#Soundresearch No. 07 - One mic - Ivo Tull Trio: “Zbudil sem se zgodaj”

From solo, to duo, trio and a whole band - all recorded on a single microphone. I think that when trying things out, life always shows us how something looks and that if we go deep we can succeed. It’s different from what we imagine. When just trying things out we usually succeed, but problems emerge with repeating. It’s like the universe is telling us that we can do it and that now we just need to work it out. That’s what it was like with the whole band. Only after a while can you see what you got from that one day.

Let’s start with drums. I was at once surprised at Giulio Roselli immediate adaptation to the space and his very gentle playstyle. When asked how he was able to do it, he told me a story from his early days. “When I was young, I got a steady job in Venice as a musician. We had a concert every day. After the second song, one of my colleagues said to me: “boy, if you want to earn your living here, you need to learn to play music suited for the space you’re in”. So I developed a technique of silent play. We musicians usually say “that’s me and this is how I sound”, but when pressed to survive, we know and can do everything.”

Then came the bass. Alessandro Leonzini and myself kept moving the amplifier around the room and listening to the sound and any possible blares, exploring how it fits in with the drums and how it responds to the microphone.

I wanted the guitar to sound majestic. When recording them, guitars usually sound great in the room, but soft on the recording. I found out that the trick is not about how high the amplifier is because of its lamps, but it’s in the amount of the amplifier’s volume so that it can overload the space. In other words, we use the strength of the amplifier to gain the sound of the space. That is why the amp is turned towards the wall - so it can make the room sing. In time we will also talk about walls as energy rebounders and cleaners.

The human body needs time to perceive change, so all these recordings sounded different to me at the time as they do now. The crazy thing is, our sound perception changes. More so when it’s heavily coloured with the mind and patterns of how something is supposed to sound. All novelties in the sound are immediately received with resistance and they need a lot of reassurance ballast from the mind (“we’re doing it just to fool around, we’re not recording a real album, if we were doing it for real we would be working differently…”). But in truth, you found and pressed on a point in you and your colleagues that triggered a defense mechanism. No one knows where it is and no one knows what’s going on. “We’re having a good time, this stuff is unbelievably interesting, but we can’t do it like that, not here.“

And yet, you can feel the atmosphere from the recording day.

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nzq5jAgVFw

AEA Ribbon Mics

#discoveringsound #music #meditation