Day 17

Date: May 31, 2011

Time: 9:41pm

Playing on iTunes: "Shine and Blue" by Manu Katché

One more week of spring training! These past two and a half weeks have really flown by. But I'm making sure to take in a much as possible and absorb everything that's going on so it doesn't go by me and I don't know what happened.

The audio snake

Yesterday, we had a guy come in and help out organizing our electronics/cables/mics. Because with a pit this big, there's a lot of micing to do, and we do not want any tangling or hazards for people moving around in the pit during performances. Here's some pictures of how we mic the pit and what the cables look like. It's pretty insane from inside the pit. We have two full audio snakes with 16 channels on each.

Micing the instruments. One on the top end,
and one on the bottom end

Setting up the cables

Micing the timpani

                        

Aside from the micing and all the cables, we have a lot of different electronics. On top of our TWO synths (synthesizer keyboards), we have an effects sampler and a DTX pad. The effects sampler has multiple banks (sections) with 12 different patches (effects) on each bank. What happens is someone puts together samples (different sounds) on a computer and then uploads them to the sampler so that even the most complicated effect can be activated just by one click. With the DTX pad, it works by hitting each one of those squares with a drum stick, and depending on what bank you're on, different drum kit sounds or other sampled sounds will play through the speakers. There will be a part two to this blog for tomorrow with a video on how they work and what sounds they can produce.

Sampler

DTX Pad

So as you can see, we have a lot of electronic sounds in the pit. We actually got rid of our chimes which were about 6 1/2' tall and took 4 people to lift it because we could just play the chimes on the keyboard and it sounds very similar to real chimes. Unfortunately, electronics are taking over the real instrument business. Hopefully they don't start replacing real orchestras for string patches on synthesizers...

To be continued...

Quote of the day: "Appreciate nature. You're surrounded by it all day. It's the most natural and beautiful thing in the world."