So – I should PROBABLY talk a bit more about the show
itself, but I’m not gonna. The combination of three superb singer/songwriters
who really enjoy one another? Frankly it should go without saying that the show
was superb. Also, I was running sound – so it SOUNDED superb to boot. Superb. I
don’t know that I need to provide much else there. Superb. Let’s talk about
reverb instead.
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Sunday morning found us on the road BACK to Alexandria, VA so I could run sound for Heather’s side project Lloyd Martin Vox at the George Washington Masonic Memorial – one of the few venues you can see from two miles and a whole state away…
Reverb can be such a beautiful thing, and it’s rarely used
correctly. I mean – I don’t get to really hold myself aloof from that – when I
was finally wrapped with Cicada my mastering engineer gave me a call and asked
if I’d like to drop by to his place in Alexandria (Alexandria again!?) for a
free course on reverb. And Hell yes, I’d learn whatever THE Greg Lukens wanted
to pass along to me! However, though he’d dressed it up as “I’ve done lots of
great things and want to make an effort to pass along my knowledge to promising
younger talent” what he was REALLY doing was saying “so… next time you do this,
here’s how you use reverb in such a way that it doesn’t make your mastering
engineer crazy!”
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Opening act Shanna In A Dress. -
I’m not entirely sure what the graffiti in the restroom meant, but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing good. -
Vicroria Vox’ signature ukulele owning the room.
Whatever – listening to sound impulses, learning about how
bass notes reflect differently from treble notes, measuring sound waves,
getting a better understanding of sonic absorption and listening to sound wash
from place to place to place was a wonderful education, and I’ve been a lot
more attentive to it ever since.
Last week when we went to see Zoe Keating, one of the things
that I found really wonderful was being seated almost smack dab in the centre
of the room and realizing that each of her tracks had a different sonic space –
so though she’d play something and it’d be fairly central, then she’d assign
that loop to a particular place in the universe and it would go zipping over to
that spot and you could HEAR that movement… literally a whole other dimension
to the music!
Her reverbs were interesting washes, like water colours or
maybe just like water, swirling from one end of the space to the other, and the
verbs were being assigned BEFORE the loops so when she’d speed up or slow down
a signal artificially, the reverb went with it, with sounds and artifacts
suddenly arriving faster or slower, washing into space unexpectedly.
All of this was definitely going through my head as I
joyously introduced Heather and Victoria Vox to the hall outside of where they
were playing at the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, VA.
Listening to people for whom their instrument is very much their voice just
playing with a room is absolutely beautiful and hard to describe – so take a
listen…
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