Convocation 2006
Today was the 2006 Newman Theological College Convocation. Several good friends of mine received their degrees today, so congratulations to you all!
I participated in the choir this year and the rest of the group was kind enough to stick around for a few extra minutes after practice to do a quick recording. Click below for an MP3 of the recording:
"Ave Maria" by Jacques Arcadelt
The piece is quite beautiful. The recording turned out quite nicely, too (although there was a bit of background noise / talking due to the preparations that were being made for the ceremony). I built another condenser mic on Thanksgiving Monday and, with the help of a piece of scrap metal and some aluminum tubing, I rigged up a stereo mic bracket; this is what I used today.
Enjoy! And let me know what you think!
D.
Archibald Asparagus
Lately, I've been reminded of the "Busy, Busy" song from Veggie Tales. I've been pretty busy lately, so I've enjoyed taking a few days during the long weekend to recharge my batteries a bit. In the midst of that, I did my first couple of baptisms, too. That was a really neat experience, to know that God was working through me in this way.
Also, the past couple of days I took to fixing some of the nagging problems that I noticed in the two recordings we did this past summer. Download the new versions here:
About a Time - mix #4
You Are - mix #4
In "About a Time," I added kick drum and snare drum samples to the mix. When we did the recording in May I was unable to put a microphone on the snare, and so it comes out fairly faint in the mix. So I added the MIDI drum samples. It was a painstaking process, since Danny didn't originally play the drums to a metronome. I found each part of the drum track that had the kick drum or snare drum (based on the waveform and on how it sounded) and made a corresponding MIDI event at an appropriate volume.
For "You Are," Stephen's first attempt at recording the drums had a few minor mistakes. We had corrected this way back in August, but the silly recording engineer (aka me) had the wrong setting in the software and his re-recorded track -- which was played perfectly -- was unfortunately recorded in mono. This made it unusable and we didn't have time to record another version. So, I salvaged what I could out of Stephen's first rough drum track, and that's what appeared in the earlier mixes of the song. In this latest mix, I crossfaded some cymbal hits over the parts that were missed. I also removed some of the female vocals and tweaked the EQ on the bass guitar track.
I hope you enjoy the new versions. Let me know what you think!
And - have a great thanksgiving!
D.