearken’s back to one of my older posts – as the Behringer FCB1010 MIDI pedal can also be used to control the Kemper. Additionally it seems there is a dedicated UnO chip available for the Kemper, so I have ordered one and will post later with a tutorial on installing and setting this up (apparently it is far simpler than the standard UnO with Amplitube).

The Hotone Heart Attack

I’ll have to admit I’ve got caught up a bit recently in the trend of mini amps – arguably popularised by Orange’s Tiny Terror, the idea of a small form factor, low wattage guitar amp has evidently captured a lot of guitarists’ imaginations. With both Peavey and Mesa miniaturising some of their flagship amps this was clearly becoming a popular choice amongst the high-gain crew.
My current main amp is one of these – the 15w Laney IRT Studio, which despite it’s relatively low power I found more than capable of knocking out gig-level volume and being incredibly versatile.

While taking a step back in terms of versatility as well as size, another range of amps that caught my eye recently was Hotone’s range of nano heads – specifically the high-gain model known as the Heart Attack.

This is an incredibly small 5W transistor head that is supposedly modelled in terms of sound after a Mesa Dual Rectifier – certainly a bold claim there! In terms of features it has gain and master volume controls as well as a 3-band EQ. On the back it has cab output with a surprisingly wide range of 16 to 4 ohm output, as well as the extremely welcome addition of a dedicated FX Loop – to me this was the game-changer as it allowed the use of my Decimator G-String (yeah it’s a terrible name) noise gate as well as a host of other FX which are more effective in the loop. There is also a headphone output and aux input on the back, although I haven’t had need to use either of these yet.

So, can it djent? Have a listen –

As can be seen here there’s certainly a lot of gain on offer! In fact I found it impossible, even with the gain knob on 0, to get a “clean tone”. The tamest sound it would make was akin to a gritty, bluesy tone. Of course this won’t deter the high gain fans, and in terms of crunch I can say I was extremely impressed. The EQ also offered a good, wide range on all 3 bands, so while it’s a bit of a one-trick pony in the gain department, the simple EQ added a level of versatility which allowed a great deal of wiggle room within the heavier genres.

In terms of volume it’s what you’d expect from a 5w transistor amp – not much really, although certainly more than loud enough for jamming in your bedroom or recording. If you band just needs one live tone, however, the FX Loop output also allows you to connect to an additional power amp, so if paired with something like EHX’s Magnum 44 pocket power amp, could very much be a gig-worthy bit of kit for those who play heavy but travel light. If Hotone were to create a dual-channel amp, combining this with one of their cleaner offerings and a more powerful output section while retaining a comparably small form factor, that could certainly be a product live musicians could also get their teeth into!

Going Digital – getting to know the GLD-80

After my first stint at my new job at Bradford University and being essentially dropped headfirst into their hectic graduation ceremonies at the end of the year, I emerged fairly confident in my abilities, yet somewhat unimpressed with the technology we were using at the time – specifically the ancient Yamaha analog mixing desk we were using to run the sound from. While the lighting desk is equally ancient, it does the job rather well in conjunction with hired LED lighting we use from the stage side, but the audio desk caused some issues. Most notably with feedback and keeping the fairly under-powered front of house system under control.

With this in mind I was overjoyed to be asked how this might be improved, and I suggested investing in a more modern digital desk. Originally, thinking about budget constraints I suggested the cheap but fully-featured Behringer X32. However as it transpired we were in the running for something higher end – enter the Allen and Heath GLD-80;

While most of my experience at uni with digital desks was with the venerable Yamaha LS9, this is much the same principles of operation, but very different in practice.

The first major difference and one of the newer advances that has me firmly in the digital desk camp these days, is the use of a digital stage box – we actually got 2 of these with the desk, both the large GLD AR2412 (a 24in/12out affair) and the smaller GLD-AR84 (8in/4out). These allow the engineer to do away with cumbersome analog multicore cables and run their entire audio digitally via a single CAT5 cable. This is supposedly limited to runs of around 70 metres, however I was delighted to take a chance with our great hall’s existing network patch bays (it’s a pretty long distance to the stage) and was both impressed and relieved to see this work out of the box.

