My Clarinet’s Splash of Colour

I recently replaced my 20+ year old clarinet ligature; you can see it give my clarinet a splash of colour in my latest YouTube upload. I didn’t need to replace it, because despite the leather gradually deteriorating, it’s not as if there was going to be a catastrophic failure.

It’s replacement is a Bambú Nova, which won out over my failed attempts to use a Silverstein original T-Frame. Truth be told, the only reason I gave the Silverstein ligature a thought at all was because of a mix up at my local music store, which instead of bringing in just a Silverstein OmniCap, they brought in a dual pack that contained the cap and ligature. The problem? The ligature was too small (it was size small, perhaps for an Eb clarinet or maybe a narrow metal sax mouthpiece).

I didn’t realise that at the time because I didn’t have my clarinet with me. I paid the dollars, took it home, it didn’t fit, nuts, waited for a replacement, the replacement medium T-frame arrived, I tried it out at the store.

It was terrible.

I’ve never experienced such a fidgety ligature. Tightening the screw seemed to make the cords irregularly tighten, and good luck keeping those metal bars in the correct place on the mouthpiece while doing so. I’m sure after many hours it would somewhat mold to shape, but I didn’t have the patience for that and could foresee me becoming annoyed with the purchase. Silverstein’s T-Frame was out (there was no way I was going to buy their way more expensive A-frame), and the Bambú Nova was in. The music store had one in blue.

I bought it, plus an OmniCap.

I’d previously bought a black Bambú Nova for my alto saxophone, which replaced a classic/basic two-screw metal ligature. It was functional and did the job. One screws is certainly more convenient than two, but if there’s one thing these fancy cord/weave type ligatures aren’t so great on, it’s staying in place when you’re putting the mouthpiece on and off. Using cork grease to help the mouthpiece slide on and off with less force will only take you so far.

That’s a level of inconvenience I can put up with though.

I’m not here to pour cold water over Silverstein’s ligatures, but I’m not one that can hear the difference between a “normal” ligature and a super expensive one. I’d been using a stock standard leather one on my clarinet for eons, and I’m taking a wild guess that it deadens the sound or something? I’m not sure exactly. And for my saxophone, the metal one I think I’ve always had, and the main reason I replaced it was curiosity, or just a change. I didn’t hear a difference between the basic metal and the Nova.

There are way too many other factors that are going to make you sound good, bad or average; there’s no way a Silverstein ESTRO Clarinet Ligature – Gen. 5 is going to offset the tone quality you can max out with on an average reed. These ligatures are definitely for the audiophiles, and despite me having a super picky ear for how I want my clarinet to ideal sound like (and feel/respond etc), I just can’t hear the difference between a basic leather mouthpiece and a piece of bling hold my reed on.

And that may be the crux of it really. The Silverstein ligatures are offering a level of bling, and at the risk of belittling the R&D they’ve put in, it has the vibe of choosing a gold plated iPhone case over a stock one.

Yet here I am commenting on the splash of colour my awesome blue ligature gives, contrasting with the stained black wood of a clarinet.

In praise of Silverstein though, I love their OmniCaps. Fancy ligatures don’t allow traditional mouthpiece covers to fit, and the OmniCaps work amazingly well. Silverstein also make a very good mouthpiece cushion they market as the OmniPatch. When you have one top tooth a little bit longer than the other, you need these cushions, and theirs are one of the more resilient.

I’ve never really had a serious issue with my bottom teeth destroying the inside of my bottom lip, so I have no need of an OmniGuard (it looks like a rugby mouth guard, but for you bottom teeth), and I don’t care enough about germs and mold to buy their OmniClean.

Back to Bambú, my music store threw in one of their neckstraps when I bought a clarinet.

There you go, a gear review, which I likely won’t make a habit of turning into YouTube videos, despite that unboxing video I did.

No. 33 from 50 Classical Studies for Clarinet

In August a YouTube commenter requested the Carl Baermann piece that appears as No. 33 in Pamela Weston’s 50 Classical Studies for Clarinet.

Unfortunately not only did this coincide with a lot of things going on (life is busy), the piece is actually hard. I wanted to make a good fist of it so I’d been practising it on and off since August but couldn’t ace it in front of the camera.

It didn’t help that I also had a lot of false starts. I borrow my sister’s DSLR camera, so we she needs it back, sometimes I forget to put auto-focus back on. Two hours of recording later, what seemed okay on the the tiny camera screen is actually a blurry mess at 1080p. Then there’s Audacity having its hissy-fits when, despite the waveform looking like it’s recording properly, is full of artifacts. Restart it and it’s fine. Go figure. If there was an opensource project I should get involved in, it’s to fix Audacity’s horrendous hotplugging issues on Mac. The Audacity devs are probably get sick of “that guy with the Max Pro and Motu M4 who sends all the automated crash reports”.

