Opera Project Columbus wins Columbus’ biggest arts awards for organizations with budgets under $1 million dollars. Congratulations!
It took me a while to post this–I am a one-person boutique with a lot happening. We’re all navigating this overwhelming pandemic. But I want to note this project as I look back over 2021.
The content Opera Project Columbus programmed for Black History Month was choice. They chose from Rosephayne Powell’s art-song collection tribute to Phillis Wheatley. “I Want To Die While You Love Me” is wonderfully dark and the text to that is great lyric writing. Dr Battle did a soulful interpretation of Moses Hogans’ spiritual. The content choices, the singers, and the pianist were admirable. And I like that they had young Zion recite Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America” then ended the program with Margaret Bonds’ song portrait of the poem which Dr Bennett sang powerfully. She also beautifully sang “Since You Went Away” by Ohio’s own Leslie Adams. They really deserved this recognition from Greater Columbus Arts Council. Congrats to Leslie McBride, the Maestro, and all at CAPA and OPC!
I was on the small nimble crew that created the “I Too, Sing America” video with Spyroll Studios. It wasn’t a grueling shoot with long setups, several takes, or edits—didn’t want to exhaust the singers. I sang opera a lifetime ago and was excited to handle sound. Love the promo shot with Dione Bennett in that cool nouveau headdress singing into my U87! Ai, ha. Lincoln Theatre graciously let me use their CL5 and opened their mic cabinet. Paul Kavicky made sure I got DPA 4099s from the Ohio Theatre. And Lincoln’s manager Jim hooked me up—I asked if I could hang a couple of Neumann KM185s from the catwalk and he climbed up there and did it! Just cool people interested in facilitating the best sound. I had plenty of options to do quick budget-minded post-production.
Here is the award celebration video emceed by Angela Pace. Jump to 26:22 to hear about “I, Too, Sing America” and Opera Project Columbus!
And please do check out the “I Too, Sing America” video, the soundtrack for which has been widely shared with schools.
Here’s some of my recent field recording and post-production mix sound work. Well, the Highball video is from 2019…I did sound for the 2020 video as well but need to track down the link.
I do several different jobs per week so have a lot of material but little time to work on reels. I grabbed these links to secure an upcoming job. Just hit me up if you’re looking for a specific genre of audio work for your job. Thanks!
HGTV Hart Tools – Steve Ford
Field Audio & Post-Production Audio – Lesley Fogle, Hear No Evil Sound
Opera Project Columbus
Field Audio & Post-Production Audio – Lesley Fogle, Hear No Evil Sound
Lincoln Theater – What a fun project this was to record and mix the singers!
I studied opera back in the day and I like to hear vocals mixed well without heavy-handed compression.
Highball Halloween
Field Audio & Post-Production Audio – Lesley Fogle, Hear No Evil Sound
Action For Children – Childcare is Essential
Field Audio & Post-Production Audio – Lesley Fogle, Hear No Evil Sound
Jewish Columbus – Together We Shine
Field Audio & Post-Production Audio – Lesley Fogle, Hear No Evil Sound
Video demo – Boss WL-60 Wireless System for Performer Magazine
One day I’ll figure out how to streamline my music, creative, and work websites. Use one of those social media aggregators. And even keep a current reel. But not today, Satan. I wrote about this on my After-Death Plan website. Might as well post the video demo Constantine and I shot here as well. We did this in a day. I think we’re going to do a pretty mic review next and take some time to make it a thorough mic shootout.
Artist-In-Residency at ACPA, the Arts & College Preparatory Academy
These days I start off my posts by saying that I am not able to update this site often. I do a new shoot or project every week with many irons in the fire. And of course creating art is a priority in my personal time. We do a decent job of keeping the After-Death Plan website and related social media updated…at the best of times.
But I want to post about a couple of important things, my recent artist-in-residency at the Arts & College Preparatory Academy (ACPA) and also the wonderful Professional Development grant awarded to me by the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
First, the artist-in-residency: The grant was written by Ben Shinaberry at ACPA, the Arts & College Preparatory Academy, here in Columbus Ohio and awarded by the Ohio Arts Council. There is an excellent program at ACPA called Bandlab, taught by Noah Demand, where students form groups that study music, write songs, and practice consistently. The grant was to bring in an engineer/recording artist to record a song with each of the eight Bandlab bands comprised of 40 students.