Another recent development common to most digital desks is remote control via tablets, specifically the iPad. As you may notice the above screenshot shows an iPad box, and this actually came free with the desk as a promotion. While it’s an older model when used simply for controlling it’s a really handy bit of kit. Simply connect a router to the desk and download their GLD Remote app, connect to the router’s network and access the desk remotely. We found even with a cheap domestic router it worked at pretty impressive distances, with a solid connection even from the back of the great hall stage. This solves a fundamental setup issue for us, as our desk is situated right at the top of the hall in a projection booth, which is far from ideal for audio applications.

GUI of the GLD Remote app for iPad – showing channel settings with EQ controls.

While there’s probably far too much stuff to go into regarding both the GLD and digital desks in general to fit into one short blog post (I could go on all day about the effects, dynamics and EQ sections removing the previous need for a whole host of external rack gear), one absolute killer feature of digital desks is the ability to recall scenes. For example previously setting up a band with an analog desk meant if the headliners soundchecked first, you would pretty much have to get out a pen and paper in order to remember specific settings – once support bands came and went your desk was likely not set anywhere near that lovely sound you got for the main act in the soundcheck. With most digital desks instead of having a physical cue sheet and tediously adjusting settings back you simply save the current state of the desk as a “scene” in the internal memory, then recall that scene to exactly where you wanted it at the touch of a button.

While there aren’t really multiple full setups occuring in our graduation ceremonies, after soundchecking the day before my manager asked what we needed to do in order to set up every year – I simply said “go to this menu, and select this scene – the desk will set itself up for graduation”. Needless to say the look on his face showed that he approved of this purchase!

New (really old) Guitar Cabs

I keep an eye out for bargains a lot of the time, despite currently having ridiculously low income right now. One place I’d actually popped on in order to sell a load of gear is Musician’s Mart NE – a facebook group where musicians can exchange gear without the rape that is ebay’s seller fees. It’s also a great place to pick up the occasional bargain if you’re shrewd enough.

Quite an interesting one popped up today – a lad in the area was selling a pair of 2×12″ Carlsboro cabs. They were advertised as old PA cabs at first but it seemed after a few people talked about it they were in fact guitar cabs. This piqued my interest, especially since my band may need a few new cabs for our practice rooms and the price had dropped to a mere £20. OK, they looked pretty battered but I thought the guy is only 20mins down the road and he’s practically giving them away – so I asked if he knew what cones were in there. He replied “celestions” which for £20 was good enough for me to scrounge a lift off Palmer and pick em up. Here they are;

They look kinda knackered to say the least, but the majority of damage was a bit of rips and a load of dust on the tolex. They seemed solid enough. After that I decided to open em up and see what was inside cab no.1!

So this was kind of weird, no branded covers on the speakers so I have no idea what they are! They did however have a code on them, which I decided to google –

This guide I found seemed to identify them as a “pre-Rola” Celestion G12H, so the lad was indeed right about the Celestions. The date is actually quite specific, with “DG30” translating to a manufacturing date of July 20th, 1971 – 42 years old! Another post on the Marshall forums also said that the T1217 “pre-rola” greenbacks were actually quite rare as well, so a good buy! Unfortunately after testing the cab only one of the speakers appeared to work – I’m going to have a better look at the soldering but since the lad claimed he used these speakers for a bass cab once I can see what might have screwed it! At least one of them works though so that’s cool.

The next cab I couldn’t get the back off! The screws holding it on were unfortunately rather old and rusted so without the aid of a drill to bore them out I could only pull back the panel as far as I could to get a look inside –

Well I can already tell these bad boys are greenbacks! Let’s dangle the phone in and see what the spec is..

So there we go! Seems to be wired in parallel so that’s a 60w, 8ohm cab. These speakers also look to be in significantly better nick than the ones housed in their sibling. Just to be sure I fired up the Laney VC50 and plugged in the cab. Both speakers worked this time, sounded really nice too!

There were some issues with the jack input however so will do a quick resoldering job on that. also I think I may keep the cab and re-tolex the outside as well as adding some fresh new screws to the back panels.

Anyway this just goes to show that if you know your gear you can find some great stuff for cheap. Most people tend to see knackered looking old cabs and not think about the actual speakers which reside inside them. This shows if you know your stuff you might pick up an absolute bargain!