So what made it hard? Despite being in a regular B minor, the piece has just enough twists and turns to find deficiencies in one’s technique. I’ve practiced it slow to a metronome a lot, but once you’re in front of a camera with a thumb, wrist and embouchure that’s giving way the more takes you do, the more things falls apart. The only thing to do is try again later. The perfectionist bogey man doesn’t take kindly to performance music. Miss a note, re-take. The triplets are uneven, re-take. Wild high notes, random squeak, note didn’t sound… all re-takes.

Regardless, the Baermann piece is fun to play, so it’s not like it was a chore to practice over and over and over again. At some point though, you want to ship it and move on to the next project, despite not being 100% happy with the recording. Like I said before, despite being very much a B-minor piece, there is just enough passing note chromaticism and interesting articulation to make it really enjoyable to play, and there’s also a few sections that are open to interpretation, or, to put it another way, force you think of musical solutions to deal with “problems”. What are those? Well, perhaps watch the video and find out.

No. 38 from the Progressive Studies for Clarinet book 3

It’s been a while, but I finally released another YouTube video. It’s getting more difficult to find time to do them, but I always find releasing them a good sense of achievement.

Admittedly I’ve got a list of videos to do, including my own clarinet adaption of Stay, and this piece that someone requested ages ago, but I’ve had to spend a lot of time practising. Performing in front of the camera has pressure involved, because you want to make a good showing and not have a lot of mistakes. That’s part of the reason for such a slow down in videos.

Truth be told, I recorded for three videos, including the aforementioned difficult piece, then realised the camera was on manual focus and therefore had to throw it all away and start again (I was not happy). The only one I re-recorded so far was No. 38 from the Progressive Studies for Clarinet book 2 by Chris Allen. ABRSM published book are nice and cheap, and this is a great book that explores non standard time signatures and sense of pulse. The pieces themselves are pretty fun to play, albeit a jumble of notes to a beginner. That’s where the teacher comes in.

No. 38 is a fun 8/8 time piece, quirky, with the occasional nice fat low note to blast out. It has a lot of educational value in the way the note groupings define the rhythmic feel, and just enough accidentals to keep you on your toes.

With this video I finally got to use my Sennheiser MKE600 for the dialog (it’s above my head out of shot). It makes it more time consuming to mix all the audio together, but it’s good to have more tools to make a better product. Now I just have to learn how to use DaVinci Resolves tools to actually do so.

Video Updates

Blink and time disappears, so here’s a little summary of the four videos I added to my Coded Notes YouTube channel.

First was a piss-take on the “reacts” and “unboxing” type videos. The guys at work suggested I make something a bit more click-bait-y, so I took the opportunity to try out a Légère reed for the first time, on camera. I’m generally lazy with my one-take-videos but this time I threw in some b-roll footage to at least attempt to level up my videos.

In short, the Légère reeds are okay, I guess. They certainly have their limitations, which may be worth a different blog post to try and explain.

Abount a month later, I figured it was time to keep the engine running and made a video for one of my students who’d been struggling to motivate himself to practice. Unfortunately he’s plagued by the “Fortnite curse”, where Fornite could be a placeholder for anything computer or internet related that kids spend far too much time doing now. Sure, I played plenty of games as a kid, but it seems to be on a completely different level now.

The idea was that I could potentially inspire some action by being the “cool teacher with a YouTube channel”, so I made video of his homework, just for him. The result was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Did it work? Maybe. I think a whole host of different nudges are getting William to play more now.

Next up was Roundabout Sax from the Sixty for Sax book, which I can’t recommend enough. It’s inexpensive and full of progressively difficult, but interesting pieces. Someone requested this piece in the comments section of another one of my videos, so I obliged. Perhaps it was the compound quadruple time that was proving challenging for this person, or perhaps they just needed some reassurance they were playing it right.

Notice at this point I’ve been getting lazy with making thumbnails.

Finally in this little batch of videos is Singing Sax from the Sixty for Sax book. I wanted to try out some microphones I was borrowing, so I picked a piece that I hadn’t yet done, is reasonably short, and highly likely to be played by students. In this video a had a couple of Rode M5 pencil mics, one above for voice and another for the instrument. The goal was to try and better control the dialog levels against that of the instrument, because some feedback was suggesting that despite my best efforts, the voice levels were not high enough. It was suggested that a two mic setup would be the best way to address this.

Audio editing is another project in itself, and projects are not something I’m short of, but it would be great to get better audio for my videos. And lighting? Ha! Did you see the mic stand shadow?

The main problem with a two mic setup is that editing in Da Vinci Resolve becomes a lot harder. I’m having to constantly adjust audio track levels depending on whether I’m speaking or playing. I’m sure there must be ways to streamline the workflow; more things to learn.

