Flip flopped again (trials & tribulations)
Seeing that I have a horrible preamp (I’m pretty sure its made out of toy parts) I realized that a pair of nice NT5s won’t sound very good until I spend quite a bit more on a preamp. So I canceled the order.
As you may know, I’ve been moving toward the direction of “sound art” for the last several months. So the question really is, what’s more important, recording my piano or sounds of the world? The latter.
However, I did spend an additional hundred dollars on this unit because it has a solid reputation as one of the quieter field recorders with pretty good built-in microphones. We will see just how well it records the Acrosonic.
ImprovFriday is growing up!
ahh, isn’t she so cute? The event ImprovFriday is really flourishing with its own public network. I want to encourage users to use the network features beyond the fun event, especially the blogs to promote themselves and share thoughts, ideas, etc.
So far users have been taking advantage of the photo section to make an art walk.
There are also some pretty nice videos there as well.
And lastly, what makes the place tick, the members.
Some things technically don’t make sense
It has been almost two months in my quest for a microphone to both capture a decent recording of my Baldwin Acrysonic and to use for field recordings. The research has led me to this thought: If I only had five thousand to kill on a matched pair of microphones?
I’d be curious to know if there is really that much more involved in manufacturing a higher quality microphone that would change the price tag so drastically. Maybe so, but in any case I’ve decided to go with a matched pair of Rode NT5s.
I was going for a pair of large condenser microphones to capture a fuller medium range, with the piano in mind. I ordered a pair of Marshal V87s on Ebay. The seller had a 99 percent rating, so I found it strange that the microphones weren’t delivered at the two-and-a-half-week mark. I canceled the order and maybe it was a good thing. Over the last couple weeks I have been thinking more and more about capturing my own field recordings. I think using other people’s sounds is a must, so sites like Freesound.org have my utmost respect. But I have a strong feeling that getting out there in the field, imagining the way the recording will work in the piece as I record, is going to be a great experience.
The next step…. what mini-digital recorder? Ahrrggg!!
Across the Road
Composer, Greg Hooper, has been busy with a set of fantastic phonography works. His latest is titled “Across the Road.” For this piece Greg meticulously recorded the construction work on a house across the street from his own once a week at the same time for 28 weeks. “Across the Road” is mesmerizing and wonderfully unique. Its available at Bandcamp on the label Analogous-Sounds.
Here is the official description of the work:
A field recording of a house being built across the road. I recorded an hour every Tuesday morning (at about 10:00 am) for 28 weeks. Each week provides – I think – 20 secs of both background and individual spot sound. The background was developed by taking a representative sample from that week, taking the FFT randomising the phase, then taking the IFFT, to give a noise sample that represented the spectrum (but not the dynamical structure) of that week. This was then convolved with representative sound of whatever the activity of that week was. Overlaid on top of that are spot sounds that seemed to me to represent the normal sounds of that week. The density of the sounds is determined by a drawing the builder made of the activity cycle across the entire building period.
ImprovFriday Site Launch – CD, etc.
A little history. I founded ImprovFriday back in March. It was a boring Friday. I was improvising and thought, I like this improvisation and I want to post it to Twitter. But I had no reason to. I thought, if I announce its ImprovFriday, that reason would be sufficient. The first reply was from Twitkarl. He replied “improvfriday?” Soon after David Toub posted the first improvisation and the rest is history.
Look at the right side here for every blog post of every week’s IF program with audio links. It has steadily grown and with the help of social networks like Facebook and Twitter it has been pretty successful. I would like to thank everyone on the collaboration CD that is in the works and give a nod to David Toub, the first participant. David has has given great feedback regarding ImprovFriday as well. I would lastly like to thank Dennis Bathory-Kitsz for pushing me to get rid of a feature which was making the event difficult to participate in, which was the use of blip.fm/ (no offense blip!).
But alas, we finally reached a point where we need our own site and I’m happy to announce ImprovFriday. Its not going to be a NNM part 2, but it is going to be a place where I hope people show up to post nice music.
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