We started with recording preparation sessions where I talked with students about what to expect during their time with me. Aided by some Song Description sheets I’d sent them to fill out, I met the students, gave them an overview of session protocol and the hardware/software we’d use, and talked about what to expect and how to get ready for their recording session. This as aided by informative visuals:
And, at times, snarky visuals such as this one on sensitive studio mics:
I spent some time getting things organized: labeling snakes, setting up equipment, updating drivers, tweaking the Pro Tools session template, etc. We were set to go for the two weeks of tracking with a different band each day.
During the prep session we’d made a list of students interested in engineering whether as a potential career or just to further their own music. Those students switched off in the engineer’s chair while I talked them through running the session. Each player connected their own cabling which was color-coded and corresponded to the patch bays, pre-amps, and session inputs; and worked with each other while we went through the lengthier process of dialing in everyone’s tone and levels. Being a whole new experience for most, we typically did quite a few takes before finding our working scaffold/take with the most solid drum foundation. Then, generally, we overdubbed or punched in any parts of instruments that needed work. From there we generally overdubbed the vocals to eliminate all of the drum and amp bleed from the original tracking. And from there we moved on to vocal mults and harmonies.
This was a hands on, engaging experience. Different groups spent their time in different areas. One group built a blanket fort around the drum set to calm some of the room reflection, another lined the kick drum with carpet tiles, another spent the bulk of the tracking day re-arranging their song and making it stronger with better chord progressions, another focused on building both the chorus and hooks with instrumental and vocal overdubs, and another spent a large portion of time working on group vocals. One person declared they’d played the wrong chords at part of a song for months and even live because they could never hear themselves and everyone else simultaneously. And most of the singers had not used a condenser mic and were very interested in studio mic technique. I could go on and on here but the basic premise is that we came to these conclusions through discussion and the students learned a lot about technique and arrangement through this experience where every note was heard and permanently captured.
That was about the entire school day for most of the groups though some of the groups were able to fit in some edit time after a crash course on editing. Honestly, we could easily have spent a week on concepts alone so these were action-packed days. And these Bandlab teens were all very talented and into recording the songs they had written.
Suverno
Odd Thyme with Noah
Not Your Fathers
Zodiac Killers
Kamikaze
U Alrdy No
Lois Griffin
Spaghetti Nightmare
We then moved on to mixing concepts with each of the eight groups. After rearranging the space a bit to get the monitors at ear level, I met with each group to discuss mixing concepts. Working wth their basic plug-in bundle, I imported some fx busses into their template so we could quickly activate any needed effects. We started with basic editing concepts then mostly started honing in on drum sounds individually and as a whole before incorporating the bass till the entire rhythm section gelled nicely. We went over the concepts of the frequency spectrum and where each person’s instrument sits in that spectrum in order to touch on EQ, panning, compression, delay, and the types of reverb. We touched on many mix concepts and though it takes time to train one’s ears, I hope this gave everyone the encouragement to keep experimenting with mixing.
Parallel Compression
Vocal Treatment Effects Options
Then we moved on to finding placement and tone for the guitars and keys to sit in the mix before dressing up the vocal.
That about summarizes the experience. Anyone who mixes knows you can work for weeks on an individual track while we created these recordings in a short amount of time. That said, the songs sound great and really don’t need to be tweaked further because there is no doubt that the next series of recordings will start st a level where these recording leave off…you know what I mean? The level of talent these young ones possess is eye-opening and I’m glad they were able to hear just how good their songs can sound in a controlled environment. I look forward to hearing the tracks assembled into an ACPA album! I’ll post info here when it’s released. It may not be mastered so crank it!
I might also add that I wanted to take this opportunity to show female visibility to potential aspiring engineers. It took over a decade for me to see another woman working in post-production audio in the relatively large arena of Chicago. The number of women in the industry has apparently risen to a whopping 5%. I have some insight into why young women might be intimidated by this field and want to do my part in empowering future generations in going after their dreams. The inner voice is genderless.
Let me start by saying that I am not able to keep the work I do very current on this site. I go through a new shoot/project/scenario every week and keeping up with the work is priority. I’ve been threatening to take a week to update my reel but the time has not presented itself.
