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Managed to get some use out of my investment in sound record toys this week. I spent one evening recording our Church Choir’s Christmas CD.
Was quite a small choir so was just using DigiDesign Pro Tools LE 7.4, my MBOX and two condenser mics. All went reasonably well during the recording. Is great fun just setting up all the equipment, sound-checking and then recording. I think we did OK, but if I was going to do it again I would separate the choir out into their different sections, and mic them and the organ up separately to try to get more control over the whole balance.
Tracks Included:
- Track 01 – Once in Royal David’s City
- Track 02 – O Little Town of Bethlehem
- Track 03 – O Come All Ye Faithful
- Track 04 – Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
- Track 05 – God Rest Ye Merry! Gentlemen
- Track 06 – Silent Night
- Track 07 – In The Bleak Mid-Winter
- Track 08 – Ding Dong! Merrily On High
- Track 09 – Away in a Manger
- Track 10 – I Heard a Maiden Softly Sing
- Track 11 – Jesus Christ the Apple Tree
- Track 12 – The Angel Gabriel
Spent last night and most of today editing and doing the first mastering cut of the recordings. There were quite a few parts of different songs re-recorded because the choir hadn’t been happy with some sections of their songs – so have spent the day doing some clever precision cutting, pasting and matching to bring complete songs together.
So far, layout on all tracks is complete, gating and EQ is also complete where necessary. Haven’t been anywhere near the reverb yet but I will.
Am delivering the first draft tomorrow to the choir master with a view to probably going back this week to re-record the tracks they aren’t happy with.
After that, will do the final master.
Have to do my cover art for the CD too and then get my production line organised.
So far so good… just a bit of fun – enjoying getting to do this kind of thing!
Will keep you updated with progress on this little project.
One of the best music videos I’ve seen in a while… really good song too!
Seriously… what was not to like?
Two weeks ago I found myself gazing forlornly at a t-shirt on e-bay… a blue t-shirt… medium-sized…
Emblazoned on the front of this t-shirt… in plain white… the logo and the name of possibly the most influential device on my long and colourful computing journey… “ACORN”…
The Acorn Electron was the first home computer we had in our family… back in the early 80s. A wonderful, wonderful Christmas present from my mum and dad.
In the late seventies I was toddling around trying to get my two older brothers to give me a go on our Phillips G7000 game machine which was really cool in its own right… but now we had a computer… with a keyboard and a tape drive and everything! A keyboard that went “click click click” when you pressed the keys. A tape drive that sounded “Eeeeee Eerrrrrr Eeeee Errrrr” like a donkey, on amphetamines, fitted with a voice prosthesis after laryngectomy surgery!
And so it begun…. the beautiful sound of “Eeeee Eerrrrr Eeeeee Errrrr”, for me, heralded the dawn of playing amazing games like Arcadians, Commando… and my personal favourite… Chuckie Egg! Dread to think how many hours my childhood were lost to Chuckie Egg…!
The other major aspect of the Acorn Electron experience was the fact that you could program it yourself… in BASIC…I learn structured programming… including obligatory overuse of the GOTO statement! No intellisense and code-completion in those days! No debuggers! No… it was all about keying in your own line numbers and painstakingly typing in every last bit of the code and staring at the screen for hours on end looking for the typo that was making the program crash… and you know something… it was just magical!
So I bought the t-shirt! Then the nostalgia started getting the better of me. I have an emulator for the megadrive. I have an emulator for the Atari ST… surely there would also be an emulator for my beloved Acorn Electron… tell me oh crystal ball (errr…. Google) – “Is there an emulator for the Acorn Electron?”
Oh yes…! First Google result takes me to ElectrEm…a full-blown cross platform emulator. Their site also includes some great links – especially The Stairway to Hell where you can find all your old favourite Electron games… just brilliant! I downloaded this and was playing Chuckie Egg all over again. I have trhe emulator running on my G4 PPC Mac… runs perfectly. This is an extremely stable emulator and I highly recommend you download and start playing immediately. Come one… I know there are a whole bunch of 30-40 year olds out there dying to play the original Elite just one more time! Here is your chance!
Needless to say… Been There… Done That… Bought the T-Shirt!… Got the Emulator!
Seen this today and thought that it was good enough to re-publish…
Baby decided to arrive a little earlier than expected. We had a planned C-Section for mid-week but my wife’s waters broke a day early so we ended up having an emergency C-Section instead at the Ulster Hospital.
All went OK. No problems. All over really quickly. Wife and baby all OK. Baby is beautiful, weighing in at 7lbs 1. We are just over the moon.
Short stay in one of the side wards at the new maternity unit at the Ulster. Really great experience. Staff and atmosphere all excellent!
Got mum and baby home on Friday morning and everybody seems settled in. Baby is doing well, eating well, sleeping well, and really content so far!
Keeps you on your toes though. Never realised how much work there is in looking after babies… busy, busy!
Well, baby still hasn’t turned into the right position that is safe for natural birth, so we are booked in this week for a sunroof job at the Ulster Hospital.
Think we have mixed emotions on the whole thing, between Excitement and Fear. This is a standard, everyday, procedure, but it’s still an operation with risks that is apparently about four times more dangerous for the mother than a natural birth – probably because the risk of infection is higher with being cut open and all that. Although the statistics are also probably a bit skewed because a lot of the women who need C-Sections need them because of other health concerns etc.
But I think our excitement is far outweighing our fears. Can’t wait to see and hold our little baby now. Gutted the house over the weekend cleaning and getting nursery a bit more prepared.Nursery is full of toys and books now.
