St Aloysius in Milson’s is one of those schools you always hoped you could afford to send your kids to. Located virtually right underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the northern side, it seems to be an unlikely spot to have a school, as the real estate alone would be worth a fortune. It is a wonder that a developer hasn’t come along and plonked a couple of multi-million dollar apartments there.
But I guess, it’s equally an unlikely place to be the venue for some timpani recording as part of a low budget album that originated in Queensland. Fortunately for me and for the album, Cameron’s father is the Director of Music at St Aloysius, and Cameron literally had the keys to the school.
As part of my quest to replace as much as I could from Jarrod’s Reason files, I met with Cameron, Antonia Gauci, and Dave Kirby at St Aloysius at 8:30pm to record timpani.
There were 3 choices of recording space that we could use. The first space was what I called the Hall Foyer; a large open space with high ceilings and windows that looked straight at the Harbour
Bridge. The next area was the cathedral where we interrupted someone playing a large pipe organ (wow, what a sound!!). The
third space was the music storage area; a reasonably small carpeted room. The cathedral, whilst possibly the most “exciting” place to record (would have looked great on the blog) was prone to unacceptable amounts of traffic noise. The storage area was ok, but the carpet would have killed the sound somewhat. So after some discussion we decided on the hall foyer.
It was quite a challenge to move 3 large timpani and a bunch of recording gear down the lift and various stairs and corridors from the storage area. After 10-15 minutes, we’d hauled all the gear, and whilst Cameron and Antonia set everything up, Dave and I tried hitting the timpani at various locations around the foyer to find and ideal spot. We eventually settled into this section with lower ceilings than the rest of the foyer.
To record these beasts, we used a pair of Audio Technica AT4050s, placed about 1.5 metres away. These were arranged as a near-coincident pair so as to pick up subtle stereo image. I also set up the
Rode K2 about 8 metres away to pick up the extremely long reverb time of the foyer. We used Cameron’s laptop loaded with Pro Tools and a 003 Rack borrowed from the school.
Whilst Cameron and Antonia drove Pro Tools, I was listening on headphones to Dave’s playing. We all had to be situated fairly
close together, because the cables on our headphones weren’t very long, and both Dave and I needed to hear the results.
Tuning was also a bit of an issue. Cameron quite rightly suggested that since the song was in a certain key, we should tune the instruments to that key. This was no easy task, and it took some time getting all 3 drums to the correct pitch. Then of course, we had to change it again for the other song. So it was with an SM57 plugged into a Boss tuner that we pitched each drum.
Dave had never played timpani before, so he had to get used to the feel of the drums as well as get a handle on the parts themselves. Man these things are loud!!!
It took a few goes, but we managed to get some decent parts down for both Someone Else For A Day and Getting Out. Very happy with Getting Out, but I think Someone Else For A Day is going to require some editing. It’s a little too much in parts.
Then of course it was the laborious packing-up process that took a while. Quick tour round some of the best views of the school, and we were done.
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