Month: December 2015

Today we had a talk from Ken Blair who is a recording engineer and founder to the company BMP. Ken specialises in recording Jazz and classical music across the UK. He goes out to various locations, often being concert halls, to record bigger scale orchestras. Ken gave a valuable insight into setting up microphones in an orchestra setting as well as setting up the recording equipment in a different room. He also spoke about the importance of knowing the venue before you arrive otherwise issues may arise such as sound proofing and running cables.

Ken’s work is of particular interest to me as for a later career I am partly interested in live music. Recording live music has many of the same elements. I also have a background in classical music and am able to read score which is vital to be able to follow along with an orchestra. I also haven’t ever done any large scale recordings before so it was interesting to know what goes into it – especially when they are on location.

Ken also went onto to discuss useful tips for writing CV’s, as an employer and employee. He said it’s important to be clear and concise, trying to stick to 2 pages max and discussing technical skills such as the desks and workstations we are used too.

I found Ken’s talk very useful not only for tips on CV’s, recording techniques and practicalities, but as another possible career path I may take after university. This to me sounds like the ideal mix between live sound and music production and I would definitely be interested in pursuing it later in life.

Katia Isakoff is the founder of Women Produce Music (WPM), she is also a composer, producer, owner of a successful recording studio and an academic. Previously Katia has been to Lincoln to discuss her experience in a recording studio setting, this time she focussed her talk on the music industry itself. Katia Isakoff most recent endeavour has been to create Women Produce Music (WPM). This is set to improve the promotion of women who are producers music, as she believe that there seems to be a lack of women promoted within the industry. She used the example of Bjork produce most of her album and her friend who laid down the drums for her and got credit for producing.

To me, as a women in this industry, I find it important to look at these factors as it may be something that effects me in my later career. As Katia points out, the industry itself has already changed a lot over the past 10-20 years and is stepping towards gender equality, however the industry itself simply does have more men interested in it. Although this is not relevant to this project it was certainly relevant to me as a person who is a women in sound. WPM is set out to promote women in music and help them be noticed for there work. This will be most useful for me in the future and will be a good way of making contacts. I think the most important thing to think about when discussing gender equality within the music industry is that by discussing it we are able to learn more about why.

For this guest lecture Dan Shepherd discussed his experience as a feature radio producer. He gave us two different examples of radio features and described the thought process into making these and the actual production process. The first piece is a montage piece on a train journey across Australia called ‘indian pacific’, he explained how a good feature will be able to exploit your imagination, this train journey achieves this through a mixture of interviews and sounds you would hear if you were on a train. The second was a different type of radio feature which was presenter led; this involved having the presenter as the main focus and then having layers of sounds behind the main focus.

What can be learnt from Dan Shepherds work is the amount that sound can actually do. The type of features Dan works on are essentially the same process’ you go through with sound for film, however with feature for radio you can go into a lot more depth with the sound as sound is the sole component to it. Sound has to do everything as there are no other elements. What I took from Dan’s talk is to be able to portray an experience it is important to experience it yourself. We have adapted this to our film through getting a lot of our ambient sounds and prop sounds on the film set rather than in the studio. Throughout the making of Dan’s feature indian pacific he had issues with some of the audio not being the quality he needed for the feature. What can be learnt from this as for any other production it is important to go in with a great deal of organisation and the ability to problem solve on set. Skills which I have learnt from our specific project through complications with our director.

Dan’s ability to make something interesting to listen to whilst tell a story all through sound can certainly be admired. A lot of his skills used will be taken into account whilst looking into my own project.