On the a££ord van, going to London now, it will be 3 hours drive there so that means more time to write down what has happened during the 2 I didn’t write about because the schedules were getting tighter.
In case some of you were wondering why I’m starting to blog again, it is because I have to document the whole trip down, it’s part of my job, apart from being the cinematographer, engineer, and a performer here. I may or may not be using this blog as an official documentation depending on how personal these post are but oh well, hopefully this will help in allowing me to write-up a proper straight document on the trip.
Another reason for this is so to keep you guys updated on what we are going through here. I guess also a way to keep my family and friends informed the events here so they won’t worry too much.
Well, the last 2 days were rather straightforward, it has more or less conformed into a routine similar to that Day 6, only that this time round we have found a new place to eat. A little restaurant at the Chancellor’s Building called Comus - The chips there are not too bad, prices there is slightly cheaper (£4.95 instead of £7.75) but yes it is still expensive – and Le Café, a Café where you can try out their thin-tasting hot chocolate.
Well, in terms of rehearsals it is more or less about the same structurally, trying out stuff with Crystal Garden and the other synthesizers and see which instrumentation works best for them.
New addition to our instrumentation is the MIDI Wand and the EMS Synthia.
The MIDI Wand is made up of an antenna and a receiver that is used as a MIDI controller. A MIDI Controller is a device that controls certain parts of the synthesizer, like it’s volume, pitch, modulation and more. In our case, we used it to control pitch, basically the further away the antenna goes from the receiver the higher the pitch goes. But the processes behind it are far more complicated than that, so I won’t try to explain.
And the EMS SynthiA, your traditional analog synthesizer, just yesterday I was trying it out. It’s a pretty awesome piece of instrument, with everything wired using a circuit board and pins. It’s like adding inserts on a channel except you don’t do it with a mouse click but with pins and a substantial understanding of how the electrical signal travels in the circuitry.
It was considered one of most portable analog synthesizer of it’s time, we will know why one we see the real analog synthesizers (which can probably occupy the space of my study table in my room). These days you don’t see analog synthesizers much, since everything is digitalized, in fact you can have a equivalent of more than 20 of these synthesizers on a Macbook (they won’t sound the same as analog synthesizers though). Nevertheless doing things the old skool way can be fun if you are patient enough to explore possibilities of different sounds.
Apart of that, a few modifications to our sound sculpture to make it easier for us to play.
We also had a session (in fact just yesterday) where we had Diego sharing with us what the Music Technology course in Keele University does. It is a possible course for me since they do sound recordings as well, though not so much on performance based but more on Sonic Arts. The video will explain…
So yes, that’s mainly what has happened over the last 2 days. Well, yes I forgot buy a gift for Yin Liang because it was his birthday yesterday, so yea..Happy Birthday Yin Liang.
I certainly hope today would be more exciting even as we go to London to check out some instrument shop and to see Ravens at the Tower of London. Will be posting up some footage of London so stay tune…
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