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Re: Pete speaks.............

But what did he say...


keets

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation,
Aquarius, Aquarius.

 -James Rado & Gerome Ragni
From: "O'Neal, Kevin W." <Kevin.ONeal@vtmednet.org>
Reply-To: thewho@igtc.com
To: <thewho@igtc.com>
Subject: Pete speaks.............
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 12:25:47 -0500

New Pete diary!
Kevin in VT

27 March 2003 <<ole0.bmp>>
I am a great fan of 5.1 Surround Sound for movies. In fact, DVD has made a
movie buff of me - I was once quite indifferent to films other than those
regarded as great art. Now I often watch movies purely for fun, and especially
to hear the efforts put into creating the elegant and complex soundtracks
required for DVD. If you too love DVD you might look out for the 5.0 version
of Ken Russell's movie of Tommy recently restored and remixed for DVD. The
restoration team did a great job. Tommy was the first simple 5 channel film
ever made (Fantasia and other such specialist movies set the standard of
course). But Tommy was mixed as a 'Quintaphonic' film - five speakers. The
system didn't catch on, and eventually Dolby Surround and DTS and Dolby
Digital took over. Now 5.1 Surround is available for music only releases.
I am personally mixing the original Who's Tommy album now, and I think it has
never sounded better than in this multi-channel format. The commercial formats
for audio in Surround are SACD and DVD-A. If you are buying home hardware, you
might wait a while for a machine that will play both audio formats as well as
all the present DVD video formats. I hear rumours that some U.S car companies
plan to install 5.1 DVD-A players in new cars in future. That would be
impressive - a car is an almost perfect environment for Surround Sound. In the
DVD-A format there is opportunity to add quite a bit of additional visual
supportive material. Surround Sound actually has 6 speakers. The '.1' is a
bass woofer. The main speakers are arrayed around the listener in a quite
obvious way - two stereo front speakers (L and R), one in the middle (C), and
two surround speakers Ls and Rs) which are placed towards the side of the
room, a little in the back - not completely behind the listener. The bass
woofer can go anywhere handy, even under a bed or under the floor.The
orchestral session here is an audophile recording I've made in purist 5.1 for
DVD-A and SACD release. It features the London Chamber Orchestra who played on
the Sadler's Well's concert and the Lifehouse Chronicles orchestral CD. The
Sadler's Wells DVD won an award for Surround Sound.
The Oceanic studio here is one I've had since 1976 - it began life as a center
for Meher Baba and spent some of its time subsequently as a film studio. Now I
use it for recording and of course for events for my web site. (The Who
rehearsal featuring the last performance with John Entwistle was recorded and
filmed there). For this session I created a system to fly artificial
reverberation and echo into the studio so that the musicians would feel as
though they were playing in a concert hall. We used a very high quality system
based around several units provided by the sponsors of the last Who tour - JBL
(owned and distributed by Harman-Kardom). The reverb was generated by several
mikes spread throughout the orchestra, mixed and fed into a Lexicon reverb
unit. The outputs of that were fed into a seven channel pre-amplifier (also
made by Lexicon) seven channels were 'synthsized' creating a delicate but
expansive echo effect and thence fed to seven JBL 'Tik' speakers - two of
which were placed above the orchestra's heads to give a feeling of height. The
amplifiers used are also made by JBL. To record the orchestra I used a British
microphone called the 'Soundfield' mike. This mike outputs four cleverly
encoded channels that can later be decoded and arranged as the six channels
for 5.1. I recorded these channels to ProTools HD at 192Khz.
The music is from Scarlatti. He wrote sonatas and fugues, principally for
Harpsichord. I felt that some of them would sound beautiful if arranged for
chamber orchestra (I included two sonatas on the Lifehouse Chronicles). This
time I commissioned Rachel Fuller to orchestrate another twelve. Some of them
are more successful than others - Scarlatti's gift was not as abundant as
Bach's, but he did know how to compose powerfully strident pieces for the
harpsichord, an instrument with little dynamic range. Orchestral translations
of harpsichord works introduce dynamics that can sometimes distract from the
composer's original intentions. We were careful not to overdo the dynamics
with over-emotional readings. The session was a great success. The Surround
Sound effect from the Soundfield mike is solid as a rock, and you can really
feel the intimacy of the studio, but the airy space generated by the
artificial echo. Some of Scarlatti's writing crosses boundaries: at times it
is Italianate Baroque, as it should be. At others it is slightly Germanic and
dark: the Fugues are often quite aggressive. Then there are segments when you
can hear an almost pastoral English sound similar to that of the British
composers of the 20th Century like Grainger, Britten and Bax. I was really
pleased with the session and I hope to get it released very soon.The
production was for Angelic Ceilings - a company I formed for Lifehouse
Chronicles to record aspirational works - in other words to finish grand and
adventurous 'serious' music projects I have the money and vision to start, but
not the stamina or qualifications to properly finish. Billy Nicholls arranged
the session, and Sara Lowenthal wrote out the parts and assisted in the
session.
Pete. March 27 2003
(Video to follow - Matt)

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