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Sunday 5 October 2014

14th Week - Circo del Sol (379th Song)



I got news of the Cirque du Soleil doing auditions in Madrid. I run to their page and read the requirements:

-Full CV saying everything about you and your skills and writing down the kit that you own.
-2 pics of yourself where you are totally visible (face and body)
-1 minute video introducing yourself and telling why do you want to join Cirque du Soleil
-5 videos of yourself playing the songs of a list (all of them)

So here I am, recording one of those songs. I spent the week learning them and recorded it. The songs were so amazing all of them, I really love the Cirque du Soleil style. Very ethnic and magical. I struggled a bit with a couple of them which I repeated dozens of times. My favorite one was this one called Celebration from the show Kà, which I saw after recording this, as well all the other shows, and it was the cooler too. It was more special and distinctive, and very focus on martial arts.

The first thing that I noticed when I went to record it was that I really need more equipment to record drums. I have only 2 mic stands and one of them has the shock mount totally broken. I had to use several rubber bands to make the mic not to move at all. I only have 2 cables (after the recording I found another one which makes 3) so I only had 2 mics to record even when I have many more. I remember watching a video of therecordingrevolution.com where the talked about 2 techniques to record drumkits with only two mics. One of them was the technique used to record John Bonham's drumkit on Led Zeppelin's albums called The Glyn John's Method . And the other was the Recorder Man technique which takes good sound from the kit but not much from the room, thanks god, because I hate the sound of my room. I used this last one, of course. It consists in placing a mic just above the snare drum pointing to the center of it with one condenser mic and the other would be pointing to the center of the kick drum to capture better its sound and should be at the same distance from the center of the snare drum to avoid phase issues. I did this spending more than hour because I broke a piece of the not broken mic stand, and also because of the height of the position of the mic and its weight the stand was leaning forward and falling, so I had to put a lot of weight on the base.

Once I start to record it I just did few attempts, first 4 were were because I didn't remember how the song was and forgot some parts, but once I got it I just did 2 or 3 takes. Ironically, at the beginning, I thought it would be the most difficult song for me. I didn't mix it or anything, I had enough just recording all the songs for so many hours (2 days).

After recording everything I was ready to send everything, so I visited their page and... Surprise! They had cancelled the audition. I think they still accept videos on the main page (Canadian?), so I'll try it and let's cross fingers.

Enjoy it!

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