HarmoniumBlog

Harmonium is holding a fundraiser and you can bid on nearly 150 different items right now. Visit Harmonium’s auction page to view the items and place your bid. Some items will be auctioned online only, but the bidding for many of them will continue at Harmonium’s live event on February 6, 2010. Read about this event in an article published by the Chatham Borough News.

Check out the story that the Daily Record (a local Morristown, NJ newspaper) recently ran about our director, Dr. Anne Matlack.

first church warmup

Warming up at our first tour venue, a cathedral in Madrid Spain. You can experience the acoustics in the space and the accommodating nature of our host.

murray introduction to anns at sendoff

Audio MP3 of Murray introducing Dr. Anne, at the Harmonium Spain Portugal tour end of tour party.

STE-anneatsendoff

Audio MP3 of Dr. Anne speaking at the Spain Portugal end of tour party send-off.

First, click on the little music note icon above the box where you type in the text of your message.

Next, depending on where the mp3 is located, click on

- “From computer” if it is on your computer.  Then click on “Select Files” and search to the file you want.  Click once on the file name then click “Open”. Wait for it to upload, then click on “Insert into Post” and you are done.

- “From URL” if the file is at a known place on the Internet.  Type in the URL and a title, then click on “Insert into Post”.  Voila.

- “Media Library” if the file has been previously uploaded to the Harmonium blog.  Select the item you want, click on “Show” next to that item, add or modify the title, caption and description as desired, then click on “Insert into Post”.  That’s it.

Once you publish your post, the title of the audio clip should appear with a little arrow to its left.  Clicking on the arrow will start and stop the audio playing.  It may take several seconds before you hear anything, while the file is being loaded.  If you click on the file name instead of the arrow, the file will be directed to whatever audio player (if any) is set up on the computer you are using.

Here is an example: Old Phone Bell Ring

Just above the box where you enter your text, there are four small icons.  Click on the first to insert a photo, the second for a video and the third for an audio. You can then select whether you want to upload from your computer, from a URL somewhere on the web or from the Media Library, which is a collection of stuff that others have uploaded to this blog.

This is good for one or two pictures in the blog format.  If you want to upload a whole bunch of photos to share with the group, a better way to do it would be to go to http://www.harmonium.org/Gallery2 and store them there.

I have added a video player (see the piano players below) that can be included in your post by typing the URL of the video in plain text in your message, except with the “http” prefix changed to “httpv”.  When you publish the entry, the URL will automatically be replaced by the video player.

I am looking around for a good audio widget and will let you know how to use that once I decide on one.

Hi Harmonii,

I made it home yesterday afternoon to sunny CO, after an overnight in rainy Boston. Warren and I had a glass of wine on the deck and watched a bald eagle catching the thermals just above us. A welcome home treat, we see them often enough along the river but very rarely where we live.

Thank you all again for welcoming me “home.” It was truly wonderful–the best of my three Harmonium trips. I’m looking forward to pictures, which, by the way, I’m trying to figure out how to put up here. John?

Hugs to all, Val

The tour had good venues and audience.  The recordings came out much better than expected from a portable recording device. You can clearly hear the acoustic properties of the different venues.

The music was recorded using a Zoom H4N, pocketable unit with 2 microphones on top that can be set for either a 90 or 120 degree angle. For our purposes for use on tours or gigs or for Anne’s kids,  it’s like a point and shoot recording studio.  It defaults to CD quality. You turn it on, push record, set the recording level, and press play. You don’t have to worry about power supply, since you can get up to 11 hours of recording on a good pair of AA batteries. Since the microphones are attached, you don’t have to worry about wires to the mics. Recording time isn’t a problem, since the majority of the tour fit on a 4GB sd chip that costs $20.00.

It has a lot of other capabilities such as the use of external microphones and 4 track recording.

Recording was made possible by Skipp, Peter Moody and Jabez. Skipp recommended models of portable recorders for us to choose from and lent us a telescoping microphone pole.  We used black duct tape to hold Skipp’s pole on top of a photography tripod that belongs to Jabez. That got the H4N recorder up 10 or more feet in the air. Yes, we should get an easy to use mic stand.

Peter Moody, Andy’s son, managed the recording process for all of the concerts, which made the recording possible.

Jabez is familiar with the use of Wavepad, a free software program that we can use to separate each piece of music and, cut out the applause and normalize the output line level. He also edited and uploaded to the net the few things we have the rights to.
We have good raw material for a tour CD.  Anne has offered to select which performances to use on our tour recording once she has the next season planned and has time to do it.

We also recorded the enjoyable “end of tour party send off” coordinated by Ben, and with awesome writing and performance by Rachel, Catherine and Linda Clark, Murray, Val, tour moms’ Beth and Susanna, with by Dr. Anne’s synopsis of Hamonium’s Spain-Portugal concert tour experience.