Think we’re pretty much ready to go!
Baby is officially due on the 7th April… and is still in the wrong breech position for easy natural birth.
My wife went to the Ulster Hospital at Dundonald last week to see if it was possible to move the baby round into the correct position using External Cephalic Version (ECV) technique which apparently can be quite painful.
They scanned her and decided they weren’t able to do the ECV because the baby’s umbilical cord was in the way and it would have been too risky.
Because this is our first baby, the hospital does not allow vaginal breech delivery – so she’s going to the hospital this week again to get an appointment for a Caesarean Section instead.
We are kind of hoping that it will be this Friday, mostly because my wife is just so uncomfortable now, struggling to get any sleep. As well as that, the anticipation and excitement is now killing us!!!
In the meantime, we have spent yesterday and today (Easter holidays) catching up on lost sleep and resting up as much as possible in bed. Chances are that once the little one arrives we mightn’t get too much more sleep for many many months… thought we’d take the chance to get rest while it was going!
Aside from this, we are all ready to go. Bags are packed. Got clean miniDV tape in the camcorder and digital camera is charged. I have put nursing area together in our bedroom including crib, nursing chair, night-light, room thermometer, and have also started putting nursery together including changing table and place to store baby’s clothes and toys and stuff, and have new car seat and buggy bought.
Will wait and see what date the section is going to be. They usually schedule it to be about one week before the official due date – so chances are pretty good that by this time next week we should have a baby!
We went to Ulster Hospital last week for our 34 week scan.
As far as we can see baby is healthy – all OK.
But she’s not in the right position, she’s breech. We’re 35 weeks pregnant now and baby is meant to be head down. She’s about 4-5 lbs now, and there’s not so much room for he to move around. At this stage, the position she’s meant to be in is head down.
Helen’s GP had been feeling around her tummy and had thought all was OK, and so did the midwife, but whenever they scanned they found baby was still head up in breech position.
This has potentially scuppered the birth plan a bit!
We’ve to go back in two weeks time to see whether or not baby has shifted into the correct position for labour. If not we’re faced with the choice of either trying to have the baby turned manually, or to go for a Ceasarean Section.
In the meantime Helen is trying to do Knee-to-chest exercise to help turn the baby.
The midwife also suggested we considered Moxybustion chinese medicine. We called in to see Chinese doctor yesterday to look into this and also read up a bit online. BabyCentre.Co.Uk also suggests that this is a possible way to get baby to turn. We’re talking this over. At this stage we’d still really like to try for a natural birth…
See Moxa video on YouTube:
OK, so it’s now 5.5 weeks left to go until our little girl is due to be born and we’ve been pretty busy since the start of the new year trying to make arrangements for the new arrival.
It’s been my job to move furniture around the house a lot, and do DIY things in preparation. We didn’t have space in our kitchen to fit a tumble dryer, so I knocked down our old shed (which was overdue because the damp had really got the better of it), had a new one erected in the back garden. My dad wired it up for electrics and the new tumble dryer was put in there last Thursday. This evening I put the finishing touches to the new pathway that I had dug out, filled with quarry dust, and then put nice red slabs down on.
Have got our bedroom pretty much clear and ready to go. Shifted shelves downstairs out of the way to make room for crib, and am moving the TV out this weekend because there’s meant to be a nursing chair for Dutalier arriving this week. Not exactly sure where the bedroom TV is going to go to.
Already we have more baby clothes than we quite know what to do with or have room for – need more storage! So apparently M&S are doing nursery furniture inc set of drawers, wardrobe and bed (which she won’t need yet but might as well get) for about £500… will try to get a race up to M&S this weekend to have a look.
My wife, on the other hand, has been doing a huge amount of preparation herself… she has been steadily stocking up on pampers and baby wipes and baby accessories – although we’re both completely torn over the eco/green issue of whether or not we should be buying disposable nappies – the debate continues… she has all the little clothes washed, and tumble-dried, and ironed and ready to go, she has her bag…packed… I don’t…. I think I should pack some comfortable shoes given that I’m probably going to end up doing about 100 laps of the Ulster Hospital maternity ward in 2 days…
As her ‘Birth Partner’… She also e-mailed me her ‘Birth Plan’ this evening which I need to print out and put into my bag for labour. This is the document that outlines how she would like the labour to go pending on the unknown and feasible at the time. This evening I am studying this document to make sure I remember it as best as possible… she has explained it to me a few times now… general gist of it is this…
She would like to try to use one of the birthing pools in one of the Ulster Hospital’s new home-from-home suites, and try to get through the pain herself trusting in her body’s ability to adjust to heightening levels of pain with endorphins. She should also be able to use gas and air. I am to ignore any requests to move her upstairs to the labour ward if, and only if, she is at or beyond the transitional stage in labour. Once you get past the transitional stage you are in the second stage of labour then you’re meant to be on the home stretch.
Anyway… tomorrow I have the morning booked off work. We’re going to the hospital for our last scan which I’m really looking forward to.
In the next few weeks we are also due to start our Parent Craft Classes… these used to be called antenatal classes… think I would have preferred the latter term… the words ‘Craft Classes’ always conjure up images of balsa wood, wood glue, Cornflakes boxes and Sellotape to me… I fear they are going to hand me a doll and a nappie and I, with a trusty pair of safety scissors am going to transform them into a hand-painted Star Wars base and a glitter-covered Father’s Day Card…
