Sunday Feast Kirtan

Here's a recording of Radha-ramana-hari from last night.

A few of things about this recording:

1. The main vocal is a bit distorted. This is because I used an extreme microphone technique, super close to the mic. I did this because for the two preceding kirtans I was manning the desk (as you can see from the video above). When it came my turn to sing I was in a different position and it sounded as though my voice wasn't coming through the PA. I had set up a foldback monitor (the Roland Street Cube) - but since things were running late (let me just add that I was personally on time) there was no time to soundcheck. In fact my voice was coming through at a normal volume, and my close miking caused the signal to clip.

2. The first part of the kirtan kicks up quite a few bpm when the tabla comes in. We'll need to practice this for the July 3 gig at Fusion, including some time with a metronome for me, I think. I am also going to separate the two melodies, so the first Hare Krishna kirtan will get a part C and maybe D, and Radha-ramana-hari stays as it is with Parts A (Radha-ramana-haribol), B (Sri Krishna Govinda...), C (Hare Krishna low), D (Hare Krishna high), and E (Sri Krishna Govinda high).

3. Without the sound check I wasn't able to get things set up nicely, but I think the two things that I could have done to make the sound better would have been to EQ the room using a graphic equalizer on the whole mix, and move the mixing station further back. Doing that will require a multicore - I'm going to look into that soon.

• Radha-ramana-hari (mp3, 26MB, 18:53)