Random Acts – Recording Live Opera at the Hatton Gallery

Last week’s recording session with composer Agustin Fernandez went great – but that didn’t stop me approaching today with a certain level of trepidation. At our previous opera recording session, whilst trying to work around an entire orchestra’s other commitments, we decided to record both a live set at Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery; a public exhibition of the piece, then on the same night to adjourn to a large recital room in Newcastle University in order to record excerpts from the full, 15-minute performance which could be edited down and used for the Channel 4 short animation piece.

On the plus side, this time I’d economised on luggage. Although I still wielded the sackbarrow of doom, it was nowhere near as hard moving it up to newcastle this time, and I also arrived an hour early, just to be on the safe side.

The Hatton Gallery, our first venue, is a very nice acoustic space – certainly not the kind of space you’d want to record a rock band in, but for classical music the reverberant character of our gallery room seemed great. We discussed the placement of the musicians and I set about placing microphones –

The Hatton Gallery performance area.

Another angle, showing the skylight above the performance area.

The first issue was where to set myself up – thankfully there were two sets of large pillars either side of the hall, so I managed to borrow what appeared to be the perfect piece of furniture for doing my job (even had holes cut for my cables!) and hid myself out of sight. For my recording rig I used my ADK/Scan 8600SB laptop, along with a Scarlett 18i6 USB audio interface and a Profire 2626 in analog standalone mode to provide extra preamps for the Scarlett. After getting this set up it was simply a case of securing the cables.

My audio recording gear, set up hidden behind some pillars.

Or so I thought. As it turned out there were some creative elements I hadn’t yet been informed of. Apparently the soprano and bass singers were required to move about onstage – it had been implied that they would have a relatively fixed position with some movement, but when I realised quite how far the soloists would be moving across the stage I had a slight panic. First I set up the AKG C414 mics up at either corner of the stage, pointing across the area the singers would be traversing diagonally. I also set the mics to “hypercardioid” mode which made them a lot more directional. The idea was to at least specifically cover the area with some kind of mic and hopefully maintain some balance.
Thankfully, we also managed to source some radio mics from the Uni’s Culture Lab. Which solved the problem.
Or so I thought. Once the performance started we had some issues, and the soprano’s radio mic didn’t work correctly! We did have some nice recordings of the bass singer but Bonnie’s voice was only picked up on the far mics I placed earlier!

Shot of the live performance, with some of Lyn’s handmade dress in the foreground.

Thankfully, my plan worked and when listening back the mics did indeed pick up a good deal of Bonnie’s performance. Which was just as well, since due to time constraints despite the fact there was a second performance later on, I had to pack my mics down between these and leg it over to the Uni building where the recital suite awaited.

Agustin conducting the orchestral section and choir.

The recital suite was an interesting room, far dryer in character than the Hatton Gallery; a wood-panelled hall with huge curtained windows at one end. I was a little jealous in a way, because my own college at Teesside was entirely modern and had none of the class or charm this old building had.

The Recital room at Newcastle University.

Of course there was something far more grand in there too – a grand! A Steinway grand piano, to be precise. I completely suck at piano, but at the same time I had to have a quick tinkle on the keys purely because these things are worth a fortune. Sounded amazing too, but It was short-lived as I was on a strict schedule to get things set up in time for performers arriving from the Hatton Gallery.

                                           The Steinway Grand Piano in the recital room.

In due time the performers arrived, just as I was finishing setting up the mics – or so I thought. Seems there was some absolutely crazy electrical interference in the area of the room I had chosen to place the quartet – so several of the mics needed to be moved until this interference was minimised. Thankfully moving everyone about a bit we got some good gain levels and did a few passes at each of the sections.

                                Panoramic shot of the recital room recording session.

After that we all cracked open a few bottle of champagne and toasted a job well done. Although personally I hate champagne, it would be remiss of me to not partake after such a busy night’s work! I have to say it was quite the experience. Certainly working with the musicians was a joy and Agustin was (unsurprisingly) very professional. It’s often quite daunting working with musicians who have a working background that differs from yours, so it’s a nice surprise to work with someone like Agustin and realise you are for the most part on the same page when it comes to recording. I dread to think what everyone first thought when a sweaty, bearded metaller turned up in combat shorts with a sackbarrow in tow, but thankfully people’s warmth and friendliness assured me that I’d at least convinced them that this odd little hobbit actually knew what he was doing! Cheers!

