Music Is Sport on National Radio

Last year I worked with my main padre Joshua 'Spanky' Moore to create the Music Is Sport radio serial for RDU 98.5FM.  We had a huge amount of fun putting it together and they came out great, so we were especially stoked when we heard that Radio NZ wanted to play them nationally!

The catch was that the twelve 15 minute epsodes needed to be condensed into two 30 minute episodes!  Sheesh, we thought, but none the less battled on with the relentless cull, till we finally had them in our sweaty wee palms.  Two golden eggs of goodness.

You can check them out streaming on RNZ's website HERE

And for the enthusiasts out there, the entire uncut series, which has a ever so slightly different leaning can be found here on RDU's mixcloud page

This is the second production I've been involved in with RDU that has been broadcast on National Radio, the first being A Flat City, which gathered voices of the Christchurch music scene after the 2010 and '11 Canterbury earthquakes.

You can listen to A Flat City HERE

Making Music With Paddy Neill

Sometimes people come along out of the blue with songs that just blow you away and inspire you to make them all they can be.  

This happened with Paddy, who calls up one day saying he wants to just get a record of a few songs he's written.  Fair enough - this is often the motvation for people to record.  But then things start to get fishy... turns out he's a really great guitarist with a background in spanish and classical guitar styles, plus he's right into a bunch of music that I love too - Iron and Wine, Bon Iver etc...  also, the 2 songs are great.  
Ideas start flowing and before you know it we've got a tune that started out as one guitar and a vocal, but now has multiple layers of guitars, organ, stomps, backing vocals, weird eery sounds and a banjo.  
That's the joy of creating music, and here's the finished EP 'Widow's Town'

You're Just The Sunshine That I Need...

I recorded and mixed the backing track for this video about Christchurch. Thanks to Hera and Lukas Kelly who wrote and performed the thing! :-) Great job.

Laura Hunter Acoustic at The Garage

Wow, it's been a little while since I did this one, but didn't share it on my news page!  This is Laura Hunter and Lukas Kelly performing 'Don't Be Afraid To Love' unplugged at The Garage. Video shot and edited by Eugene Lee.

Find out more about Laura at:
https://www.facebook.com/laurahuntermusic

Audio Post April Update

Over the last couple of months I've worked on some really great video projects, one of the highlights being creating the sounds of a yeti ferociously devouring an old lady!  That was fun!  

Here's a more recent project I mixed for Simon Waterhouse.  It's a video for Ground Effect clothing who organised a team of volunteer workers to build the 'missing link' mountain bike track near Castle Hill in the Southern Alps.  Simon went along and beautifully documented the project, and then the riding of the new track.  Gotta say he did a fantastic job, as you can see in the video, and this just inspired me all the more to do a great job with  the mix.

Mix Notes:

First job was to get all the dialogue cleaned up, compressed and EQ'd so that we had a nice even volume and tone across the whole video.  Once again, Simon did a great job recording too - all the dialogue nicely captured on lapel mics - so that made my job a bit easier.

Next I added atmospheres to the backgrounds, including rivers, hillsides, and bush scenes.

Then the bike scenes!  Only a couple of the mountain bike shots actually had bike sounds, so every bike sound you hear was placed in time and adjusted so it looks and sounds real.  Simon had recorded various stereo bike sounds, which I went through, labelled and categorised so that I could drop in the appropriate sounds when needed.  Of course, a lot of them needed to be edited, time stretched and beefed up to work well.

I wanted to emphasise some of the great slow motion shots, so created different sound design elements to enhance the speed, grit and power of the bike movement.  Here are just a couple of examples of things I did:

The roaring wind blow effect that follows the bike in it's dust cloud.

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This was created with two different wind noises.  One was a classic whispy polar kind of wind, and the other was a low frequency rumble noise. By simply automating the volume to swell at the right point it gave the impression of a gust of wind.  I also distorted the higher wind noise a little to give it a bit more grit.

Flying gravel shots.

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Some of the shots such as the one below showed gravel being thrown out by the bike's tyres, but the bike recordings I had just didn't quite have the close up gravelly sound I needed.  So I had to create it.  The image below shows the 3 tracks I used - the bike recording in blue, then the 2 effects above it. First a nice 'whoosh' effect gave the shot more movement, but I was still missing the gravel.  I had to think outside the square because I didn't have any 'mountain bike throwing gravel' effects!  

My solution was to take a 'leather shoes on gravel' footstep effect and with a bit of editing and time stretching I made it long enough to give me the gravel I needed to add to the other effects.  I also used this effect on some of the other close up gravelly shots.  Worked out pretty good in the end!

Graphics.

I also added sound design to all the graphics, by making a really close recording of a pencil scribbling on paper.  This was quite heavily compressed, noise reduced and the distorted to give the effect you hear on the video.

Lots of fun and opportunity to be creative on this project, and I've only touched on some of the things I did to enhance the sound, and in turn, over all impact of the video.  Thanks again to Simon Waterhouse from Resonate, check out more of his work over at his company's website!

A Flat City to play on Radio New Zealand National

I recently received news that Radio NZ National is going to be playing selected episodes of 'A Flat City', a radio documentary I produced and mixed for RDU98.5FM.

A lot of effort was put into these docos, not only from my end, listening through hours of material and editing a cohesive story, but also from the team at RDU who relentlessly missioned around the city interviewing everyone!  So a big high five to all the team who worked on this.

As yet I'm unsure of the times or dates they'll play on air, but all the episodes can also be listened to at RDU's Mixcloud page HERE. (They're on page 5 and 6... you'll have to skip to them)

To find out a bit more about A Flat City, check out my news entry up the page a bit...