I like this section, from a seven minute recording in a relatively quiet New York Subway station, because of the quality that the voices and environmental sounds take on in the very reflective surroundings. Tile, cement, glass, and metal surfaces cause the sound waves to reverberate back and forth in a confined yet expansive maze.
Quiet Station
Here’s another example of Rhodes recorded during our set at Nublu. It’s interesting for me to hear these clips unprocessed and without the other instrumentation, not to mention the excessive crowd noise in the room. During the performance, when I record these clips, I’m usually running the Rhodes through various amounts of amp modeling, eq, compression, delay, and sometimes reverb or filtering. There’s often other loops playing while I record as well as live drums, bass and laptop added by Graham and Nils as you can hear in Segment of Recording from Nublu.
More Nublu Rhodes
One of the nice things about playing at Nublu is the fact that they have a Rhodes in their backline. I don’t know very many clubs that do, and most of the time, if they do they are in disrepair. Instruments in backlines suffer a lot of abuse. The Rhodes is not a delicate instrument but with heavy use certain things break. Most commonly the tines. So I went to the club early just to check on the Rhodes and offer to repair it if needed.
In fact, two tines in the upper register were broken, but fortunately Nublu had a “parts” Rhodes in the basement that had both of the broken tines intact. I quickly replaced the tines and made a few other minor adjustments and the vintage keyboard was ready for an evening of music. Here’s a clip that I created while improvising during our second set to give you an idea what shape the Rhodes was in.
Nublu Rhodes Loop
I captured the sound a very old looking group of subway cars going by at the Battery Park City, Chambers Street station. They had an aging deep red paint job and looked as though they were full of some sort of cargo as they flew past.
Old Train in Subway
I came across this busker in a Times Square subway station surrounded by several battery powered dolls gyrating to his music. Fortunately I had my Sony PCM-D50 along to capture a few minutes of his performance, and a few dollars for his tip bucket. The scene was surreal and difficult to describe, but enchanting never-the-less.
He was an older gentleman wearing an over sized beige trench coat hunched over a Yamaha electric organ playing an uptempo rendition of La Vie En Rose. The dolls were similar to those annoying dancing Santas, but among them there was a gyrating saxophone player and a creepy, blond, female, dancing doll with “sound, moving head, hands and buttocks”, as described on the web and shown here.
Battery Powered Dancing Dolls