I was called to record a concert by Tulika Ghosh last weekend, which as always was more than happy to do it. Any Hindustani vocal or instrumental concert always enthralls me as you get a to attend a free concert and get full access to its recordings. So the concert started well after a neat introduction. It was a fairly small concert (50 people) in a fairly small hall. Five minutes into the concert, the sound mixer heated up like crazy and the circuit breaker on it went off, shutting the power off to the speakers. Fortunately Tulika had just started with an explaination of the raag that she was about to sing. I set the circuit breaker back into position and the speakers became alive again. Five minutes later again the circuit breaker went off and I was surprised. I had checked the speaker connections twice/thrice before the concert and also had the mic testing going on for atleast 15 minutes before the concert. Then why was this happening? This is usual when the polarity of the speakers is reversed but again this was not the case here. As I was trying to figure out the root cause of the trouble, I realized that the right speaker wire was heating up like anything and causing the circuit to break. So I pulled out the right speaker and over rode the circuit breaker and in a couple of minutes the left speaker was on again. The situation reminded me of Anniken Skywalkers pod race in Star Wars -The Phantom Menace, where one of the blasters on his pod stops functioning and hence Anniken delivers the power from the functioning blaster to the non functional blaster and accelerates again! I was glad to take that split second decision of phasing out the right speaker, and powering up the left one. Fortunately the hall was small and the left speaker alone could handle the sound requirement for the whole concert. The recording came out pretty well with extra compliments from Tulika herslf!
Also since this was a small concert with no time limitations, Tulika was glad to sing requests from the audiences and the concert spanned quite more than its usual length time. When I record the concert on my hard disk, it does not OCCUPY space BUT CONSUMES space on my hard disk, until I convert it into a compressed format. So as she went on singing, my disk space started running out and I had to make extra space by deleting some old files. One such file was the 1951 animation classic Alice in Wonderland. Later on I realized that I have a copy of it on a CD. Hence after this incident I decided to go ahead and get an external hard drive so I have safe back ups each time.
Current Music : Trans Europe Express ::
Kraftwerk :: The Model: Best of Kraftwerk This song composed by Kraftwerk in the late 80's has a certain music which was copied note to note by Rajesh Roshan for the movie 'KOI MIL GAYA' when Hrithik Roshan uses a typical music to communicate with the aliens! That music is a perfect 'Inspiration' of Trans Europe Express.
Thursday, June 09, 2005