Monthly Archives: March 2011

Westcombe Park: Abandoned Police station = more local crime?

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Image by kenjonbro, Flickr

Image by kenjonbro, flickr

Spending as much time as I do in the local area, I’ve been wondering for a while what purpose this former police station building in Westcombe Parck actually serves, and a couple of recent (unrelated) events have made me more than a little anxious about this:

First off, I found an iPod Nano and a CD on the street, and as I was passing I wanted to hand them in to the nearest station so they can be claimed as lost property.  With finds like these, one never knows if something was just dropped accidentally while running to catch a train or bus, or whether something more sinister had taken place.  Walking up to the front door (shown far right, in the picture above) it was clear that there is no public-facing service, so it seemed pointless to knock on the door.  The phone thoughtfully provided outside doesn’t have any instructions and looks in a dire state of repair – there didn’t seem any point in using it.  I just left the goods in a plastic bag on the doorstep.  Four days later it was still there in the same place.  At least the yokels apparently didn’t think it fair game to pinch something off that particular doorstep!

Then there was the incident a couple of nights ago at the local train station, with trains diverted while a knife was apparently recovered from the tracks.  It’s not terribly encouraging to know that quite a nasty fight apparently took place in what is otherwise quite a nice suburb, only a block or two away from a now “closed” police station.  It makes me wonder whether having the station back in use for the public and serving as a base for regular visible foot patrols would help prevent this kind of thing becoming a more regular feature.

Looks can matter…

We humans are shallow creatures and the presence of a police station in an area, even when disused or non-public-facing, seems to make at least some of us think twice about our actions and how they’re coming across.  In this case, the fact that the building is overgrown (more so now than in the above pic, taken in 2009 apparently) and has had a leaky overflow pipe with moss growing all over the wall underneath it for two or more years, the building doesn’t come across as one that actually performs any function whatever story the office lights and car movements around it might try to tell. Perhaps if someone fixed the leak, cleaned up the wall, tidied the phone booth and cut back the overgrowth around the front door, passers-by might actually think there’s a real presence there and modify their behaviour accordingly?  Sure, it won’t stop the worst offenders, but it might at least make them think twice about the fact that someone might catch them.  And perhaps it might make the locals feel more like a police presence is nearby.

Thoughts on mixing sound for Christmas Praise 2010

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Thought I’d dig this older post from the depths of another blog that has yet to go public.  I had the pleasure of setting up and mixing for Christmas Praise last December in All Souls Langham Place. It was a great concert, featuring the All Souls Orchestra with guest stars Michelle Todd and Graham Kendrick.

I freely admit that orchestral music isn’t my strong point, but I enjoy the challenge of understanding and working with something a little different to my normal tastes. This event proved challenging because a real orchestra in this space produces a lot of volume on its own – without amplification of any sort. This means that Michelle and Graham’s vocals needed to be much louder than this PA system would normally be asked to produce, and the orchestral backdrop makes the quality of any sound reinforcement much more critical if we are to blend reinforced vocals with an acoustic orchestra.

Main challenge – Vocal levels

In the event, the quality of vocal reproduction was far less of a challenge than the sheer quantity! It didn’t help that the solo singers were some ways in front of the PA speakers reinforcing them, making gain-before-feedback more of a challenge in this room than usual, especially given the very wide dispersion of the installed Bose 802′s! I was very concerned about tipping the system over into feedback (which would have been a huge distraction) as well as missing cues, so despite a good rehearsal/soundcheck time the first half was spent fighting the system to give me cleaner and louder vocals. I was impressed at having equal numbers of people approach me during the interval saying “great job on the sound”, or “Sounds great where we are but can we have more vocals please?” – that 50%/50% balance is usually difficult enough to achieve in this building with quieter setups!

By the time the second half started, I felt more comfortable with the system as a whole, and therefore set about fixing the vocals that I’d been struggling with for so long. The key to this was making the vocals loud enough to be heard above the orchestra, without having them feed back or go too loud for comfort/comprehension.

A use for compression

The first tool I brought out of the box was compression for the two vocal mics, which I set to the “vocal” preset in the iLive board, with a ratio of 2:1, soft knee, with the threshold set so that the compressor was just beginning to act (around 1dB reduction) on median volumes from each singer. With this, I was able to squash the loudest passages of each singer by about 6dB without audible pumping or feedback issues. This reduction figure was important – it essentially means a halving of the volume. if I could reduce the loudest passages by that much, I could use the “make-up gain” setting to boost the quieter passages by the same amount without having the loudest passages get too loud. Extremely loud passages will get squashed a bit more than 6dB, keeping things comfortable on particularly strong notes or the singer getting right in close to the microphone. This boosting of the quieter passages with control on the louder ones meant that the singers were *always* above the orchestra with no need for me to ride the faders, unless the orchestra also got too loud around them, in which case there’s nothing wrong with reacting by pushing the vocal fader(s) up to restore the balance. The make-up-gain in this case was turned up gradually with care to listen out for feedback creeping into quieter passages.