But I do want to post about our new album and music videos. I updated a bit of my gear to record and mix this album. Mostly links will have to do here because we’ve already spent a lot of time creating and promoting this work. The new album, released January 15, 2019 is called Psycho Social Sexual. There is a considerable amount of info about it and press coverage of it on our website: www.afterdeathplan.com
Time is pretty tight but best thing is to reach out to me if you’ve a professional project that needs sound or voice. I’m always open to a pitch on artistic projects as well. Worst case scenario is that someone will have listened and appreciated the concept.
After-Death Plan’s Literature officially outside the echo chamber.
We released our album Literature earlier this month. I’d sent preview copies to the usual Mal VU suspects and tried it out on a few new people I’ve come across in the industry. Got a lot of positive feedback especially from collectors who’ve lived through a wide range of music and a lot of the displaced 4AD veterans who like a bit of brain massage with their sound. I kept hearing “It’s on repeat in my car.” Even people from the old noise, garage, and punk scenes were finding appeal which is all very tender for a bunch of tough guys.
We’d planned to hire some PR help with the album but the tail end of 2016 sucked so hard that it was amazing we were able to inch forward at all outside of life and work. So we’re just now storyboarding videos and sending Literature out for review. We have an interview and a podcast coming up but were pleasantly surprised to see our first review outside of the echo chamber and it’s an impressive one. Such a relief because this is a stylistically complicated album.
The review comes from Fred Mills, the editor of the highly-respected Blurt music magazine.
REVIEW:
“Chicago duo After-Death Plan off-handedly describe their genre as “American Gothic Nous Rock,” which is befitting of an album titled Literature additionally accompanied by a user’s guide* to its literary influences. Fair enough—although I feel compelled add that ADP is so free-ranging and broad-reaching in its musical palette that adjective-adjective-adjective-noun categorization borders on the useless (if not outright hapless). Because this has to be one the most sonically adventurous and lyrically challenging releases to grace the still-young new year, the type of record destined to be mentioned by critics when they start chronicling their best-of-2017 picks at the end of the annum.
It’s the brainchild of vocalist Lesley Ann Fogle, classically-trained and studio-schooled, and multiinstrumentalist Constantine Hondroulis, most recently heard with innovative Columbus combo Earwig (whose 2016 LP Pause for the Jets was reviewed right here at BLURT recently). Together, the pair conjure images both stark and expansive, foregrounding Fogle’s sultry purr ‘n’ coo—a cross between PJ Harvey and Sharon Van Etten, but one which can’t help to conjure analog ghosts of experimental muses of long ago—against an array of melodically riveting, rhythmically edgy, arrangements.
There’s opening track “The Master & Margarita,” for example, a brooding slice of ‘50s-ish, Nick Cave-styled pop noir, which is quickly followed by the considerably strummier, yet no less dark, Americana that is “Devil Takes A Hand.” Two songs in, and we’re already thinking murder ballad territory. Ah, but we’d be thinking wrong. Soon enough there’s the luminous “Raygun,” with its gorgeous strings and neo-gospel choir of harmony vox; a thrumming post-punk-meets-power-pop rocker called “Memory Remains” that cements the aforementioned Harvey comparison; and, skipping all the way to the end of the album, “In The Sun,” a slice of neo-operatic provocation that crescendos towards a violent, Sonic Youthian climax that’s anything but ballad-like…READ MORE
The biggest news is that we just released After-Death Plan’s album Literature which is a concept album about classic books and writers. Visit the site for a more info.
In audiobook news, 2017 begins with Rom Com, supernatural snark, YA espionage, and literary study.
I just finished my second Witch In Time audiobook for Amanda M. Lee’s popular, snarky Witchy Tales series. It is proofed and will go for second review this week. Just got T. A. MacLagan’s sleeper cell series They Call Me Alexandra Gastone back from proofing for minor revisions and that will go out this week as well. Next in line is my second audiobook Royally Wed in Pamela DuMond’s very funny Part-time Princess series. Her characters are stuck in my head and I look forward to hanging out with them again.
Then on to my fourth audiobook for Kimberly Krey (details soon after we announce).
