March 21, 2005 at 3:13 PM

Well, it was a big weekend, starting last Thursday! My contradance band played Irish at a local brew pub for St. Paddy's day, and didn't we have a ball! I couldn't plug my recorder directly into the sound system, but did get a decent bootleg of the gig. :) And, got some good comments from audience and host, so the afterglow is nice and warm and fuzzy.

My old sound editing software wasn't working very well, so I downloaded a shareware wav editor called Acoustica, which seems to be working quite well. I figure I'll give it a bit of a trial and if I still like it after I'm done with this recording, I'll fork over the $35 and keep it. It's got pretty decent noise reduction, which is my big need for this recording -- you'd think, in a pub, people would be quiet... NOT. I've found, though, that if I put noise reduction on one channel and then combine the channels to even them out (the mic was in a bad spot for stereo anyway, and the channels are really uneven), the result sounds pretty good, and still sounds natural. It ain't clean, but the music pops out from the background a bit better.

Then Friday was dress rehearsal and Sat and Sun were choral society concerts. Pretty esoteric stuff -- William Albright and Vaughn Williams. Beautiful music, and the choral society did better than most amateur groups could even dream of. Not that it was perfect; there were some ... odd... places, but people in the audience never noticed.

And now... no rehearsals for at least a week! Amazing.

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