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[Alexandrie Gallup]

TheAMDA High School Summer Conservatory (On Campus) Pop Star: Recording Artist Program offersa dive into vocal performance styles from contemporary to jazz, gospel to acapella, blues, soul, country and R&B. Theprogram also provides students a focus on the styles most suitable to their specific vocal type to enhance theirstrengths. This session includes a professional recording studio experience to help students start them on the pathtoward becoming a vocal artist. In addition to this, the session ends with an opportunity to audition for AMDA Collegeand alternative AMDA High School Conservatory Programs as well as a final presentation for family and friends.

After a while, I was recording local bands and became really busy. From there I had a purpose-built extension constructed on the side of my house and had a nice little home studio at my house called X-Ray studio. By that time I had progressed to 8-track open reel (this would be the late 80s).

I recorded loads of Rockabilly & Psychobilly bands there, mainly because I had been in the Sharks, and back then no one really knew about this type of music. Most bands would go in a studio and the engineer would run a mile when he saw a slap bass. So I got loads of the type of work.

In 1991, you went freelance working in various studios producing bands from all over the world, then in 1999, you started Western Star. Has it always been predominantly rockabilly and psychobilly and do you run it as a one-man outfit?

Alan Wilson: Well firstly, Vince is a great bloke, and such fun to work with. He called me up as he wanted to do an album. He had so many of his old mates on that album that it was wonderful for me, a lot of my musical heroes from the history of British Rock n Roll.

This is a Rockabilly weekender that I have now staged 2 years running. Both years have sold out and been a massive success. We take over a farm in Somerset, near Weston Super Mare, put on the best line up of bands and DJs we can. We always have BBC radio broadcasting live from the event. So imagine 2 pasture fields full of around 600 drunken campers made up of rockabillies and psychobillies and even a few old teddy boys.

ROSS: We bought the parts. There were no recording consoles available. We had a broadcast console that was available to us. It was a stereo console because one channel was for cuing and the right was for the air. It was gorgeous. A guy had this wonderful board with the colored knobs and [it was] just what we wanted. And so we got it for a good price and I said, ah, we got the console.

The SpaceWire Recorder Mk2 is designed to support the validation and debugging of complete SpaceWire systems. It can be used to unobtrusively record and view large quantities of traffic travelling over up to four SpaceWire links. The visibility this provides greatly helps to confirm a SpaceWire system is operating correctly and aids debugging when problems are detected.

The Recorder Mk2 is inserted inline on SpaceWire links of interest. When recording is started, packets, time-codes and link errors are written to solid-state disk along with their time information. When recording is stopped, software indexes the recorded traffic to minimise access time, and then displays it in network and packet views ready to be inspected.

NOTE: The Recorder Mk2 supercedes the original SpaceWire Recorder. The Recorder Mk2 board now supports link speeds of up to 400 Mbit/s (previously 200 Mbit/s); a more compact and quiet chassis is provided; and the CPU board has been updated. Additionally, a much more capable software application has replaced the Traffic Viewer software, providing improved traffic visibility and enhanced functionality. Please note the new Recorder software application is compatible with the original SpaceWire Recorder and can be made available to download to existing Recorder users (please contact us for more information).

A Juilliard graduate and Dorothy DeLay proteg, Dukov was part of the 85-piece free-lance orchestra that recorded the latest Star Wars score at Los Angeles' Sony Scoring Stage from June through November in eleven double sessions, with composer John Williams conducting.

"It was just an honor to be a part of a franchise like Star Wars," Dukov told me over the phone last week. "And don't forget, I've played on huge franchises for other things, I've done the Indiana Jones movies, too, and all the Back to the Futures. But this is something really different. The buzz around the world about this is extraordinary."

"It was in London because (director) George Lucas never wanted to pay any kind of back-end royalty to anybody working on the film, and music is one of those things which has a contract which requires him to pay," Dukov said.

The current Star Wars film was directed by J.J. Abrams, and that is one of the reasons the film came to be scored in Los Angeles. "J.J.'s way of working require him to be here in L.A. with his whole team, and that worked in our favor," Dukov said. "Besides that, John (Williams) doesn't want to travel like that any more. So that's how it came to be here."

