Tag Archives: music

Another new promotional video by HCS

My new band, Doobies Inc., walked into SIR Studios in mid-December to film and record a live demo. We tracked to ProTools and filmed 3 cameras (2 roving and 1 stationary). Then I took all of the tracks and footage back to my studio to mixdown and edit. For a one-night session, these came out really well, and we hope to get quite a bit of work from this promotional video.

http://youtu.be/hw3z7zDf2O8

I truly enjoy recording and filming live events. One of my favorites was Jennifer Robin’s CD release party for her album “The Bird and The Beatles” found here on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/K5evsOLje7k

I also have filmed live concert footage that will be found in the upcoming film “Praying the Hours” by Lauralee Farrer. These types of events are difficult to capture multitrack — so that one can mix the music later on — but ultimately exceptionally rewarding, because you get both the immediacy and thrill of the live event, as well as the incredible sound of a professionally mixed and produced recording.

Super Bowl brings the music, 2012 edition

The Super Bowl is now over, but now we get to dissect everything that happened around the big event (I’m not a Monday Morning Quarterback, so I won’t get into analyzing the game, even though it had its exciting moments).

On Crazytown this week, I look at the music that shaped key moments during the broadcast — from commercials, to halftime, to the incredible National Anthem. Go check it out.

Tribute [the band] live mix off the board

We recorded our live show at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s annual Fun In The Sun Chili Cookoff in October 2011. Straight off the board, with some compression/limiting done after the fact. Sounds great. And some really nice photography by Katie Macquarrie to show off the band.

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We had a great time. Check out Tribute for more information. Maybe you want to book us for your next event!

Hearken Creative produces Electronic Press Kit

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credits: Loren A. Roberts, producer, ProTools recordist and editor, film editor, b-camera operator; Jordan McMahon, a-camera operator

Jennifer Robin is a fantastic jazz artist that I have known for almost 20 years, but have never gotten to work with before. That opportunity finally came when she announced a CD release party for August 2011. I stepped in to both run sound for the show and assemble some live footage for an electronic press kit. All mics were mine — we ran 12 channels directly into my ProTools rig, and then straight out to the board for live mixing. Jordan and I both brought cameras, and later I mixed down the live recording and married it up with the footage as well as some interview clips that I filmed a few days after the concert.

I love how much of her personality I was able to capture, both in the concert and in the interviews. Jennifer deals with life with a thoughtful but in-the-moment grace that is hard to find in artists, and I believe that comes through loud and clear here. And she surrounds herself with wonderful people, too: the whole band was game for trying things, but gracious and helpful as well.

In all, a good time putting together a powerful package that I hope helps her sell some more albums. And a good piece showing what Hearken Creative can do on short notice…

Shakedown Mambo photo session

Wow, I had a blast today. We are currently working on a CD packaging design for Shakedown Mambo’s upcoming album, and to support that effort we shot some photos of the duo — Rick and Phil. Some iconic shots here (click on any image to get the larger sized lightbox):

Can’t wait to show you the rest of the CD package, as soon as it’s done. These guys sound as good as they look!

Constantly learning, constantly, working

We filmed another short promo for Nimbus Ensemble this past week:

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I tried some things on this shoot that I ultimately regretted, but on other elements of the shoot I’m extremely happy. Running four-channel audio recording through the Zoom H4N is a breeze, and gave me lots of options for incredible audio. I’m finding that I like wireless mics less and less, so I used only studio-quality mics and shotgun mics for this shoot (all wired directly to the Zoom). The viola sounds superb, and the interview worked beautifully with a shotgun on a boom stand.

The things I’m less happy about are in the video; specifically two things:

  1. Halfway through the shoot I changed white balance settings. I should have just left it the same as when I started, because it would have been easier to match everything together in post (unless we were changing locations, which we did  not for this shoot).
  2. I wanted to minimize the effects of the “rolling shutter” issue (because his bow was moving so fast) by filming everything at 60 frames a second. Bad idea. First, it didn’t eliminate the rolling shutter. Second, I was eating up card space like crazy. Third, I conformed to 24 frames, so it looks a little jerky. Fourth, the 7D won’t record at full 1920×1080 HD when shooting at 60 fps, so I don’t have as many pixels as when shooting at 24 frames. But hey, it was a good idea. And now I know.

We’ll be filming the real concert coming up this weekend. I’ll be excited to show you footage from that. Or, you could just come and listen to some great (and very unique) music: here’s the information page at Nimbus’  website (which Hearken Creative also designed).

