We’ve just purchased a Sound Devices 722 for the remote gigs. If you have one coming up Travis will check the recorder out to you at the Monday crew meeting. It’s a very slick self-contained unit with an 80 GB hard disc and integrated mic preamps. We’re working on a cheat sheet to help you get going, but in the meantime, here’s a link to the manual.
If you didn’t get a chance to stop by the 354 studio on Valentine’s Day, you missed a great spectacle. The Audio Cupid splattered on the door like a butterfly on the windshield of a speeding 18-wheeler:
So to whomever vandalized the door was kind enough and thoughtful enough to make a Valentine’s Day card for everyone: Thank You! People like you make our program a great place to be!
I am happy to announce open-access to the hall calendars! Now, with great help from MITS, you can subscribe to standard “.ics” files in your favorite calendar program and see all events in the halls here at IU.
There are more calendars for other rooms in the Jacobs School of Music available here. (Note: some calendars are available but not regularly updated.) Also, MITS has put together a very pretty web calendar interface.
We just caught up with Aaron Beck A.S. ‘97, who’s now mixing front-of-house sound for the touring production of Mama Mia! Previously he was mixing the Cirque de Soleil’s “Love” in Las Vegas. Aaron updated us on Mitch Tracey A.S. ‘97 who’s mixing the touring production of Lion King, and Julie Randolph A.S. ‘98 who’s mixing the Broadway production of Jersey Boys.
Tony Elfers B.S. ‘06 contacted us recently. He is now working as a staff composer at Spank Music and Sound Design in Chicago.
Rob McGaughey from Digidesign is coming back to show off the new version 7.4 and a few other new things. He will be here Tuesday November 13. The main demo will be at 7pm in MAC room MC036. There will also be an earlier demo for those of you who are new to Pro Tools, that will be at 5:45. I think these are worth your time. Most likely we will be upgrading all of our JSOM systems to 7.4 over the semester break.
Mike Flynn, producer of the multi-platinum “How to Save a Life” from the Fray will be here to chat and answer questions Wednesday November 14 at 2:30pm in room M242. He is a former graduate of the Recording Arts program. While in town working on the “soon to be released” Howie Day album, he worked with IU Grad Troy Brazell and took him back to LA with him. Bring questions.
Look who showed up in Recording Arts classes today!
Recording Arts Students Richard Mountsier and José Aguirre took top honors in this year’s Audio Engineering Society Student Recording Competition. Richard won first prize in the Classical Stereo category for his recording of Liszt’s Les Preludes performed by the IU Festival Orchestra conducted by Roberto Abbado. José won second prize in the Classical Surround category for his recording of the first movement from Mahler’s 5th symphony performed by the IU Festival Orchestra conducted by David Robertson.
This marks the fifth consecutive year IU Recording Arts students have placed in the AES recording competition. Richard and José join pervious winners Paul Bannister, Eliot Leigh, Curtis Heidolph, Charles Van Winkle, and Peter Cerbin.
After our first semester of recording directly to Wavelab and using a completely file-based workflow, the results are in! The Department of Recording Arts recorded 227 events encompassing 854 hours of crew time. With some crews requiring more than one engineer, almost 4000 man-hours were reported by our students! All in one semester! The majority of these hours were performed by freshman, with a fairly linear regression down through the seniors. (However, the percentages match the number of students per class; every students is required the same number of hours regardless of seniority.) The majority of our crew time was spent working Graduate Recitals with the Opera and Ballets coming in at a respectable second.
The completely-new workflow went very well! The 227 events resulted in ~400 hours or recorded sound. This sound encompassed ~1 Terabyte of data, not including our HD video recordings. The entire 1TB of data was always stored in at least two separate locations and was kept track of almost entirely by perl scripts. We delivered 93% of the concerts to the library with no reported errors. Out of the remaining 7%, 5% of the errors were minor documentation issues that slipped by our quality control staff. Only ~2% (1.7521145374%) had mistakes in the files that required significant correction!
I’d say that’s a pretty successful first try! Thanks to all our students for their hard work. Also, thanks to the library’s Variations staff for working with us on this project.
We have just finished recording a companion CD for volume I of The Symphonic Repertoire, a five-volume series begun by the late A. Peter Brown which is being published by IU Press. Entitled The Eighteenth Century Symphony, it features world-premier recordings of symphonies by little-known composers such as Antonio Brioschi, Gottlob Harrer, Joseph and Placidus von Camerloher, Gaetano Brunetti, and others. This project is a collaborative effort involving over twenty scholars from four different countries and is being funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Since it is uncommon for full scores to exist for symphonic music of this era, the scores for this project were assembled from individual parts by Mary Sue Morrow of the University of Cincinatti College-Conservatory of Music. Apparently thousands of these parts are stored in archives and monastaries throughout Europe. The Music was performed in the historically correct style on original instruments by the Bloomington Early Music Festival Orchestra conducted by Stanley Ritchie in Auer Hall.
For this recording I used 2 Schoeps mk21 wide cardiod mics as the main pair with B&K 4006 omnis as outriggers. Spot mics were used on the woodwinds, horns and harpsichord, but the ensemble balenced itself very well so they will probably not be needed in the final mix. Ambience 
was captured with a pair of Neumann KM 130s hung in the middle of the hall about 20 feet high. The adjustable acoustic in Auer were set as follows: the stage curtains were fully opened; the second floor balcony wall curtains were completely down in the front, and at the half position in the back of the hall; the rear curtains were all the way down; and the ceiling curtains were at the one-third position. I find that this configuration, the front of the hall dryer than the rear, works very well and provides a nice clear sound with a decent amount of hall bloom. My goal for this recording was to be clean and accurate, since it is intended to accompany a textbook as a study aid I felt that the musical lines and parts had to be as clear as possible.
Listen to a clip from the session. This is the fourth movement from Camerloher’s Symphonia in D.
I really enjoyed this project. The musicians (many of whom are EMI graduates) were really excellent and Stanley Ritchie is one of the founders of historical performance study, so it was a treat to work with him. It is also satisfying to know that this recording is unique: it is unlikely that these works will ever be recorded again, and in many ways, we are creating the definitive performances. And unlike most classical CDs, this disc will be in publication for many years and will be heard by thousands of people (even if they are only students studying eighteenth-century music.) I also think that this project demonstrates the great strength of the Recording Arts program. We regularly have the opportunity to work at such a high level with professional-quality ensembles on truly unique projects. These kind of opportunities are available nowhere else.
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