March Meeting Notice

 

March 2000 Meeting Notice



 Subject:  Tour of the UCSC Music Center  
 Speaker:  Peter Elsea, Director Electronic
      Music Studios, UCSC 
 Place:  UCSC,
      Santa Cruz, CA 
 Time and Date:  March 21st, 7:30 PM (refreshments at 7:00 PM)

Tour of the University of California at Santa Cruz Music Center

The UCSC music center has a variety of facilities:

Foremost is the recital hall. This is a 400 seat auditorium designed by Ron McKay. One demostrable feature is adjustable reverb time that works. The hall is designed to offer an excellent classroom experience, flexible high quality sound reinforcement for music when needed, and multichannel sound diffusion for electronic music presentations. This is set up so that sound techs are seldom required. When used for classes, the teacher has full control of the audio and video systems from a box onstage. For typical SR, the operator pushes a button in the sound booth to get control at his board (When the system is shut down, control reverts to the stage if the teaching box is set up. That way an instructor never finds himself shut out of the system in the morning.) There is a recording facility with a Mackie board, ADAT MDMs, Pro Tools mix/24.

The classrooms and teaching studios are equipped with high fidelity playback systems with Denon electronics and Paradigm speakers. The electronic music studios are in an isolated wing of the building. There are 5 studios: A large classroom/studio with extreme isolation and neutral acoustics. The front of the room is taken up by a compositon workstation that includes a 16 channel mixer, 8 tracks of ADAT, CD, DAT, and cassette recorders, a stack of analog processing gear, a Mac running Sound Designer, and whatever synthesis equipment (modular analog or MIDI) is appropraite for the current course. Just off the classroom is a recording control room with Mackie digital board, 16 tracks of ADAT and a window into the classroom. All students in the electronic music classes get at least 8 hours a week of personal lab time- for the main sequence of courses, half of the 25 students use the classroom, half use a small studio that has identical equipment.

After students spend a year in the basic classes, they continue their studies in electronic music workshop. Some of these work in the recording room, and there is a dedicated room for workshop composition. This is a fairly large room with three workstations. Two workstations are elaborate MIDI setups, with G3 Macs running standard software as well as experimental things like Max and Csound. One of the workstations is set up for SMPTE soundtrack work with ProTools or a Darwin HDR. The third workstation is called "Analog Heaven"- it's three racks of classic gear such as spring reverbs and analog delay lines to let the students get a feel for the old days. The graduate studio is still being defined. It curently has a MIDI workstation, a good Soundcraft console, a G3 running ProTools as well as a variety of sound generation programs such as Max MSP. There is also a Kyma DSP Synthesis system.

Peter Elsea received his B.M. (72), and M.A.(74) from The University of Iowa, where he studied composition with Peter Todd Lewis and Music Technology with Lowell Cross. He served as Studio technician and instructor in the U of I Electronic Music Studios from 1974 to 1980. Since 1980 he has been Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has developed a unique and well respected curriculum in music technology. He has published articles in Electronic Musician and Mix Magazines and authored instruction manuals for music software.. He is a consultant to various music software and instrument companies and author of the "Lobject" extensions to the interactive composition program Max. He is currently active in bringing the fruits of music technology to blind musicians.


Directions

click here for a map

From anywhere other than Santa Cruz - Take Highway 17 south to Route 1 north to Santa Cruz. Once you're in Santa Cruz on Route 1 north, follow the highway as it becomes Mission Street through town. Then turn right on Bay Street and follow it to the campus entrance. From UCSC's main entrance at Bay and High Streets, drive 1.1 miles north on Empire Grade Road to the west entrance at Heller Drive. Turn right. Drive up the hill past four stop signs. Turn right just after the fourth stop sign onto Meyer Drive. Turn left at the second stop sign. The Music Center Recital Hall is on the right and parking is on the left. Handicap parking is available directly in front of the Music Center Recital Hall.