Back in Montréal Playing Feedback Sax!

After spending the 23/24 academic year teaching at the College of the North Atlantic, I am now working at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music as a postdoctoral scholar. While I will miss being in the classroom teaching full time, I am happy to be digging into research-creation.

My previous blog post outlined my proposed work at McGill, but after getting settled over the course of three weeks, the path my research will take is beginning to crystallize. I am working between four complimentary spaces: the Digital Composition Studios (DCS); the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT); the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL); and my personal studio space.

As it looks now, I will be practicing, composing, and recording in my studio and the DCS. IDMIL is a lab filled with many highly driven, knowledgable academics with a wide variety of backgrounds, and I am excited to be working with collaborators already. CIRMMT is where I will be doing high quality documentation and acoustic experiments, the latter of which will be beginning soon.

While this research is ramping up, I am doing lots of improvising with my feedback saxophone system and simultaneously learning how to use several new microphones I have invested in.

I had high hopes for the sonic possibilities the intraMic could bring to my feedback system. This highly specialized microphone sits inside of the neck of the saxophone, and because of where it is, I thought it would give me lots of new feedback notes. I had used it at a couple of private gigs in St. John's in August and it sounded amazing, but upon plugging it into my rig here in Montreal it failed to yield any new feedback tones.

In recording feedback improvisations, however, it has worked really well as an isolated, "dry" microphone that barely picks up any of the feedback sound at all. This is despite feedback sound blasting directly out of my amp into the bell of my horn! This isolation is the true selling point of this amazing microphone and I am glad to have it for my work at McGill.

In the DCS, I was working on microphone positioning, trying to get a balanced sound between the feedback from the amp and the acoustic sound of the saxophone. I was fairly successful with the studio's AKG C 414, which I then repeated with my TE CM-15. Teenage Engineering get memed on pretty hard, but considering the traveling I'll be doing, as well as the tight spaces I find myself in, it seemed to be the right choice and so far I'm very impressed.

A big part of this research is documenting the creative process, which I plan to do regularly on instagram, with longer (but less regular) posts here. My most recent post is an expert from an improv I'm working on! Lots of tweaks to be made in the documentation process (and maybe more gear to learn and/or buy), but I'll post as regularly as I can. Thanks for reading, more to come.