An interview I did with Marie Pojkarová, “a newly born star of teleshopping”, for Instinkt magazine is now online here.
Archive Page 13
My dream? Do a support for Robbie Williams!
Published December 6, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a CommentSaturday evening we’ve been watching Pouta with my girlfriend, a film directed by Radim Špaček, and despite it’s initial tempo we liked it very much in the end, and yesterday evening I was confronted with him personally by coincidence when I was asked to comment a couple of advertisements for campaigns fighting against the HIV virus and AIDS. Shot for the Q magazine for Czech Television, you can watch how hard it is to shoot a good commercial about AIDS on 30th November on ČT2.
Thursday I re-recorded vocals for The Linings (or The Linings Mustaches, they still didn’t make their minds up). I used uncreditable Chinese Honsound HSCM1100 valve-condenser mic (it doesn’t exist on Google!!! no single picture and possibly no single link besides them I created) which is apparently almost a proper copy of Neumann U67.
I used the mic after long months in the box couple of weeks ago during recording the guitar for “maskoule.cz” video and I enjoyed the warm sound it produced. Simply, it was the best sound of a guitar I ever recorded in my home studio.
Two weeks ago I recorded Wlado’s (The Linings’ singer) voice on my AKG C-414b through SSL Channel One as I use to record almost every vocal. This time with no success. The recording lacked almost everything you need for a lead vocal and exceeded only in producing very unlikely hissing frequencies. Honsound (the name sounds way worse than the actual sound of the mic) removed hissing, added warmth and punch and slight distortion which made Wlado’s voice sound nicer and thicker. With an instant ease.
Why a post about this? First, I don’t like discussions “we were choosing the right mic for two days and then we nailed it in an hour” because I don’t believe the gear is that important (as I saw Dušan Neuwerth’s equipment and nobody would believe that he recorded Tata Bojs albums with THESE mics and THIS outboard) when you don’t have the right pair of ears. And my experience tells me that I meet superb gear-loaded studios more often than a simple human head using ears for recording and mixing instead of eyes, sharking for brands-which-made-the-history. But I admit that a mic can make a bigger difference than I assumed as I thought that a good mic just sounds good on almost anything or anyone.
Second, I believe in quality and I am usually ready to pay for it as I think you support quality and development by paying for good products, so I do believe in gear in general. And I love gear, especially when it works and when I know how to operate it to success. But these Chinese Hon-guys made possible to own a copy of a 7.000 USD microphone for a little bit more than 500 USD and to experiment with it in your own studio, day by day, day and night. Which won’t be possible with an original. Hardly comparable as a copy won’t be never an original. So I don’t know how great the guitar and the voice would sound with a genuine U67 but I can claim that with this cheap and cheerful copy it sounds pretty good too. Nevertheless we should buy proper originals.
So, it’s a truth finally, The Prostitutes and Pale Music Int. from Berlin are married. German and English releases are in distribution right now. My personal thanx to Steve Morell, Monique, Kill The Dandies! and all people from Pale Music Int. and the band and our management!
The Prostitutes – Out in United Kingdom on Pale Music Int.!!! Free Shiping in the UK!!!
Available at HMV – Click the link below !!!
