Avalanche City - Wanderland Festival, Manila

(taken by Dave from on stage)

A week ago I jumped on a plane headed to Manila for Wanderland Festival with Avalanche City. We were looked after by so many lovely people I kinda wished I didn't have to leave, but now I am happily back on New Zealand soil and looking forward to getting back in to mixing and editing some Hula Hope and French for Rabbits songs this week.

 

Hula Hope - Drum Recording

A few weeks ago I recorded the bones of 3 more songs with Hula Hope from Wellington featuring guest vocals from Steve Abel. I'm in the process of adding a few extra parts to them (bass, keys etc) and asked Alex to play some drums/percussion. I'd added some of me playing individual marching drums on a song but needed more of a full drum kit sound for the others.

Live Sound - B Street at Galatos

The Raw Nerves

I set up and mixed Las Tetas, The Raw Nerves and The Drab Doo Riffs at Galatos yesterday, working for the Rockfactory. With a few tweaks here and there Galatos could be a great venue, it sounded pretty good in there yesterday.

The Raw Nerves

The Drab Doo Riffs

The Drab Doo Riffs

Studio Upgrades!

Over the past month I've been making some purchases to upgrade the studio and I thought I'd post a little about what I bought and my current setup.

I recently bought a new apple 27" iMac and upgraded to Protools 10, unfortunately I just missed 11 by a couple of weeks but I think 10 will last me a while yet and I'm happy to not have to upgrade all of the plugins.

As you can see in the picture above I've also moved all of my preamps in to a rack (except for the 1073DMP) (DMP standing for Desktop Mic Pre, designed specifically to sit on a desk top!) and added a Focusrite ISA428 and an API 500-6B Lunchbox with 2x API 512c mic preamps in it.

The Focusrite is taking over conversion duties with its A-D card and I have the four channels of the ISA428, the two API and the two Toft channels being converted and going in to the ADAT in on the 003.

Along with the 003's 4 mic pre's I have the BAE 1073DMP and 3 channels of the Presonus Digimax plugged in to the line in's on the 003.

That gives me 16 channels! 12 of which I can plug straight in to from my new Whirlwind 12 channel drop snake.



I think that brings you up to speed! I'm really excited to get stuck in to some proper recording with the new setup, the pre's I've added should really step up the quality of the source recordings!

Live Sound - Farah Loux

After recording yesterday I headed in to do sound for Farah Loux at a corporate event. They had acrobats, a confetti canon that fired just before the band started to play, fake tattoo/makeup artists, a silent disco but instead of music: Morgan Freeman talked to you and there was bread with dips inside paint tubes. It was all very surreal.

Josie Tuck - Trumpet Recording

Recorded Trumpet & Flugel with Liz Stokes for some of Josie's songs yesterday. Ribbons just sound perfect for horns!

French For Rabbits

French For Rabbits were here over the weekend recording and mixing some songs for their album. We finished a single a couple of weeks back and they've just shot a video for it. They've also just got another grant so I should be heading down to Wellington again soon to work on another single, and they'll be back up to finish their album.

Here are some pictures of how Brooke spent most of her time while we were mixing!!

New Great North Video - To Leave Someone

I just updated my website to include the Great North video for To Leave Someone in the Watch & Listen page. The video for "To Leave Someone" is really beautiful/sad and I highly recommend watching it (unless you're wearing mascara that isn't waterproof)

Palmerston North - Avalanche City

On Saturday we caught an empty ferry out to Motutapu Island where I did sound for Avalanche City for 'The Dual' which is held on Motutapu and Rangitoto Islands (I forgot to take photos) and then Sunday we caught an early plane to Palmerston North where they played in the square. It was a beautiful day!

Josie Tuck

We're slowly making progress on Josie's album again, recording vocals, guitar and piano the other day. Hopefully more recording soon!