Need A Holiday

Thought I'd post an update on where I've disappeared to. The Pink Floyd tribute band I'm in has kept me very, very busy! Not only am I drumming for them but I've ended up being the person to sort out the keyboard player's laptop which is running Gig Performer for all the synth patches. These consist of all the Arturia and Roland vintage synth VSTs in order to authentically program all the keyboard sounds! Hard work but it helps we have a technical guy who used to work for Pink Floyd so he has the inside knowledge!

On top of that, I seem to be the sound and mixing engineer doing all the live audio rigs. It's a lot of work.

We had a production rehearsal last Sunday - 9 hours of it! - to test out all the kit and I took full multi-track live recordings at the same time. Lots of work but here's a couple of snippets. At least it's sounding great (to me at least!).

I'm utterly enjoying this band but it's very, very hard work!

An excerpt from Any Colour You Like: https://www.facebook.com/eclipsetribute/videos/551828512262518/

Another from Echoes: https://www.facebook.com/eclipsetribute/videos/780503862417993/

I will get posting more music here when I get a bit more time! See you on the Loops!

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Always the pro. They are lucky to have someone like you who will dedicate themselves to doing the job the best that it can be done. Wishing you all the best for the holidays.

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hey martin, sounds really cool :) wishing you a nice holiday season and all the best for 2020, Shi :)

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Thanks both of you. It's been a very busy time for me - so distracted have I been that I even let my Wikiloops membership lapse! Sorted that now!

The gig went spectacularly well, it sold out, and I've been knee-deep in mixing the recording in what spare time I have. My Mac didn't know what had hit it! Considering how under-rehearsed we were and the sheer technical challenge I faced of miking up and recording 22 tracks of gig (because everyone insists on being in stereo!), I'm amazed at the end result. I was making up the whole rig as I went along, so the fact everything was successfully captured is a minor miracle.

We had a few technical issues, first being the laptop that runs SCS (which handles background samples and noises - for example the crows and the wind noises in Echoes below) having a really, really noisy output so I had to re-apply the original samples at mixdown. The second was the keyboard player routing his monitor mix through his submixer for the keys resulting in the recording containing bits of everyone else on the keys channels! Luckily it's background enough that the keys didn't have to be re-done as the other tracks covered it well enough.

Oh yes, one of the guitarists, who was using two amps on the night, forgot to take one of them off standby for the second set! Of course, it was the amp I'd miked up! So for our second set he had to overdub his part!

Since the gig on the 6th December, I've lost count of the hours I've spent mixing this gig! My studio is still dismantled (I've brought the Yamaha out of gig retirement, partly because I went through the kick head of the Spaun at the tech rehearsal and, actually, it just sounds better) so have no means of recording at the moment until I get my backside into gear and put it back together with the Spaun.

Anyways, if you have 23 minutes to spare, here's us doing the Pink Floyd epic 'Echoes' at the gig. I have other recordings done now but I don't control the Soundcloud account and the other songs up there are the test mixes at the moment.

I've had a few comments from people saying it doesn't sound live. The recording is very dry and I've added a subtle master reverb to the whole mix to put the 'live' back. It is all live - I promise!

[url=https://soundcloud.com/user-387059928/echoes-live]Echoes (Soundcloud)[/url]

See you in the new year! I'll be back as soon as I get my studio rebuilt!

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sounds great to me ! looking forward to more of this ;)
Wishing you all the best on your Floyd trip :)

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Sounds awesome Martin - and Mitchie, who's an even bigger fan of Pink Floyd than I am, agreed that it sounds "just like the original" (being really impressed by the voices).

I think for that live touch the pros always take some extra room mikes as well - but even like this it's awesome. Good job from you all!

Wishing you a good turnaround into a happy new year 2020, and I hope to see you at the meeting :)

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Thank you Wolfgang! I'm about to re-pass the mixes as I've obtained a copy of Izotope which should do a better mastering job than the combination of Waves L1, Wave MB Compression and Waves Spatial.

I'd love to have had ambient mics and had planned to set them up, but all 22 channels on the desk were occupied with instruments. Occupational hazard when even the guitarists are in stereo! :(

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Sounds great to me. Wish I had headphone or speakers to do it justice.

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