Sidebar

Solving the problem of micing the hang and other stories…

Having managed to cut all the electricity from our house by fiddling with the knobs under the stairs (ahem), Jack and I are winding up the week in The Parlour café on Church St, Stoke Newington. Spent all of Wednesday with our favourite soundman Harry Bishop in an attempt to solve the ‘hang issue’. Finally, after years of scratching our heads with the conundrum of how exactly to mic-up the hang, we found ourselves in the presence of a team of top sound professionals, with an arsenal of microphones and a day to solve this sonic riddle. You see, the hang is a quiet instrument and the sound comes from quite a dispersed area (i.e. all over the top side) making it very difficult to capture a strong signal. Mics have to be turned up to hyper-sensitivity which means they pick up lots of sonic ‘spill’ from Duncan’s drums and Jack’s sax. Tricky. Harry arrived at our gaff early with a frightening amount of equipment including over 25 different mics and fellow sound-boffins Sam Parker (Lilly Allen’s soundman) and Matt from Sound Network. If they couldn’t solve the problem then it is literally unsolvable. We spent hour after hour trying different combinations of mics and mic-positioning and came up with some interesting results. Interesting at least to sound-geeks. The best tone came from the DPA Standard but this picked up too much spill. The overall winner was the Audio Technica 4053b. A very satisfying thing to know, I can tell you. This mic, combined with clever adjustments to our playing positions on stage and we should have the solution to our sonic niggles and a mind-blowing amazing sounding Portico Quartet. We do it for you, people. Remember that.
Thursday was spent promoting the new record ‘Isla’. Me and Dunc headed for an early interview with Time-Out at their offices on Tottenham Court Road. This favourite London mag has always supported us and was interested to know how we’ve been getting on. We chatted to Kim for about 40 minutes. Bit gutted she’d only been given the album earlier that morning so we couldn’t really talk about the new music, but hey. Otherwise all good. Had amazing walk in an unbelievably crisp autumnal Regents Park.
Later on we did a session for the British Council Selecta (a British Council sponsored podcast about new British music that goes out worldwide with a listener ship of 2 million!) at Somethin’ Else productions near Old Street. Recorded 4 tracks and bit of chat. Look out for this on various radio stations from next week.

Going tonight to see Jono McCleery and United Vibrations at the Cross Kings in Kings Cross…