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This was on the Vatican Information Service this morning:

OTHER PONTIFICAL ACTS

VATICAN CITY, 3 JUL 2009 (VIS) – The Holy Father:

– Appointed Bishop Albert LeGatt of Saskatoon, Canada, as metropolitan archbishop of Saint-Boniface (area 38,000, population 436,000, Catholics 119,000, priests 115, permanent deacons 18, religious 356), Canada. The archbishop-elect was born in Melfort, Canada in 1953 he was ordained a priest in 1983 and consecrated a bishop in 2001. He succeeds Archbishop Emilius Goulet P.S.S., whose resignation from the pastoral care of the same archdiocese the Holy Father accepted, upon having reached the age limit.

Nuts. Bishop Albert, we’ll miss you here… :-(

The formal CCCB news release is here:
http://www.cccb.ca/site/content/view/2694/1214/lang,eng/

Yeah, so it’s, um, been a while. I’ve been quite busy these past few months – lent, Easter, retreat, conference, weddings, ordinations, and, of course, recording!

(Oh, and I have a brother who is now engaged. Congratulations, Danny and Becca!)

Yeah, a fair bit has been going on lately. :-)

Here are the recordings that I’ve been working on the past while.

Piano recordings

These recordings were made with my two, homemade, large diaphragm electret condenser microphones. I placed them inside the piano at the church (11′ Petrov), and tried to orient them to they’d get a decent stereo image. The disadvantage to close miking with a piano is that it tends to pick up unwanted artifacts from the strings. But the overall result is pretty pleasing, I think! (please forgive my mistakes…)

Recordings made over the Easter holiday

I went to Lloydminster for a few days during the Easter octave, and David & I recorded a few tracks. They are a work in progress, but one of them is sounding fairly polished. It just needs some singing, I think! I’ve dubbed it “Mirror of Eternity” after a quote from St. Clare… and because in one version of the tune, my niece Claire is in the song. :-)

Other

The CBC used to have a catchy opening tune for their “CFL on CBC” broadcasts back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Here is my take on the theme. Note the cheesy 80s-ish sounds. :-)

And… that’s all for now! Enjoy!

Yesterday I built a simple shock-mount for my new condenser microphone and recorded some piano tracks in the church. Using a large ring of PVC pipe, two hose clamps, a bunch of elastic bands, a joining piece of electrical conduit, and two bolts I MacGyver’d the shock mount together. It doesn’t look pretty and I needed to use a 2lb weight to counterbalance the mic stand, but it works!

I recorded some piano tracks in the church with our 11 foot Petrov grand piano. They turned out quite well. I used the large condenser and one of the small ones I built last year, about 5-6 feet from the side of the piano, in an ORTF-ish configuration. I then reversed the stereo field because I thought it sounded better (lower notes on the left, higher on the right, like it would be if I was sitting at the keys).

The church has a beautiful natural reverb sound to it that the mics captured quite nicely. Unfortunately, they also captured the fan from the furnace, but there’s not much I can do about that until the summer!

Piano Test – 3 Pieces.mp3

The 3 pieces are:
- “Thaxted” by Gustav Holst
- “God Is Alive!” by David Haas
- “Kingsfold” by Lucy Broadwood, arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams

Please forgive any mistakes. :-)

Any ideas on which 4-legged furry creature was responsible for this?

I’ve just finished building a new, large-diaphragm condenser microphone. This was a lot of fun to do!

This microphone uses a Transsound TSB-2555A electret condenser capsule and seems to work pretty good. Here’s a quick voice test if you are curious and/or bored.

The circuit is based on a classic Schoeps circuit. This particular variation was developed by user “zapnspark” on the Yahoo “micbuilders” forum. If you are interested in doing something like this, that forum is amazing!

Here are some photos of the construction. I used a tip from an exhaust pipe that I found at a surplus store for the casing. The base is a 2″ steel ring, to which I epoxied a washer and fastened an XLR connector. Copper wire holds the circuit in place. A piece of wood holds the capsule assembly in place.

I have yet to build a shock mount for it.