Violin Amazingness

Jules Massenet, “Meditation from ‘Thaïs’”

I like to promote things. I’m a producer — a promoter — a big-picture kinda guy. And so when I become friends with an incredible artist, like Buddy Zapata or Lauralee Farrer, I can’t help but want to promote their art in any way I can. And I have skillz. I can take press photographs (see my post on T-Lou). I can shoot video (see the stuff I did of Buddy Zapata). I’m now producing (check out Not That Funny on Facebook). And now I can record live concerts. Laurie Niles is a fellow parent at McKinley School, where my kids go. Laurie is a violinist, a music teacher and educator, and a friend. She runs the crazy-cool website violinist.com, and this past Spring, she agreed to do a concert of violin music in the school auditorium. It was simply amazing. And I got to record it.

I think the live recording sounds pretty good, no, it sounds great. But live was even better. I wish you all could have been there. If you ever get the chance to see her in concert, it’s a treat. And every piece of music was unexpected — none of the “standard” classical fare. Here’s the trio that started the concert (the audio on this video is simply from the Flip camera — sometime I’ll marry up my audio with their video, but it’s not a priority right now):

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And it was all that good. The “Meditation from ‘Thaïs’” that you heard at the top of this post was her encore, and it was a beautiful, peaceful way to end a magnificent evening of violin music.

I feel so privileged to be around such awesome talent. It’s fun. It’s challenging to me as an artist. And these people become great friends too, friends that I hope to be promoting and hanging out with and enjoying each others’ company 20 years from now.

So enjoy the music, and enjoy life, and enjoy the friends and family that you get to experience life with.

What Hearken Creative did this summer, Part 2

Did I mention we were busy this summer? (By the way, my son is the one in the yellow cap above…playing the nerd. Perfect casting.)(Oh, and the fantastic photos of this summer’s shows were taken by New York-based pro photographer Matthew Murphy. He got some incredible shots.)

The Pasadena Musical Theatre Program is a decades-old training program for kids in Pasadena, CA. But I would call this a kid’s program on steroids, or, better, a pro theatre program that just happens to have kids as its focus. But this summer we held a master class with Megan Hilty of Wicked fame, held a class entitled Pursuing a Career in Musical Theatre, and did a American Idol-style solo competition, in addition to the two main shows that are produced every summer. Ryan Scott Oliver (award-winning musical composer), Cindy Abbott (wonderfully dedicated Pasadena music teacher), and Emily Clark (fabulous musical theatre performer and teacher) have transformed this program into a powerhouse that trains over 125 students every summer.

So what did Hearken Creative do? Well, for starters, I joined the board of the program last summer, because funding for arts has dried up with local school districts and I feel strongly about arts education. So, on our own, we have raised somewhere in the range of $50,000 every summer to make the program happen. In addition, Hearken Creative

  • provided all design services for print media, programs, and press releases,
  • photographed the Megan Hilty master class,
  • filmed the Promise Competition,
  • ran sound for all events, including the master class, meetings and competitions, and
  • sound designed both major shows — the Juniors (4th-6th graders) and the Seniors (7th-12th grade) shows.

Essentially, this was two weeks of wrangling a high school auditorium (that a friend aptly called an “airplane hangar”) into submission, using Hearken Creative-provided equipment, rented equipment, and the high school’s 40-year-old 24-channel mixer, as well as my own 16-channel digital mixer. Twenty wireless body mics, plus choir mics and band sound reinforcement.

And boy, did it sound good! We don’t have the professionally-produced video from KLRN yet, but several people have posted their home videos already. Here’s one:

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and my son singing a solo at the Promise Competition:

The purpose of the program is twofold: first, arts education is vital to a well-rounded education, and music/dance hits so many of the other disciplines — math, reasoning, spatial relationships — that it seems stupid the schools are cutting performing arts. Secondly, there is an erroneous meme out there that there are no viable career options in performing arts. We aim to change that perception.

By using Hearken Creative’s graphic design skills, our production and sound design skills, as well as our music background and fundraising acumen, we were able to help make this summer’s Pasadena Musical Theatre Program a complete success.

In progress…

A piece of music that might go in the background of a new video I’m working on…

[pro-player width="450" height="30" type="MP3"]http://www.hearkencreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/test1-09-10-07a.mp3[/pro-player]
Check it out.