Alison Chabloz

Have you had your jab?

Here’s TMML Productions latest jab – at the jab, and at the obedient masses, living in hope that their jab will enable them to get back to “normal”.

A back-to-the-old-days live demo. Quality is now better than it was few years ago, although my means for such a production are limited to what you see in the video: my Yamaha arranger-keyboard, my 30-year old Shure SM58 (easy to see that my Sony headphones have lasted only a fraction of the time) and the Zoom H4n Pro device, partially seen, in the lower left-hand corner. This piece of kit is ideal for home-studio recording, as well as for capturing audio outside. It can be used as a condenser mic, as a four-track mixer and – my favourite setting – as an audio-interface, once connected to a laptop via USB.

For such a live demo, using the Zoom H4n Pro as my audio interface, it’s only possible to record one stereo track (left/vocals, right/keys). This track then has to be mixed and rendered to two separate mono tracks, and then re-mixed, in order to get a decent balance.

The musical inspiration (excepting the middle eight) – as well as the lyrics – comes once again from Gerard Menuhin, who proposed the famous blues number Work Song. For years, as a classroom music teacher, I used the Monty Alexander Live in Montreux version for music & movement exercises. My students were kept on their toes.

Meanwhile, Gerard and I are on a covid roll. Watch this space.