Twice The Trauma – New Album and Artwork

Twice The Trauma are a band I’ve worked with a lot – I used to be in a band called Goatsniffer with them, but since we inevitably split up years ago two of the lads – Ian Hanratty and Lee Teasdale – have moved firmly into grindcore. The last thing I worked on for them was mainly clearing up some of their older tracks – they feature heavily programmed drums, which Ian creates the basis of and I fix up into something more, er, listenable.

They’d originally wanted something totally lo-fi, with obviously programmed drums hitting a rimshot on every hit, at 240bpm but after some consideration decided they wanted to sound more like bands such as Putrid Pile; who whilst firmly grindcore have kinda nice production. Also their original singer had left so we were tasked with recording Lee’s far superior death metal growls over the older tracks. After this lot was done we had a far more brutal album on our hands, although of course true to the genre it was hardly sparkling production!
Anyway, this was all done a while ago, just around the time I finished university, and I hadn’t heard much since. Cue Ian shouting me on facebook at some ungodly hour asking for help with photo editing software for his album cover.
Well, he confessed he wasn’t too savvy with MSpaint, let alone photoshop, so muggins here offered to sort his album cover out. He already had an image, a decapitated corpse with it’s guts hanging out (massive suprise there, then) so I went about creating him a nice version of his band logo with transparency, then tried a bunch of stuff with colours and placements, etc.

This is the one he settled on – I think it turned out OK –

And for those of you easily amused, here’s the back with the song titles –

Oddly, it only ended up with the title Cancer Of The Decency because we realised if he wanted the logo in the top left it’d look shit without a title! So he went through the songs and picked one he liked. What can I say, the man has impeccable taste.

You can hear the title track from their album here –

You can buy the full album from Twice The Trauma for a whopping £3. Drop Ian an email at spooncore@yahoo.co.uk

New practice rooms!

Old Corpse Road recently had to move out of their rooms at Elegant House – mainly because the owners of the building realised after a long time neglecting the place that it was a total deathtrap – but deathtrap or no, it had long been a place where many bands rented rooms out and the loss of this unlikely hub for local talent was felt, not just by us, but by the local scene in general.

We immediately set about looking for new premises – no easy task it turned out, since the rates we were used to were pretty cheap. Eventually we found a new place – a unit on the very same road that Elegant House was situated, no less. The problem was of course while larger and far more secure, this new property was almost twice the price of the old one! With that in mind, we decided that setting up the spacious upstairs spare room for bands with the intention of renting it out as a rehearsal space and offsetting our own costs was a plan. We had previously rented our rooms out to other local acts in the past, but after a while had decided to stop and use our rooms for us alone.

We set about soundproofing where we could – I designed panels for the windows which were simply backed with rockwool and locked into place within the window frame – this actually worked surprisingly well and very little noise could be heard outside, even with a metal band practicing!

Palmer testing out the new soundproof panels.

After that my Dad dropped off some old carpets he had no use for – well he said they were “alright” which in Dad-speak means “only one breed of dog has pissed on it”. As it stood though we couldn’t afford to be picky with the flooring due to budget constraints, so I set to work fitting the old carpets, after which thankfully a good old hoover seemed to dissipate the less savoury aspects of them.
Both rooms were set up with a P.A system and some guitar cabs we had going spare and we were good to go!

The downstairs practice room. This one is mainly just for us!

Facebook ad for the upstairs room – although now it’s carpeted.

If you’re a local act interested in a well-equipped, affordable place to practice, check us out at darlington-rehearsal-rooms.co.uk/ or you can find us on facebook at facebook.com/DarlingtonRehearsalRooms

Dory Gets Her Head Shaved

So this Sunday I’m doing a freebie for a friend – her name is Dory Dronsfeld and she’s shaving off the dreadlocks she’s had for ever in order to raise money for charity. This is the final event in a “family fun day”, also raising money for charity, at the Dolphin Centre in Darlington. As they had some announcements to do from the stage as well as a few acoustic acts I offered to provide the PA. It turned out on arrival there was already a more powerful PA in the room! But it seems the council want money for all the add-ons so we used my little Peavey system anyway;

Dory being made bereft of dreads for charity. Have a click for zoom on the panoramic goodness!