I made a recording of another piece, this time for clarinet, which uses a Sennheiser ME-66 for the voice and a Rode M5 for the instrument, but I haven’t attempted to edit that yet. Perhaps I’ll write about that later.

No. 26 Tarantella by Carl Baermann from 50 Classical Studies for Clarinet

Another request, so another bang-it-out-on-a-Sunday effort.

Someone on YouTube spotted my No. 25 from Pamela Weston’s 50 Classical Studies for Clarinet and requested no. 26. This one is Carl Baermann’s Tarantella, which is a classic example of a piece best played fast, but thankfully fits under the fingers nicely enough to allow one to do so. Being in B minor, it’s very accessible to students and demonstrates that if you’re good at a scale and its arpeggio, you get to reap the rewards in playing such a piece.

I’ll admit that it took a few attempts not to butcher any notes on the play through. That was on top of the fact it took a while to realise the camera’s SD card had run out of space! Rookie mistake.

No, I’m not sponsored by Triumph, but I’m not above plugging my favourite motorcycle brand. Give me a call guys…

No. 9 from Rubank Saxophone Advanced vol. 1

I got a request!

I hadn’t made a video since my Killing In the Name for solo saxophone video back in January, and given my DevOps scrambling that I had to do for my Chartopia side project, my attention has definitely not been on video making.

But last Saturday I got a request for a No. 9 by Fodor in the Rubank sax book; challenge accepted. This was the kick I needed; I blasted the sucker out, edited it, then threw it online sans a fancy thumbnail. The requester seemed happy enough. Not a Ko-fi donation level of thanks, but I’ll take the thanks-comment-acknowledgement.

It was a strange piece to request, because it’s an old-school classical piece, but perhaps there was something oddly confusing about it, or perhaps the requester just needed some assurance that they were on the right track. Regardless, I did the play through, explained away a few of the counting things and showed why an F major scale would be a wise thing to practise, and voila, I finally made another contribution to the bottomless pit of YouTube. I got a few views out of it.

At least I got to use my fancy gear again, and also experiment with Audacity’s compression settings which I still not seem to get quite right. I still fail at lighting.

Killing In the Name for solo alto saxophone

For some reason, I’ve had in my head that I must write a solo arrangement of Rage Against the Machine’s Killing In the Name. It’s a completely inappropriate piece for a solo wind instrument given that it’s somewhat dependent upon percussive guitar, a whammy pedal for the guitar solo, and a vocal line that is almost spoken, but I had a hunch it could be done.

There’s a piece in the Sixty for Sax book called Sax Valsant, and it has this neat trick of maintaining what seems like a bass line and a treble line. The music doesn’t explicitly tell you this, but I can see it, and making the piece sound good relies on the player being able to detach these parts out with a mixture of dynamics and shape.

In short, Sax Valsant is two parts rolled into one, and it works. Still difficult for the students, but straightforward for myself, so it’s good teaching material.

This is what I figured could be done with Killing In the Name, a piece that seems to have 2-3 distinct lines to it; bass, rhythmic guitar and vocals. I had to figure out how to get enough bass notes into the music to “ground” it, and just enough rhythmic guitar folded into the vocal line to carry the tune.

The main challenge (and this is for pop music in general) is coming up with an alternative to spoken vocals. For an alto sax, Killing in the Name predominantly uses B minor pentatonic scale ((B, D, E, F# A, B), but sneaking in a C# and F natural can work in places too), so the only way to make the arrangement interesting is to make it more melodic. There is a lot of taking the vocal’s rhythm, but attaching pitch to it.

Then there’s the whammy pedal guitar solo. It definitely doesn’t work for saxophone, but what it does do is establish a descending line with the whammy’s octave jumps. You can here the sax arrangement use lots of pentatonic and almost bluesy scales through the line as it descends.

There’s a kind of interlude toward the end of the piece that builds some tension while the guitar is strumming and the vocalist is getting more riled up, but it ascends almost chromatically, so with some trills and playing the rhythms of the vocal line, there’s some great tension build up here. This then becomes ‘chaos-at-the-end’ so I just go all improv-like, hitting all the bass notes with octave jumps, and jumping up to do a swung-semiquaver-funk melody on top.

5 mins 40 secs of breathless energy building. That’s what this is. There are so many low lots on the first page that you can get exhausted pretty quickly unless you come up with a breathing/phrase strategy. I put in commas to help, but even I was running out of air for those low Bs. By the second page, it’s a necessity to dial it back to mezzo forte in order to recharge the stamina. Breathing all the time chops the music up too much, so it’s really important to keep any gaps caused by ’emergency breathing’ as short as possible.