A use for gating

Given that Graham’s mic was much louder in the singer’s monitor wedge than Michelle’s, his mic was much more susceptible to feedback. The 6dB makeup gain put his mic on the very edge of feedback and was frankly a bit of a liability. I mitigated this by using a gate to take 3dB of gain off his mic whenever he wasn’t singing – 3dB being barely noticeable if I’d got the threshold too high for his quietest passages while I was setting it up, but enough to take the mic out of its perpetual near-feedback zone when he backed away from it.

Other things I did…

Recording

Premier radio came in to record a broadcast mix of the event, for use on Boxing Day I think. I assigned three mono auxes to send an ambient mic feed, a mono mix of the conductor’s mics (more on those in a while) and a mix of everything that was sent directly to the main sound system.

To make sure there was a backup, I decided to try out the M-MADI card in the iLive system and use that to send direct outputs of each incoming mic channel to a laptop. Allen and Heath very kindly arranged for a loan M-MADI card in lieu of any other supplier being able to provide one. With this arranged I was able to hire an RME MADIFACE for use with the one laptop I could find in the building possessing an ExpressCard-34 slot. As I was testing the robustness of the MADI interface as well as that of the laptop and software receiving the audio stream, I enabled all 64 input channels that the iLive system can theoretically cope with to be sent from the iLive, and set up the recording software to stream all 64 channels to disk.

All was well on the night, it seems – having listened to snippets of the 90Gb of audio data we created over the several hours the event lasted, everything seems to be locked together and I’ve yet to hear a dropout. It’s amazing to hear how little noise there is in the recordings compared with the same kind of activity I’ve previously done with analogue gear recording to an Alesis ADAT-HD24.

Live reinforcement

The orchestra certainly packs a punch in this building when fully unleashed – but often the strings and woodwind tend to get lost, drowned out by singers and percussion. To help mitigate this, I put a single condensor mic on a stand in front of the woodwind section, and a cross-pair of condensers in front of the conductor’s stand to get a stereo image of the whole orchestra. This pair was physically closer to the strings than any other instrument, giving me a slightly strings-heavy mix of the orchestra. As well as being used for the recording, i found them useful in the live mix, boosting the strings sections a little so they remained mostly audible even when everything else got loud. I was even able to set them up on their own audio group, so that I could use boost their level the matrix feeds for the speakers covering the sides of the building without having them too loud in the main speakers.

Another useful tool was the channel input delays. Any mic behind the speakers was delayed according to its relative distance from the central point between the main speakers using the 1ms-per-foot rule, the approximate speed of sound travelling in the air. This meant that drum and piano mics in particular effectively disappeared from the mix as identifiable sources, so i could mix in a little more of these instruments for clarity and impact without them sounding like these details were being provided by the sound system. These delays were also recorded to the hard disc, so the live recording immediately sounds more natural when played on headphones or a decent hifi system.

Summing up

This was not the best-sounding mix I’ve ever created for an event, but the tools built into our iLive console certainly helped bring things under control with a whole lot less stress and anxiety than I’ve experienced with similar events in this church using the previous analogue console. The ability to stream every input to its own channel in a software recording system certainly made reviewing the work after the concert a whole lot more meaningful, so I’ve now got a list of things I’d do differently next time I run a similar event. More on that note in a future post, I think!

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Homeless: explore and reflect

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Walking to work from London Charing Cross so often as I do, I regularly come across people, situations or slogans that make me think a little outside my usual perspective. This morning’s journey was no exception.

The National Gallery is running another campaign to get visitors through its doors, with the words “Explore and reflect” splashed across its main hoardings. But what made me take a second look at the scene was the homeless man basking nearby in the sunshine, apparently surrounded by his worldly possessions and looking decidedly lost. The kind of lost that is not formed by having only just arrived, but for having been here for far too long. Without a home and seemingly without a hope, all he could do for comfort was drink in the beauty of his surroundings. I hope his situation brings some perspective on my own thoughts and attitudes today, as I deal with whatever ‘crises’ life and work will throw at me. I took a picture to remind me of all of this:

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Maybe one day I’ll get over myself and summon up the courage to strike up a conversation, to see what’s what.

Dual 505-2: Taming vinyl sibilance

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I’ve been really happy with our record deck since we inherited it a few months ago, but one common problem has been playing back 70′s and 80′s pop/rock LP’s that have been, shall we say, well loved.  I had an idea while last re-aligning the cartridge/stylus that part of the treble reproduction issue I’ve been experiencing with these discs was that the cartridge was slightly vertically offset in comparison to the vertical alignment of the groove – almost as if the cartridge mounting is somehow twisted slightly on the arm.

