[gurney]

Hi there,

I finally got the Kat out for the first concert of a group which is still looking for a name . I have a few photos and we are trying to get something meaningful out of the recording and filming we made (but so far it is a bit disappointing on this front). Fortunately we got great feedback from the audience, which we found encouraging.

The group is a 4tet with vibes, sax, bass and drums. We have a couple of compositions and some nice covers from Steps Ahead (Buzz, Sara's Touch...), Herbie Hancock (Chameleon, Wiggle Waggle...), Eric Trufaz, and a couple other nice groovy tunes from the past 50 years (Hummin', Killer Joe...) as well as some more quiet pieces such as Conference of the Birds (with the Marimba Abyss sound from the KS sound bank) 

I'll send a link to a video or a sound file if we manage to clean up the material...

[pljones]

Sounds good -- looking forward to seeing you!

[gurney]

OK so, now the quartet has a name  it's called Vibraslap!

I managed to salvage a few tracks from the recording, and to upload them on soundcloud:

* Buzz
* Wiggle Waggle
* Sara's Touch

Still lots of work ahead of us, but we're enjoying this. I hope you'll like it. 

[pljones]

Cool name .

Lots of ambience - where was this?  (Of course, I actually want every little piece of detail about the whole thing - player set ups, etc... )

It sounds great fun, too.

[gurney]

In the place where I live, there's a small concert room (~100 seats), if you're a member of the association managing the place you can book the concert room for rehearsals, and if you know the guys really well, you can do a private concert, which is what we did: booked if for the week end, nice rehearsal on saturday and sunday morning, lots of work. And on sunday 5PM, the room was packed with friends and family 

The sax player happens to own a sonorisation system he bought for another group, we somehow  (that was before I learnt about the TRS cable thing, which caused quite a lot of pain during the balance...), and struggled to ge a correct balance (which was completely off by the time the audience got in, lesson learnt, we will get some monitors for the next time). We thought we would be able to record in multi track directly out of the mixing table, but this was actually not possible (only the stereo mix was available). So we ended up recording with a Tascam portable recorder on a pole at the back of the room, but the dynamic range was crap. I edited the files in Audacity to cover up a little, but the harm was done. The audience told me the sound was ok, with maybe the drummer (accoustic) a bit loud (heh... drummers... )

What else do you want to know?

[pljones]

Pretty much covers it, thanks!   I'd actually guessed "something like a portable recorder at the back of the room" - just a shame you couldn't get the desk mix, though.  Very nice work getting it to sound that good!

[gurney]

This actually ended up at the shop where the sax player had purchased the mixing table (with the rest of the gear) 2 years ago, after the vendor had certified him he would be able to plug in his macbook and do multitrack recording with <insert mac software name>. Gérard showed up with the macbook and the table and asked for a demo of how if could be done, and after lots of sweating, forum reading, helpdesk phoning, they were able to upgrade from "the macbook can play sound in the table" to "the macbook can record the stereo output of the table", which, while being a nice improvement, is still far from the original promise.

Still, 2 years is a bit late for a refund, but from what I understood, he is in a very good position to negociate the price for a better mixing table...

[gurney]

I'll send a link to a video or a sound file if we manage to clean up the material...

We managed to edit something out of the video recording. Far from perfect, and we are newbies to video editing to make things worse,  but still I don't cringe too much when I watch it 

http://vibraslap.fr/concert-a-loscar-le-film/ on our web site (in french...) or https://youtu.be/YuCv6PpcGRg directly on youtube.

Next concerts on June 19 and 20 

[pljones]

Thanks - nice concert vibe and nicely showing what the malletkat can do .

[AaronRes]

O M G, thank you for putting your time together for this : I hope DSP will make a DVDversion of this concert & HOPEFULLY, the sounds wont be edited I will definitely buy it