Nordlig Vinter Solo Suite @ NIME2013

10 Jun '13

I performed my solo suite from Nordlig Vinter recently at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference at KAIST in Daejeon, Korea. This was a bit of a test for me as I’ve been doing a lot of revisions to this piece and wanted to use the iRig Pre that I bought recently with the Nordlig Vinter iPhone app so I had been doing a bit of preparation in the week before the performance.

The final setup consisted of:

• vibraphone
• iPhone with Nordlig Vinter app
• iRig Pre
• short microphone cable
• Behringer C2 microphone

(all of which fit into a small stick bag with my mallets)

On stage, I connected the 3.5mm output from the iPhone to the PA system and asked for a pair of microphones to amplify the vibes sound.

The Behringer microphone is one of a pair and probably the cheapest real condenser mic available. The iPhone app uses the signal from this mic to trigger some sounds throughout the piece and also applies a bit of reverb - so it’s not important to have a great mic.

The conference organisers had promised that they would find a vibraphone for me to play but I was still relieved when I had a chance to see that it was a good instrument! Only had to tighten up a few loose bolts to get it working perfectly!

The photos above are of my setup in a practice room and one of me performing courtesy of Chi-Hsia. Thanks for having me NIME and KAIST!

Overall this was exactly the kind of gig that I had in mind when writing this piece. The vibraphone was borrowed and I could only use velcro straps to attach the mic, preamp, and iPhone. We had a bit of a soundcheck but nothing significant and it was all through an interpreter and there was only a few minutes of setup time before performing. The whole system worked perfectly and (I hope) sounded good!

Here’s a video of me practicing the piece at ANU just before I left for the conference…