[Und] At the Edinburgh Fringe

After rehearsing most of last week and composing bits and pieces of sound for the performance of Und in Bristol we arrived in Edinburgh on Friday night after a long drive (thanks Martin and Anna!) and dragged all of the (fairly extensive) set into the venue. We had a tech run through on Saturday night from 11pm until dawn and then a dress rehearsal from 8.30 am, followed by the first performance at 11.15pm. A gruelling 48 hours during which I think I managed to get about 30 mins sleep.

I didn't really feel that my audio stuff really sounded all that great. In part because I am using samples that are faded out - this means that even though they have been treated with reverb and, in places, with delay, there are no reverb tails after the sounds have finished. To my ears that doesn't sound good or "right" and certainly isn't natural.  In the end I came up with using SoundFlower to route the audio from QLab to the main output and also to Garage Band (!!) where I can add various AU effects to the audio. This seems to work but GB complains about feedback every so often and decides this is bad and stops processing audio. This is a bit of a concern if I am going to try this method of effects processing tonight. I can't work out how or why it would be feeding back as the documentation for SoundFlower implies that the output from GB and QLab should be mixed at the output stage, I must be missing something.

Also, thanks to Anna for showing me QLab, I thought it was a really expensive application but in fact the standard and free version of it does everything I need it to. It's a little weird to understand at first as it simply has a linear timeline but it is possible to have sounds mixing into each other and crossfading, it just isn't immediately obvious this can be done. That said it has saved my bacon for these performances which are mainly sample based.

You can buy tickets for Und here, should you wish to.

And thanks, Jay and Mikey for making it to the performance last night - really good to have friendly faces in the audience.

Already feeling a bit homesick to be honest and I am here until the 29th of August... Maybe I am just tired, Edinburgh is a nice city to spend time in.