Ray Man Music and the Yangqin

The day after the Podcaster Masterclass I did another class at the Roundhouse called an “Intro to Speech Radio”.

After discussing a few audio clips that were played to us, we were handed some Olympus dictaphones set an exercise to tell a story through sounds found in the area.

So strolling around Chalk Farm road, I thought I’d go into this interesting instrument shop called Ray Man. It appeared to be a shop run by several generations of a Chinese family. Here’s the piece I recorded:

This is a picture of the instrument, the Yang Qin (which I misheard as a Jiang Qin… whoops).

I asked the guy who played for me a few questions about the instrument for my own record:

I had to do a bit of negotiating with the woman who appeared to be running the shop since they have a store policy that prohibits the recording of musical instruments. She let me record once I got headed letter from the Roundhouse stating that I was on a course. She was quite interested in the dictaphone that I was using (the Olympus LS-11 Linear PCM Recorder – which I personally think is fantastic), so I did I quick interview with her so that she could hear the quality of the recordings it made.

 

So another great class at the Roundhouse. Listening to it again I probably should have tried to make it shorter and reduced the volume of the voiceover, but like the Podcast Masterclass, there was a real joy in creating something against the clock in a rush. Hopefully I will do more of these short pieces on local shops in the future.