Probably the highlight of the music was the extremely talented Anthony Davison – who unfortunately played later on as a lot of people were leaving. Still, I hadn’t seen the guy play live in years, since the days of him playing 10-minute long solos behind his head to “Sweet Home Alabama” – so I can say this was a definite improvement! Some beautiful work on the nylon-stringed guitar. We were also treated to his brother Chris playing some more rock-oriented stuff (including a cover of QOTSA’s “no one knows”) and OCR keyboardist Steven Palmer on his Ukelele (including a cover of “Gangster’s Paradise” – I shit you not).

To cap the day off there was a raffle, and although I didn’t win anything initially, fate must have been smiling – my friend Karl won a £10 butcher’s voucher. Unfortunately, Karl is a vegetarian! So on his way out he gave it to my girlfriend, and we had epic steak time! Cheers Karl, you are a gentleman and a scholar.

Random Acts – New project, recording an Opera

So, after finally finishing my degree I am once again back out in the big bad world! Apart from resuming some work on my band projects I was also approached by an old friend from college about a quick bit of audio restoration work on a theatre performance he’d recorded. This was a pretty simple task (although involved some sly effects with the stereo field) but ultimately netted me a more ambitious project – turns out he was in contact with a director looking for a recording artist to record a live Opera piece for a channel 4 commision for Random Acts. Of course I jumped at the chance, and met up with director Lyn Hagan and composer Agustin Fernandez over a nice cup of earl grey, in order to discuss their needs.

Lyn told me about the project’s inspiration – the real-life story of George Antony Hernandez Jr. – a Mexican mafia hitman, and the female deputy who fell in love with him – their failed conspiracy to kill the witnesses in his trial, and her subsequent incarceration. Strange, I know, but in fact Lyn had first-hand experience of the guy after engaging in a series of interviews with him. The opera itself would be based upon a series of letters the two lovers sent each other and a subsequent animation would be based upon sketches which Hernandez made while incarcerated.
I decided, since my experience with classical recording was minimal and my opera recording experience non-existent, to offer to record some of the rehearsals in the week preceding the performance.

One aspect that was a pain was the logistics – as it stands I don’t drive (and since I won’t be able to afford to until I get some more full-time work), and on top of that I realised that if I wanted to make a good impression I should get some of the expensive mics from the uni. I suppose the resulting situation could be spun as a testament to my commitment at least – with no car I actually ended up strapping my entire recording rig to a sackbarrow! While effective, this weighed a ton and was no fun getting on the train to Newcastle either – Still, if you want these kind of opportunities you have to persevere!

As ingenious as this felt at the time, it was a right bugger to cart through Newcastle!

For the recording itself I selected some mics from the University’s collection – 2 AKG C414s, 2 pairs of Studio Projects C4s, and a pair of DPA 4091s – which I found to be lovely ambient mics for recording drums so expected some similar results with an orchestra –

The selection of mics I used for recording the Opera.

Fortunately, despite being slightly late due to train issues, the full orchestra wasn’t due until 6 so I actually had ages to set up anyway! The session itself was fun as it was essentially just pre-recording to get a feel for the material, although there were a few issues. Most notably there were some small speakers around the room emanating some kind of hiss, so I quickly found the hidden amp for these and turned them off. After this I realised the always-on air conditioning in the performance room was causing massive issues, so in a bout of ill-advised improvisation I decided to actually place the pair of mics recording the orchestral elements on the floor as opposed to near the ceiling!

I’m unsure of the true validity of this technique, but any port in a storm!

After the initial setup things went without a hiccup – I would like to post a video of the results but unfortunately I will have to check contracts first as I suspect the actual recordings are under a non-disclosure thing until after they are broadcast. Better safe than sorry. Anyway here’s a final picture of the full ensemble being led by Agustin – they were a wonderfully talented group of musicians, especially the soprano, Bonnie, whose voice was fantastic. I look forward to recording them again in the near future!

The full ensemble performing together.