Category: Guest Lectures

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.

‘The more you listen to something the more it allows you to here’

Jez Riley French works as a field sound recorder going around the world collecting interesting and different sounds. What makes Jez’s work extremely interesting is how he finds objects/places/living things and captures there sound in a way that perhaps hasn’t been heard before. His work allows us to have an idea of how much more sound there actually is out there rather than the obvious sound which we perhaps hear every day. He differs from other sound recordists as he prefers the unpredictability about field recording; of how sound can change to it’s environment and how other aspects like nature around it may change the shape of the sound. Other field sound recordists try to prevent this from happening through trying to block out sounds and movements that may effect the sound they are trying to capture; Jez likes the mystery of it all.

He continued to discuss the microphones he used to capture these sounds, my particular favourite was the way he uses contact microphones. He uses them to capture fascinating sounds which you could never imagine came from the object. For example the recording of the ‘Telefrica’ which is a cableway in Italy used to transport goods down a mountain, through a contact microphone this sounds like something out of a science fiction film. He also spoke about how stairwells are a good place to find interesting sounds through a contact mic. My favourite piece he showed us with his contact microphone was the recording of the orchestra with the microphone attached to the stage, this created a really harmonic atmosphere audio (‘Salt – Adagio’). He also spoke of other microphones he used such as hydrophone microphones – to pick up sounds under water. Ultrasonic detectors which pick up ultrasonics and pitch them down so they are audible to the human ear. Geothermal detecters which collect infra red sounds below our hearing. VLF detecters which detect space sounds.

I found Jez’s talk very useful; it certainly opened my eyes up to different ways of getting sounds that you wouldn’t expect to find. I think we will be able to apply a lot of this to our project. Although we don’t have the range of technologies Jez uses we can use some of his techniques. We have now discussed as a group how whilst we are recording we will play around with the positions of our atmos microphones; try explore with the sounds we are getting with the hope that some of them will be able to fit into post. I also want to try using a contact microphone whilst recording the music; this will be perfect for our scenes where the main character is dreaming. I also think we could use contact microphones to create base layers for our atmospheres.

In this Lecture with Bryan he discussed an example of his own experience with working for a client on a radio drama. This specific project was for a BBC radio 7 drama on William Wilberforce to celebrate an anniversary of Wilberforce ending slavery across Britain. Bryan spoke about his steps in problem solving and research into the project. He spoke about how he wanted to make it as close to what it would have been in that era (this also including using locations that Wilberforce was actually present). Due to joining the crew on this project late Bryan had to re-plan a lot of the schedule as it was not efficient for the transmission date. He also had issues with location so had to quickly sort other locations so the recording could go ahead.

From Bryan’s talk I have taken more thought into what could go wrong on our project. Thinking more carefully about what issues may arise when we are filming and how we will be able to fix them quickly and efficiently so our job is easier in post. I have also taken more thought into authenticity of our sound; we are going to try and get as many extra sounds on location. This will help us build the atmosphere’s and foley when the time comes in post and for it to be as realistic as possible. He also spoke that in hindsight he would have shared out the responsibilities more. When everyone has more specific roles to the project it allows everyone to examine there area carefully. This will be very useful in our project to make sure we don’t miss any important details in our sound design.