Peppered in between the fiction reads, I’ll be keeping my voice relaxed but strong with the nonfiction narration of Carl Rollyson’s biography Understanding Susan Sontag through The University of South Carolina Press. In the simplest of terms, I am a big fan of Sontag’s work.
And that’s it for January and February audiobook mornings. I won’t get into commercial voice, field audio, or audio post work. Just retail projects that can be obtained.
We have most of the songs for After-Death Plan’s next album sketched out. I’ll be working on that quite a bit in my free time as well as a series of guided meditations. I teach regular yoga classes and my people are hooked on the guided meditations. As some classes came to term, I was asked to make a recording of the meditation rituals. I agreed and of course decided to do it right. Having recorded the vocal guides, I was just starting on the music when I lost my father in the fall. My energy was all over the place and not right for creating meditation music. So I decided to commission the very talented Lisa Bella Donna to write the music instead. She is a frighteningly prolific composer who embodies good energy. Those downloads will be available soon and I hope they bring peace and wonder to many.
Welcome to my new website! Special thanks to the talented Aaron Yeagle of Author Platform Guru for his, well, guru skills. And thanks to Constantine Hondroulis for his management skills.
Highlights this week include wearing scrubs for a medical training shoot, eyeing the finish line on my current audiobook, and making it through week three of the plank challenge.
The medical training videos were shot here in Columbus on multiple Red cameras by owner/operators Lance Meaux and Chris Hagan (DP). They both do beautiful work and are a lot of fun on the set. Worked with Chris Carson (AC, PA) for the first time and was very impressed by how he made himself indispensable on the set and did so with relaxed ease. I was field mixer, using the Sound Devices 664 mixer/recorder: great sounding pres, ample routing options, and an internal recorder that can be set to record polyphonic WAV files to CF and SD cards. I love that option because for 50 camera takes, each involving 6 channels (5 lavs and a backup boom), you have 50 WAV files that each contain 6 tracks when imported into ProTools or Final Cut. You don’t have to handle 300 tracks. The editor can solo say the boom track as scratch, make the other 5 tracks inactive, and group/lock those 6 tracks per take for the edit. Then your post engineer knows everything there is to work with when they get the OMF back. I’ll blog about using all of the tracks to cut the best final audio when we get to the post-production stage of that project. This is where you want a post audio engineer with experienced ears as you can’t just set up an EQ on a channel and expect that to be the right filter on a moving target. I’m sure this process sounds obvious to my audio engineer friends, but I think video folk will get something out of it. To my voice talent friends, the producer hooked me UP on that shoot and I will also be narrating the medical training videos!
I am two chapters away from finishing the narration for Windwood Farm (Taryn’s Camera, Book 1) by Rebecca Howard-Patrick. The series focuses on Taryn Magill, an artist/photographer who uses her oil-painting skills and her degrees in Art and Historical Preservation to create portraits of grand buildings as they would have been when they were created, long before they fell into disrepair. Further, Taryn uses determination and her burgeoning psychic abilities along with her camera’s burgeoning ability to develop actual pictures of the past to solve the mysteries behind the paranormal encounters she experiences while on the job. I love this book. It ties into many things I value: historic preservation, the paranormal, the American gothic vibe. My first engineering experiences in my teens involved gathering EVP recordings…this was in the late 80s, pre-internet, before I could discover what the masses knew about EVP. Ok, and I love historic houses. My husband and I painstakingly restored our Craftsman-style house to life in Columbus’ first, historic neighborhood. We geek out on the researching the history and treat our house like family. In other words, I love the subject; and when I looked over the script for Windwood Farm and read about Taryn’s connection and even conversation with these grand old inanimate objects, I was hooked. Taryn herself gets so immersed in her work that she can come off as aloof and she has a healthy sense of sarcasm to boot.
Finally, the plank challenge. See this?
Rug burn. I’ve been taking my yoga and core classes through the plank challenge for the past few weeks. This week we got up to the five 35 second sets of walking planks which I’ve also seen called alternating hand planks…the ones where you go back and forth from a high pushup to a forearm plank. I feel like I could pop on a crazy German guard bra right now and it would feel comforting. Everything from my neck to lower rib cage hurts; the pain goes away for a second then picks back up from belly button to hip joint. The stuff below that feels great and so does my head. I don’t know about Week 4 because it involves Spiderman kookery. I’m also the only one that got rug burn.
