Swan Song Diary 1

This is a new series of blogpost where I document my progress on my Residency. These will sometimes be daily, or a combination of two or three days of work. These are the production notes of the project.

The first day is move in day, I brought from home these gears with me:

Sennheiser wireless handheld mic 
AKG handheld mic Elle C
Neumann Condenser mic TLM 102

I then have an audio interface from school the MOTU M4

From the church I am using a Behringer mixing console, doing a mid-side recording in the room, and a guitar amp outputting a handheld mic.

I have set the space up as if it is a performing area, a stage. It is set up this way to reflect the way I wanted it to sound, spatially as a theatre piece. I then turned to writing a movement cue sheet, almost like a score or a script-like document that entails what’s in each song. I am keeping the script to myself but here is the content page.

This the characters of the opera, represented by different instruments and sound objects. This sets a very important ground rule of how I am presenting the story using various timbres and ranges.

Since there are other people using the space today, I can only set things up and do a few tests with the mics. But having the mics set up I could finally write down directions for movements in the space and starts to do blocking. This helps me finish the script including stage directions and can start recording all the materials. The script is now complete in the linear sense. I am still debating if I will edit it at the end of the recording process in a linear way or will I abstract it.