A lot of things have changed about scoring films, over the 40-plus years that the Star Wars movies have come to life. The biggest change? Technology. For musicians, it generally means not as many days of recording.

In years past, "if a director decided to make a change, everything had to be done by hand," Dukov said. "Without digital editing, they had to do it all on the film. It was much more time-consuming, so that's why we had so many more days of scoring. But things are done so efficiently now that the average film has maybe four days (of scoring)."

"They can make cuts and change things so easily," Dukov said. "It can drive a composer crazy! Everything on a film is scored to the millisecond, and the composer has written his score to make sure it goes with the cut that he's been given. Then if they change the cut, all of a sudden it needs new music. This is why Leonard Bernstein swore he would never do music for film, because he had to change the music to suit the film -- he wanted them to change the film to suit his music! He did do 'On the Waterfront,' and it was a great score. But certain composers are so committed to their musical vision, that they can't alter anything."

"The whole art of being a film composer is being able to make those cuts or compose in a modular sense, where you have certain melodies that can be cut up or expanded, made to last longer or shorter, you have the flexibility to do that," Dukov said. "John Williams is a total master at it, he's just unbelievable."

In the new Star Wars score, much of the old music remains, and as was always the case, "each character has his own motif," Dukov said. "He's written some new motifs for the new characters, and he's also made new music for certain situations."

"You don't have a lot of composers who do their own conducting," Dukov said. "A lot of times they have a separate conductor who is hired, and the composer is in the booth. (The composer) might not feel comfortable with his skill set as a conductor, or he wants to be listening. When you're conducting, you're not really able to listen at the same time because you're so caught up in what you're trying to convey to the orchestra that you're not hearing the actual performance.

"In this case, we did not see the film," Dukov said. "John Williams was watching it on his video monitor, on the podium, but they definitely did not want anybody to sneak a shot at anything in the film. They wanted complete control."

"When it's a very high-profile film, there's the danger of piracy or people leaking things before it's time -- because everybody has a video camera on their phone!" Dukov said. Typically, musicians did used to get a little peek of the film they were scoring. But Dukov remembers the first time that changed: "It was when we did Jurassic Park, with Spielberg, and they blacked the screen out so we couldn't see the effect of the dinosaurs. They wanted everybody to be completely shocked when they saw the film."

The sessions for Star Wars: the Force Awakens took place in Sony Scoring Stage (once MGM) in Los Angeles, which carries a great sense of history. "They've maintained the integrity of the room, it's almost identical to what it was back in the 1930's," Dukov said. "We're still playing off the same music stands! I always make it a point to show people the music stands -- they still have notches on the wood where people used to put their cigarettes while they were playing. And they have heavy bronze pedestals, with a big wooden back, so you can put the music on it. The lamps on top have about a two-foot, iron black hood, with the lights underneath it. This is all original, from the 1930's."

"The quality of the player right now is at the highest I've ever seen, especially in the strings," Dukov said. "In Los Angeles, we have this amazing ability -- speed. We can do things in half the time of most places. We adapt incredibly well to whatever it is the composer's asking for, and it's just an immediate thing. We just know how to do it. It's just an acquired skill, but we definitely do it well here."

"In terms of film music, there are trends. Back in the '40s and '50s, there were very sweeping, wonderful melodies with big solos in the stringed instruments, and they wanted a lot of vibrato. Then in the early '80s the synthesizer took over, and there were hardly any films with this big stuff in it. I mean, you can spot an '80s film in a second! In '85 the trend started coming back to big orchestras and sweeping stuff, but a little more sterile. The younger composers, like (the late) James Horner, who is one of my favorite composers -- he didn't favor the big, emotional sweeping of the strings, and all the vibrato. He wrote a great line, but he always told us, don't over-vibrate, cut back on that, no portamenti whatsoever. It got kind of sterile -- it sounds beautiful, but it's missing something. But that was the trend, and so everybody started following that. It's not bad. But it's really nice when we get to play with composers like John Williams, who wants us to play out and just do what we do. We're all thoroughbreds and we need to run, you know? And that's great, when you get let loose like that."

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