Si Bheag Si Mhor - harp tune by Carolan played by Mark Harmer
2 years ago
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1. Si Bheag Si Mhor - harp tune by Carolan played by …
2 years ago
This piece is inspired by the Irish legend of two mountains, small and large ( Sí Bheag and Sí Mhór). According to the legend, two tribes who lived there fought a battle to the death. The spirits who lived in the place continue to fight the battle.
I was inspired to play this in a local wood full of bluebells, which for two weeks of the year carpet the forest floor in a magical haze of blue. Close-up, the bell-like flowers also inspired the bell sounds in my arrangement. I like the way the bluebells are only temporary - just like hearing a piece of music.
I thought it was a great place to record this tune and I hope you like it. My favourite shot is the very last one, with the harp standing in the middle distance amongst all the different colours of the woods. It really was like that!
This was recorded in SD (but don't let that put you off watching it!) as a way of getting used to the camera before recording a DVD project for Gloucestershire on sharing best practice encouraging children to be musical. Before the shoot we created a preset for the Canon which we liked, and then shot this as a way of checking out all the location shooting issues before using it in a preschool environment. I love this camera and it works really well - thinking of getting a 35mm adaptor for it having seen Philip Bloom's inspiring work with various adaptors.
As a musician and (in another life) sound recordist with the BBC for many, many years, I would say audio is fantastically important - both the acquisition and editing of it. Like everything it has to be so good as to be unnoticeable, or noticeable for the right reasons. While I'm not at that stage with the pictures, I do love the way it's possible to make my harp playing available to a wider audience, and that's made some amazing musical connections for me.
Technical notes:
Harp: Pilgrim gut-string harp
Camera: Canon XHA1 (recorded in SD PAL WS)
Sound: 2 x Neumann KM184
Editing: Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition
Plugins: Magic Bullet Look Suite
I discovered Sony Vegas after editing this - and wish I'd used it as Sony Vegas has better multicamera editing facilities than Premiere Pro, which limits you to four cameras at once. Sony Vegas allows you a much higher number (we had 11 complete or partial takes to choose from and you can sync them all up to get a rough-cut and then go back and adjust the edits afterwards).
I was inspired to play this in a local wood full of bluebells, which for two weeks of the year carpet the forest floor in a magical haze of blue. Close-up, the bell-like flowers also inspired the bell sounds in my arrangement. I like the way the bluebells are only temporary - just like hearing a piece of music.
I thought it was a great place to record this tune and I hope you like it. My favourite shot is the very last one, with the harp standing in the middle distance amongst all the different colours of the woods. It really was like that!
This was recorded in SD (but don't let that put you off watching it!) as a way of getting used to the camera before recording a DVD project for Gloucestershire on sharing best practice encouraging children to be musical. Before the shoot we created a preset for the Canon which we liked, and then shot this as a way of checking out all the location shooting issues before using it in a preschool environment. I love this camera and it works really well - thinking of getting a 35mm adaptor for it having seen Philip Bloom's inspiring work with various adaptors.
As a musician and (in another life) sound recordist with the BBC for many, many years, I would say audio is fantastically important - both the acquisition and editing of it. Like everything it has to be so good as to be unnoticeable, or noticeable for the right reasons. While I'm not at that stage with the pictures, I do love the way it's possible to make my harp playing available to a wider audience, and that's made some amazing musical connections for me.
Technical notes:
Harp: Pilgrim gut-string harp
Camera: Canon XHA1 (recorded in SD PAL WS)
Sound: 2 x Neumann KM184
Editing: Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition
Plugins: Magic Bullet Look Suite
I discovered Sony Vegas after editing this - and wish I'd used it as Sony Vegas has better multicamera editing facilities than Premiere Pro, which limits you to four cameras at once. Sony Vegas allows you a much higher number (we had 11 complete or partial takes to choose from and you can sync them all up to get a rough-cut and then go back and adjust the edits afterwards).
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Mark HarmerPerformance / arrangement / editing / sound
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Where did you put the Neumanns? I was very impressed with the sound pickup on the harp--clean and rich. I've got a stereo pair of KM184s and they're my go-to mics for lots of music stuff I do. Since they never appeared in-frame, I'm guessing you had them down low somewhere, down in the bluebells?
I agree - the Neumanns are great mics to use on the harp. I've tried many others but you don't get the clean sound you commented on. For this particular recording I actually recorded the harp sound the previous evening (with the mics about six inches from the bottom of the E string in the bass - third string up from bottom - pointing upwards towards the middle of the harp). Although you'd think this would give you too much bass, actually the top strings really "cut through" the sound). It was a stereo pair and for this recording I used no eq or noise reduction - it's absoultely as recorded. I then played along with my arrangement when we did the filming. Actually, we could have recorded the sound in the woods as it had the most amazing series of subtle echoes - not at all a "dry" sound as some people imagine. But there was distant traffic etc so we couldn't have made such a nice sound. I added a bit of the wood atmos afterwards, recorded on a return visit a few hours later when the traffic was much quieter.