Long needed update

Due to a lot of things to do, paired with a needed rest from blogging, paired with some nasty night/day-shift switching (I've come close to sitting on the flesh of my teeth as they would say in Belgium), paired with music and recording I haven't come to blogging recently. I'm not making any excuses, I'm just saying.

When I got back in London, it was cold, lots of snow, ice and traffic jams. Obviously, I didn't mind.

Visited the british museum.

(Cleopatra, still find it a bit awkward, I reckon they'd better leave all those people were they where left)
(the rosetta stone)

(Easter Island dude)

(Personally know somebody who would like some statues from this room in his garden/home)

On cooking:

(Shepards pie, I didn't cook it, but is was great)

(Classy, eh?)

(one of the best results up until now)

(grilled pasta, discovered the oven)

(what you get when you lend some matches to a desperate neighbour on his girlfriend's birthday, very nice)

At college, we got introduced into the next studio, the SSL G-Series room.
Analog is the main focus, with a genuine 24 multi-track tape recorder. It's quite a procedure, but you can actually sync up the desk with a mac and the tape. It's like magic. And it sound like.. real tape. Allready put 3 songs on my reel and mixed one down. Really nice experience.

(my 15mins reel, great to actually hold and handle sound, instead of looking at a hard drive)
(ssl, the industry standard, with too much lights on, just for show)
(the whole thing, working it is like solving a constantly changing puzzle, good fun. Also, note the 80's SSL computer)
(you gotta love working this, I even did some tape-editing)

Wave

I got 5 invites for google wave left.
Anybody that's interested, just give me a call/letter/email/comment/..


Back in London!

It's all good.

New Year

Have a great new year you all.

Live from the London Eurostar terminal

Arrived at something past 6, I gotta say, I wasn't the only one.
These english people really know how to queue..

Got out of the tube, and was directed to the waiting-line, which started outside of the station, went down from the escalators, back into the tube-tubes, back up the escalators, filled up the whole arrival and departure-hall, went on to the eurostar departure-hall and filled it up. That was about it. I'm now facing another 3-hour wait. But it could have been much worse.

Although I had to start waiting outside, the line grew at a steady pace behind me. Don't think I'm of too bad.


As I managed to get a spot at the laptop-desk I can even do some useful things such as translating talks for TED (official TED-translator, it might even get me live-streaming from the real San Fransisco TED conference !!). Yes, I know, most of my former Dutch/English-teachers would start feeling sick if they knew I was doing those things, but that doesn't really matter, does it.

Christmas etc

Travelling back to Belgium for Christmas and new year,

by eurostar offcourse, they are now trying to clear there backlog, providing service on a first-come first-serve basis. Yesterday thousands of people waited inside and outside of St. Pancras station to get on.

Promises to be a challenging day..

I'm going in. Early
See you all back in Belgium.

It snowed (again), so now traffic is suffering again in London, but at least it's a pretty view.

Visitors

So I was expecting some people to come and enjoy the atmosphere of London in Christmas mode.

But ofcourse:

Eurostar staff was going to go on a strike, luckily they postponed this 'till after Christmas.

You are probably aware of further developments:
- snow/ice-water condensed from the eurostar train onto the electronics when it entered the eurotunnel (where the temperature is at a constant 25 degrees)
- 5 trains broke down inside the tunnel
- hundreds of people where stuck inside the tunnel, some for 16 hours
- water ran out, all electricity was shut down, the train crew didn't do it's job, temperatures raised inside the cabins
- random people in the trains who happened to be police officers set up the evacuation
- the executive manager had a lot of explaining to do http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8422978.stm, but didn't do a very good job.
- no eurostar service has been available since Friday http://www.eurostar.com


Nobody is going to be able to make it to London. Talk about things going wrong on precise timing.

Fingers crossed on getting home for Christmas.



Update on where things went wrong:
- eurostar had absolutely no contact with the trains in the tunnel
- no or little communication with passengers during breakdown
- manager of eurostar tells of passenger witnesses as telling 'anecdotal stories'
- manager of eurostar up untill now still hasn't debriefed with the crew on what really happened in the trains, thus as a result almost knowing less than the passengers
- stranded passengers, still no service

Sure, it is easy to criticize eurostar by just summing up all things that went wrong. But than again, I'm in a bad mood, and this is my blog.

Empty studios no more

One of my current practical assignments is to record and mix a multi-track recording with drums in them. This can be your own music with someone playing drums over it, but I tought the experience would be much more realistic if I brought in a band.

So I posted ads, went to some shows and got me some contacts.
After a lot of mailing I got "the david vegas project" into my practical night-session, they are a two-piece band, so that seemed a nice way to get into it.

We recorded 4 songs in 2 8-hour sessions, this may not seem a lot, but believe me, it is.
(consider having to solve all the technical problems, trying to get them to play in time, dealing with the band in general, doing guitar and vocal overdubs, setting up all mics and channels, setting up headphone mixes, patching everything in, setting up pro tools, etc etc)

There where some minor problems with the headphones due to interference inside the amplifier (not really our fault, the headphone amp is just rubbish), and some channels broke down on the mixing desk itself, but we managed pretty easily (it's all a matter of running down all 10 possible faulty elements in the signal path :) ).

(action picture, a lot on my head)

(miced-up drums)

(guitarplayer/singer's area and inevitable spaghetti of cabling near connection point)

(guitar cabinet in separate booth to avoid spill)

(sontronics helios valve condensor for vocal overdubbing)


(patchbay to send all signals to the desk and headphones)

On another note,
It's very cold in London at the moment.

(personal ice-walk of death at my doorstep)

Steorn

They've been on it for years,
failed demos, massive amounts of gossip, debunking etc.

Wonder whether they will soon be unmasked..
Maybe this time they will actually make something work.

We'll see.
Still fascinating stuff.

http://www.steorn.com/

Americana

Maybe a bit outdated, sometimes a bit manipulated.
But still striking..







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