The Dual 505-2 has no azimuth adjustment to speak of, but the cartridge is held in with a pair of bolts, and so the azimuth could easily be corrected by inserting a washer or some other small object to act as a shim.   I didn’t have any washers to hand that were less than 1mm thick (way too thick for this project), so for the sake of experimentation I’ve experimented with a piece of copper tape retrieved from a no-longer-working hard drive enclosure.  It’s less than 0.25mm thick, and easy to cut and fold to the right height.

To get a rough measurement of what was required, I chose an older duplicate disc and set it playing, and observed the end of the cartridge right above the needle riding the groove.  I estimated that the left side of the cartridge (as it faced me) was about 0.5mm too high compared with the level of the LP spinning underneath it, so I cut a small piece of the copper, folded it to get the approximate thickness required and cut a bolt-hole through it, before inserting it between the cartridge and its mount.

After doing up the bolts and re-checking the overall alignment, I started the same disc playing and listened.  Much of the treble harshness had gone, and vocal sibilant distortion was down around 50% – much more listenable for some of the older discs in our collection.  What’s more, newer/cleaner discs are sounding much more dynamic, and their overall soundstage much more focussed – much more digital, one might say.  Bryan Ferry’s “Boys and Girls” was a particularly problematic recording, but was much improved in this evening’s round of listening tests. The same improvement was noted on playing a slightly ratty copy of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” LP.  We’re closer to hearing the music, and further away from hearing the equipment playing it.  That’s a good thing in my book.

Next on my list is to trim the copper shim to make the installation invisible, but it certainly proved my little theory and proves a nice illustration for anyone else wanting to try the same thing.

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Steven Faux’s Psalms Project comes to All Souls, Langham Place

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Some photo’s my wife Sarah took while I was mixing sound for the event.  From what I remember I think they give quite a nice flavour of how things looked.  From my side, I really enjoyed working this gig and look forward to seeing where this project goes in the future.

Childhood memories revisited: Sonic the Hedgehog on iPhone

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I was never much of a gamer as a kid. For one thing we didn’t have the money for games consoles, for another I had a ZX Spectrum and enjoyed trying to program simple maths problems, graphics and music too much to be content with simply consuming other people’s work.

That said, I spent many a happy hour at friends’ houses playing Sonic or Mario games on various consoles. When I saw that Sega have promised to donate profits on some games downloaded from the iTunes App Store to relief works in Japan, I couldn’t resist having another go at Sonic The Hedgehog. The memories are awesome, and I’m pleased to report that the gaming experience is surprisingly faithful to the original.

Screen grab, content copyright to Sega I guess...

Trying out WordPress 2.7 for iOS

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Wow – what an improvement! I can actually type without the app bogging down! Not sure how it’ll fare with longer posts, but the comparative speed of typing this short post is somewhat encouraging. Way to go, guys!

As an extra note, I’ve just seen the app fail gracefully while trying to post this entry when the 3G signal dropped out. The app remained stable, and kept the content ready for me to update and re-upload. That’s fixed one of my pet-hates of previous versions. Awesome.

WordPress for iOS 2.7 Now Available (via WordPress for iOS)

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Just a quickie to say that I’ve been assured by the devteam that this app really is an answer to the reliability and speed issues I reported on my iPhone 4, which should make posting on the move somewhat more bearable. I’m very much looking forward to trying this out to see if it holds to its promise.

WordPress for iOS 2.7 Now Available After three months of development, WordPress for iOS 2.7 is now available in the App Store. This version fixes over 100 bugs, which means better performance and fewer crashes. Reliability Updates The main focus of this release is to improve the app’s performance and reliability. The app has been moved to Core Data, which is a much improved way of managing information locally on the device. Also, the methods used to communicate over XML-RPC have b … Read More

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Claire Robinson (Band) – “Conversations with the Night”

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A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure of attending our good friend Claire Robinson’s second CD launch party with her band – this time at St Peter’s Church on Vere Street, just off the bustling Oxford Circus.  The support act was a slightly shy but extremely talented Matthew Wight.  Not sure I want to do a “review” here, but suffice it to say that I would love to hear more from both acts as their careers develop.

Of course I couldn’t go to a gig without taking the camera, so here are some pics that I think give a flavour of the evening we very much enjoyed!

More Be/O2 broadband routing issues

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Grrrrr!

Looks like Be and O2 are having more routing problems – this time affecting traffic to OpenDNS servers and some others.  Things have stopped working several times on both Be and O2 connections I use in London over the last 24 hours, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for a few hours. Advice from both providers is to set router DNS to the original factory settings if you’ve changed them.  Thing is, they’re offering this advice in their online forums, and uh… well without working DNS servers to look at, affected users won’t be able to get to the forums in the first place.