Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
2011-08-06
Richmond Theatre, Richmond, UK

SP-BMC-2 -> Battery Box (no brand) -> CDWave -> Soundtrack Pro (See Notes) -> xAct -> You

First Set:
1. Intro banter
2. Dr. Jazz
3. Born to be Wild
4. Anarchy in the UK
5. Hot Tamales
6. Vertigo
7. Life on Mars Medley
8. Freak Out
9. Danse Macabre
10. Into the Night Life
11. Pinball Wizard

Second Set:
12. Theme From How The West Was Won
13. The Model
14. Shaft
15. Crazy
16. Teenage Dirtbag
17. Limehouse Blues
18. Slave to the Rhythm
19. Trouble
20. Back in Black

Encore:
21. Encore intro banter
22. Wuthering Heights
23. Leaning on a Lamppost

Cut: Entry applause, applause between second set and encore (71 seconds), end applause

Sometimes, life gets away from us. Such is the case with this recording - many of you who've downloaded my prior releases know that I'm a big fan of quick turnarounds and not sitting on things whenever possible. But sometimes, we move halfway around the world and get busy with work and all that. So, this one sat around on the hard drive for a while and I'm just getting it out.

Then there's the fact that getting this into shape was a nightmare - and it's probably not still quite there.

For those who are unaware, you basically have three highly distinct levels during a UOGB show - banter, which is very quiet, music, which has 2x as many mics helping to capture sound from the stage, and crowd noise which easily doubles the decibels of what's coming off the stage even in a theatre setting with a polite audience.

The end result? Three sets of normalisation and sound level tweaks on a track-by-track basis - a base normalise to RMS -12 (or in a couple rare cases, -10 or -8), turning down the audience a couple db (between -2 and -4dB both before and after track normalisation), and then trying to normalise the incredibly quiet stage banter up to a level (-8 Peak) where you can hear it without totally destroying fidelity from artificing. If quality is your sole priority, I'd cut everything that isn't music. You'd lose some funny stuff, but your ears will likely thank you. Meanwhile, I trimmed about a minute and a quarter of applause from between the second set and the encore just to save my ears while listening plus the entry applause at the starts of the first and second sets. If anybody *really* wants the original, unedited master, I'll FLAC it up and send it along for retracking/remastering.

Minor technical annoyances aside, this is a fun gig and a pretty solid lineup of their standards and while not as exciting as the Proms concert, one that's just as professional and quintessentially British. If you've never heard the UOGB before, you could certainly find somewhere worse to start listening. You can also see the Ukes at any number of stops on their never-ending tours around the UK, Germany, Scandinavia, and increasingly the USA. They also have a new DVD out, so support the group and enjoy!