The Prostitutes: Hometown Zombies (2010) CD
directed by Mods
cinematography by Karel Fairaisl
produced by Kristina Šedivá
production Nikola Böhmová
editor Petr Mrkous
sound Roman Sečkař
sound mix and music Martin Přikryl
balls design and costume concept Kristina Šedivá
balls development DP Image
costumes Lela Geislerová
make up Tereza Patočková & Jana Nováková
casting Kateřina Oujezdská
location scout Ondřej Havlík
grading/Spirit operator Ondřej Štibingr
online/Flame operator Rasťo Šimočko
UPP production Magdalena Halamová
assistant of production/set design Jan Štěpánek
1st AD Lukáš Viznar
special visual post production SFX Tomáš Hájek
storyboard artist Petr Fousek
Special thanx to Simona Halíková at Barrandov Studio – filmové laboratoře, Naďa Marková at Michael Samuelson lighting, Jindřich Čipera at Vantage camera rental, UPP, Honza Trnka and Marek Šulista, Renata Němcová (nadace Krtek)
Very special thanx to actors and balls: Adrian Bell, Luk Santiago, Adam Piaf and Stevie LFO, Martin Pechlát, Jiří Mádl, Eva Leimbergerová, David Máj, DJ Robot, Mejla Kukulský, Lukáš Rumlena, Pavel Homér, Simon Ruffskank, Petr Vaňek, Jana Plodková, Markéta Stehlíková, Juliana Johanidesová, Tomáš Měcháček, Alžběta Přikrylová, Šimon Přikryl, Magdalena Němcová, Ema Kinterová, Matěj Převrátil, Bára Trnková, Karolína Trnková, Viktorka Cabanová, Viktorie Šmeralová, Vanessa Lenková
I spent last two weeks beeping and buzzing, raving and dancing in my Radiotron studio, working for McSanchez directors on two gummy candies commercials. I can’t say more now. I enjoyed it but I suffered from one of the worst headaches after endless hours of tweaking individual effects. Why? One theme was a pure 8-bit madness inspired by famous sounds of Sinclair ZX Spectrum colliding with Atari 130 XS and Commodore 64. Try to play Supermario loud for two weeks and you’ll see for yourself.
I used mainly two synths, TAL Noise Maker as a soft-synth and Moog Little Phatty as a hard-synth, combined with omnipresent bitcrusher and couple of samples from Roland TR-808.
By the way, here is a demo of TR-808:
And here are the darlings. Something I usually relate to as my personal R2-D2s. I still have my Atari 130 XE somewhere but I lost the tape recorder… And the Logic mighty soft-synths. Not so legendary, but dependable workhorses.
The second theme was an euro-trance-inspired girlie dancefloor vocoder-driven smash hit quite similar to the production of our Austrian and German friends. Entirely done with native Logic 9 instruments like ES 2, EVOC 20 and EXS23 mk II and Ultrabeat for drums. The result will be presented as soon as it will be legal.
Tomorrow I would like to come back to real music and finish recording part of an EP development for The Linings. Vocals. The most important, the most complicated part of recording. We laid down couple of takes last time but after I spent some time on editing and EQing I would like to re-record them again with a different mic and preamp setting. Cross fingers. Then some mixing and mastering using Waves and TL Audio mixing console.
There is a brand new website of Mods with complete showreel divided into commercials, music videos and miscellaneous stuff called virals & shorts (usually short videos for low budget marketing projects and a couple of festival jingles).
We are now free for booking as we closed our 5-years-lasting exclusive contract with Bistro Films (but keeping the good cooperation still on).
We also finished the balls commercial (a charity commercial against testicles cancer) which I will publicize here on Monday.
The brand new poster for the autumn tour of The Prostitutes. Photo by Jan Trnka, who did the last and personally my most favorite photo-shoot of the band. Graphic design by Lukáš Franz, designer behind most of our posters in last two years and art director of Experimentální prostor Mumie in Ústí nad Labem.
I just updated the Music tab again and added a commercial for Linka bezpečí from 2008 I did the music and SFX for.
And I added the last single from The Prostitutes‘ album Hometown Zombies called Everybody Knows plus the music video link. Hometown Zombies was just recently released in Germany and UK by Pale Music Int.
There is an another gear test: FourTrack for iPhone, an app which incarnates what I always wish for when I was 16 to 20 years old – a Tascam portable 4-track studio. These days I travel with my MacBook Pro everywhere loaded with Logic 9, so my possibilities are literally endless but this little app is a wonderful ideas-recorder on the go in a palmtop size. With some EQ and compressor, panning and possibility to bounce and overdub again (which increases the number of virtual tracks) it is a powerful and stupid-proof software. This is my morning doodle in the kitchen recorded on four tracks. Some rhythm problems are intentional indeed because they create the right desperate feeling… Mixdown, download to you desktop from dedicated IP and share, um, for example, on your blog:
The Last Old Mod***MDP74 v. 3.0 
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