Robyn Hitchcock Live at The Assembly Rooms on 2001-08-04 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Robyn Hitchcock Live at The Assembly Rooms on 2001-08-04 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive.

Robyn Hitchcock
The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh
2001-08-04
AUD

AUD > lapel mic > Sharp MD-SR50 MD (mono mode)
MD-SR60 > Marantz PMD-620 > Audacity > FLAC
(analogue connection from MD to PMD-620)

Note: recording is *MONO*, and is 24-bit FLAC.

Setlist:
     1	talk: "not horribly caramelized or mellow"
     2	Surgery
     3	talk: "clint eastwood, for it is he"
     4	A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Briggs
     5	talk: "exciting and miserable time"
     6	Wax Doll
     7	talk: "a totem of misery"
     8	The Veins Of The Queen
     9	talk: "watch out for igor the dragon"
    10	Viva! Sea-Tac
    11	Glass Hotel
    12	talk: "the only reason we can have, um, courtney cox"
    13	Queen Elvis
    14	I Am Not Me
    15	Raymond Chandler Evening
    16	talk: "good news: charles knocked out"
    17	Sally Was A Legend
    18	talk: "that amp contained a dybbuk"
    19	Only The Stones Remain
    20	Nightfall

Encore:
    21	encore intro: "got another half hour"
    22	Gene Hackman
    23	The Ghost In You
    24	talk: "already preparing to go somewhere else"
    25	Think For Yourself

Audience recording by Stewart C. Russell, http://scruss.com/

Robyn Hitchcock Live at The Assembly Rooms on 2001-08-03 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

I finally got around to transferring the first of the Robyn Hitchcock shows I recorded back in 2001 in Edinburgh: Robyn Hitchcock Live at The Assembly Rooms on 2001-08-03 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive.

There are three more. Two of them (plus the one I just uploaded) have dropouts from dodgy Maxell MD media.

I did transfer these back in 2001, and distribute them on CD to several people. Audacity and a solid-state recorder makes this a lot easier. My old workflow was:

  1. Save the recording to wav through the sound card and GramoFile.
  2. Burn the recording to CD-R (yay, 2x CD writers …)
  3. Delete the wav file (I don’t think I had space to keep multiple copies)
  4. Listen to the CD, noting track end times in a text file
  5. Rip the CD with CDDA Paranoia, using the notes as a cue sheet
  6. Burn the final CDs.

i was the sound man (kinda)

I went to hear Chris Coole yesterday at The Local, and got pressed into the not-very-arduous duty of looking after the levels. With only voice and instrument, it’s not that hard, and I only once managed to produce an ear-splitting blast of feedback. There was a slight ring if Chris leaned forward and his guitar started to feed back a couple of times.

I also ran my first soundboard-audience matrix recording rig, with the PMD620 recording off the board, and my old minidisc recording from my table. The Local’s not short of ambient noise, so it’s nice to control it. The board gives a clean but rather dead mono recording, while the audience mics pick up lots of colour (and dropped plates, door chimes, …)

I haven’t put the full matrix together yet, but tried it on one excerpted song. Once you know what you’re doing, aligning tracks in Audacity is pretty simple – just find a clear note or beat in each track, get the tracks roughly aligned with the Time Shift tool, then zoom in as close as you can to refine the match. I suppose I should have delayed the audience track by about 0.01s to mimic the distance from the stage, but that’s a bit nerdy. Limiting the audience to 25% of the final mix, I get a great warm sound, but one that’s unfortunately almost entirely monaural.

the analogue hole

I have a bunch of Catherine’s old family recordings to digitise (do people still do that – sit around a tape recorder and make recordings?) and I had recorded one of Ken’s shows on minidisc, so I needed a relatively clean way to get analogue audio onto the computer.

I ended up getting a Griffin iMic, a small USB audio input device. The sound quality is remarkably clean; here’s a sine wave recorded from CD to minidisc, then recorded on the iMic:

tracks000.png

 

The  iMic seems to work with all Mac audio software as an input device. The free Final Vinyl recording sofware is pretty, but a bit buggy and annoyingly, only works when the iMic is connected. I just use Audacity, and have done with it.