fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote: Thanks a lot! Yes, but the way to this CD was not as straight as it could have been, which also influenced the way it was recorded: Our original plan was to make this recording together with a small label with its focus on early music. He is a professional recording engineer and would have made the recording. Every detail was fixed. But then, about 30 hours before the first recording session, during rehearsals, one member of the group became sick. We spent the whole night with finding someone to fill the place, which is of course not so easy with this very special repertoire, special instruments, little budget and no time to rehears. The next day we had a concert where we also invited the recording engineer (and label owner). After this night with little sleep the concert had to be a bit of improvised - which caused the label to cancel the whole production. Only 18 hours before the first scheduled recording session. Since I do run a (very) small mobile recording studio, based on ardour, of course, we decided that I will do the recording. I usually never play and record at the same time - I cannot concentrate on all the technical details like mic positions etc, and the music simultaneously. This is why I took a set of microphones, four Neumann KM183 omnis and a pair of Neumann KM184 (cardioid), and I tried to find three stereo positions which allow me to blend between more or less room afterwards. I decided not to use any support mics, because that would have required to much setup work. The setup was a paire of KM183 and KM184 at accoustically matched positions (membranes next to each other, ignoring any HF influence by reflections, but same ITD for all instruments) in about 2 m distance, and a second pair of KM183 at a higher and a bit further position, to provide more room. (during the editing/mastering I realised that the closer omni-position is the best, so finally it was only 2 channels of omni, with a 40 Hz high pass filter). When I started the recording I realised that I left my libardour_tranzport.so on a network drive at home, which made my very nice Frontier Tranzport device completely useless, and my attempts to contact the Linux Audio World for help through a small mobile phone failed (the recording was in a small church of a former monastery, on a hill, surrounded by wheat fields and woods, but no civilisation nearby. Ardour did a very great job, no failures at all, in all five days of recording, and very very few xruns (it was an RME hdsp9652 card running at largest possible block size, on a VIA Eden board with 1.2 GHz clock and an IDE hard drive with 5400 rpm, nothing special, but rock solid). The wheat fields turned out to be a big problem: The harvest began in exactly that week, which meant huge combine harvesters, which you can hear from a distance of several kilometres! On some bits of the recording they are still audible, because there where no takes without... Than it took one year to edit and master it (well, there are lots of other things to do, and our smallest kid was born in the meantime). Again, ardour was perfect. The CD cover was made with gimp and scribus, based on mosaics from Ravenna. We took the photographs after LAC2009 - without LAC there would not have been this artwork. And why is the video a making of? It shows a few pictures from the recording, and it shows the wind and rain we suffered from during the recording, and one of our supporting column just broke down which turned the whole action into a great experience. And of course, it is just fun to work with all these tools like blender and ardour... That was the long story of the making of our CD. - Giso

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 1:33 PM, <fons(a)kokkinizita.net> wrote: On a similar, but non-early note, http://www.hutchinsconsort.org/ has interesting videos at http://www.hutchinsconsort.org/press.php ) and CD for sale too :-) [probably not recorded in linux] -- Niels http://nielsmayer.com PS: moving, acoustically, into the current century and a style of music that can only be emulated by Europeans :-) ... more friends and family recordings, in a linux-unfriendly flash-based webpage (doh!): http://www.townandcountryband.com/ click on the "ipod", and hear four wonderful high-quality-audio full-song previews from their upcoming album. (maybe a tiny bit will be in linux eventually :-) , i'm waiting for some new mixdowns and want to test out some multiband compression&eq settings i found helpful, although http://brianwoodbury.com/ 's mixing/production is beautiful already).

...and the music and recording is no less than wonderfull of course :-)