George Balston | Online Portfolio

In May, I again trekked to St James’s Church in Clerken­well with lots of gear (this time, luck­ily in a suit­case…) to record Vladi­mir play Bach’s 5^th Cello Suite, inter­twined by a new com­mis­sion called Micro­suite by a chap called Bosch. This was fol­lowed by Zoltan Kodaly’s Son­ata in B Minor.
The inter­est­ing thing about these pieces is that they are all writ­ten in ‘Scordatura’, which means the detun­ing of one of the cello strings. This is why there are two cel­los — it is not an easy job to tune one in the middle of the performance.

Spe­cial prize for any­one who can name all the fonts…

I thought I’d draw a little dia­gram of the sig­nal path. You can see it lar­ger by click­ing on it.
So the sig­nal went straight from a pair of DPA 4006s to a Can­ford Dual Preamp, which appar­ently has some rela­tion to an old cus­tom made Decca mic pre. This was then fed ana­logue into a TC Elec­tronic Final­izer, which was basic­ally just used for its very nice A/D con­ver­sion. All the mas­ter­ing set­tings were bypassed.
This was then sent digit­ally to an Edirol R4 hard disk recorder. The reason to bring the pre and the final­izer was just really a way to cir­cum­vent using the Edirol pre amps and DAC, which I ima­gine is slightly less than amaz­ing quality.

And to top it off, Vladi­mir is an amaz­ing player, and sounds lovely in a church, which is the most import­ant part.

First post in a while. Been super busy.
So me, Mark and Sarah went to a church oppos­ite Spit­al­fields to record some examples for a tutorial. This was the res­ult — recor­ded with two DPA 4006s, in a fant­astic acoustic.

It is Rene Cama­caro play­ing Bach — Cello Suite No.4 in Eb Major, BWV 1010 — III. Courante