Day 10: Our First Performance...

Tuesday September 27, 2011, 7:03pm GMT +1

Sure am glad to have a half-day off to catch up on what’s been happening, although it’s one hour, it felt as if a lot of things has been done.

Today was the performance day, after all the rehearsals, today is our first and informal performance to the public of Keele. Well, for those who listen to popular music, it’s something that would be new to the ears, and in fact it will always be new every time we perform it to other crowd, because it’s improvisation…

Well, here’s the bunch of instruments involved in this mini-informal setup..

Irfan's station (From left to right):

1) "Doltali" (२ स्त्रिङ्ग्स) - meaning two strings though there's 9 strings in total; one melody, one drone and 7 seven sympathetic strings, played plucked, or bowed. This instrument was at first a guzheng prototype, before Irfan's modification.

2) "The thing with the string that goes tinkling" - it has a string but doesn't go tinkling, more of boing, basically played by plucking and pulling the screwdriver attached to var the tension of the string

3) The tin whistle - also called the penny whistle, English Flageolet, Scottish penny whistle, Tin Flageolet, Irish whistle and Clarke London Flageolet^.

4) PVC Flute, played like the chinese xiao, only without holes, made by him as well.

Yin liang's instrument, a Novation X-25 midi controller with a digital synthesizer called omni-sphere. Gives you cool sounds. He also plays the classical english flute once in a while...

Chris's Station: 1) EMS Synthesiser - The analog synthesizer I was talking about in my previous post 2) Home-Grown Electronics Synthesizer - Basically a light dependent resistor controlling the frequency of the oscillator on a circuit board. He uses the iPhone LED flash along with this with a app which allows you to strobe the LED flash.

3) Guitar Synthesizer, we call it the guitar that produces the rodes sound, because of an occasion where Chris played the Guitar Synth with a rodes tone.

4) Feedback Delay system - similar concept to my instrument except that the feedback is created with the delay pedal (many people keep mixing the sound of the instrument with Chris's). You can also create a fake snare using the dome mash (forgot the name) and the distortion pedal and the delay I think...

My station (or rather it has become Michael's). The feedback synthesizer, modified by Michael Spicer to his preference.

Zheng Jie's station (Gabriel's playing it in this picture): Basically a midi controller controlling one of the drum synthesizers in Logic Express 9.0. Similar in concept to Yin Liang's system only that the keys are replaced with pads...

Valarie's Station: A Popular station for electro-musicians, from left to right:

1) Alesis airFX, basically a digital wavetable synthesizer/controller that has sensors that detects hand movement and playback sound, in accordance to what we play. You can play this without even getting into contact with it....

2) MIDI Wand, two dimensional spacial controller build by a client- Jimmy Sorson. It's basically a X and Y controller using 2 ultrasonic speakers and one ultrasonic microphone, and later map it to different control information. In this case, we used to control a digital synthesizer - ChucK.

3) The iPad - which is actually the Crystal Garden interactive music performance software, which michael programmed - was played by Sandy, she shares the same station as Valarie.

4) A Melodica aka. Melodion (Suzuki), Melodika (Apollo), Melodia (Diana),Pianica (Yamaha), Melodihorn (Samick) and Clavietta.

Johanne's Station: The bass guitar into an bass amp, how much more simple can this get..

Anna's station: The Rhodes MK1, probably the oldest instrument here, a lost art that was popular in the 1970s. Now we bring it back along with chorus, delay, wah wah, and distortion. This setup is capable of replicating a electric guitar, that's why it's also known as the piano that sounds like a guitar.

Sandy and many others' station: The sound sculpture, now modified with other chimes and ornaments to give more timbre possibilities..

Other instrument are:

1) Simon's plank, basically a piece of wood with a contact mic, you can make wind sounds by rubbing it with your hands and playing around a wah pedal.

2) Trumpets - played by Gabriel and Clara.

3) Classica Flute, Saxophone, and Piccolo - played by Michael Spicer

4) chinese mini drum played by Simon, a small toy drum that you can get from a pasa malam every chinese new year.

and lastly but definitely not least,

The mixer (submix in this case), managed by valarie. This basically works as a router to group our instruments according to who's playing them on my mixer board, making it easier to pan them left, right, front and back on my end.

You may not know this, but the mixer is considered an musical instrument, because it manages the music that comes through it. Playing this would mean being like the main performer of this entire performance.. cus you can mute a performer if you dislike him and that totally changes the piece...

Today’s performance wasn’t too bad for a start, one thing for sure, there was no feedback throughout the show (yea..of course excluding the synthesizers). It’s funny being praised for doing things that you do not know what you are doing; everything I did on the mixer board – panning left to right, front to back, fading, and adding reverberation - today was totally on the spot. I was too busy to figure out why I did this or that; everything was just in real-time.

I think I might have had too much movement though in terms of panning, but "if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing" -Michael Spicer :P.

I guess the days PArts as a live soundman really help me to do everything fast on the spot, but I have lots more to learn…

Well, will be uploading the video of the show if possible, it would be hard to cramp one hour of show into a single video, but I will see what other alternative I can do, either to show segments of the performance or to split the video into smaller segments so that so guys can see the part of the performance while waiting for the rest to upload.