Truth be told, it was an absolute mission to get a recording I was happy with, and even now, what I uploaded was merely “good enough”. I just had to let it go and run with what I had because all the practices and recording were eating away at my free time. I was doing this on my old student model Yamaha sax while the Yanigasawa is back in Japan (a story in itself), and I was trying to record this in high humidity in the bedroom. I almost achieved a performance that relatively free of mistakes until I realised the camera was all out of focus! Small mercy though, the following days were cooler and I got something recorded.

The ultimate goal was to write an arrangement, record it, release it to the wild and then make the arrangement available for download. You can get a copy of it on my newly established Ko-fi page, which will do until I finally make my own online store. No need for that I guess until I have more material. Hopefully something completely original next time.

On a side note, the music was written using Steinburg’s Dorico. Get it, it’s awesome!

Buzzing the Mouthpiece

There’s one trick that I learnt from another saxophone teacher that has stayed with me. Many, many years ago I took over Lance’s Saturday classes and for one week, as a bit of meet and greet between myself and students, I sat in on his lessons. Was I still a teenager at the time? It was so long ago.

The trick Lance used was “buzzing” the saxophone mouthpiece, i.e. just blowing the mouthpiece and reed to make a sound.

The thing is, I could make a sound with my clarinet mouth piece at the time, but not my saxophone one (not a good sound at least). It’s just something that I’d not really thought much about, and so never really did, and I guess I’d considered it more a party trick to make some silly sounds.

But here I am sitting in on one of Lance’s lessons and he’s getting one of his students to play the saxophone mouthpiece by itself to generate not just a sound, but a good sound; actually pitching the note!

Why is this important?

Embouchure shape

Embouchure is something that is hard to refine and hard to maintain. Hard to refine meaning its hard enough getting it right in the first place, but then, because of fatigue, it’s hard to keep steady. That’s not even including the variables such as reed and mouthpieces, that seem to fight you all the way to creating a tone you want.

By playing the mouthpiece but itself, you instantly realise a few things

• There’s a high likelihood you’re gripping the mouthpiece too hard. This will make the tone sound a bit strangled. It’s important to note squeeze the reed too much. If anything, try squeezing (gripping) the sides of the mouthpiece with the corners of your mouth.
• The shape of the inside of your mouth is critical. It’s incredibly hard to describe, but say “too” and “tor” and notice how the back of the tongue and the soft palette changes shape. The “tor” creates a better resonance.

Airflow and sustained tone generation

It’s quite difficult to maintain the note when playing just the mouthpiece with reed, especially if the reed is very hard, or the gap between mouthpiece tip and reed is really large. Getting a sound and sustaining it is obviously a prerequisite to anything that comes next.

Embouchure flexibility

It’s important to not grip the mouthpiece for dear life, and often squeezing too much is a beginner’s default embouchure.

As a prerequisite for pitching a note, you must be prepared to “bend” the note by loosing (and then tightening) the embouchure. Another way of thinking about this is loosening such that you’re dropping the jaw such that the reed has plenty of room to vibrate. Conversely, we tighten by starting to squeeze mouthpiece and reed to bring the pitch up.

Typically student struggle with pitching the note down, and I wonder if that is their mental inertia telling them that it will sound gross if they do so. The thing is, this is exactly what we want; loosen up and drop the pitch so that your reaching for the next note down, making it as ugly as possible.

Note that the lower bend, the more airflow is going to be required to sustain it. This too, is an important realisation.

Pitching Notes

By trying to pitch the note with just the mouthpiece, Lance was demonstrating that embouchure is not just for generating sound, but for assisting pitch. Even though the saxophone (and clarinet) have keys to press down to make the sound, it’s the embouchure that is assisting getting these notes in tune by almost being that note. In practise though, this applies to the high notes than the lower ones, and perhaps for the throat notes of the clarinet which have a tendency to go sharp.

As saxophone and clarinetists (I can’t speak for how an Oboe, flute or bassoon behaves), we get a bit lazy in that we blow air, push some keys, then expect the note to be accurate, but flexibility of embouchure is important for getting notes in tune. The advanced player is likely doing this without even realising it, and yes, obviously a quality instrument will have less intonation issue.

Unsuitable mouthpiece and reed combo

Once upon a time I saved up my teenage dollars and bought a metal Yanagisawa mouthpiece. It’s of the most difficult types of mouthpieces to pitch; it’s bright and aggressive and mine had a large tip opening, so quite difficult to get subtlety of control. Admittedly this was the early 2000s, so perhaps I could do that now.

What I’m getting at is there’s a chance you’re fighting your equipment, and your equipment is winning. Sometimes you just have to take a step back, try some different combinations, get things working, then work back into the equipment you really want to use. e.g. and Otto Link hard rubber mouthpiece with a size 7 tip opening, and a 2 1/2 – 3 strength reed is about as “average” as you can get. First of all, this is a great setup, but it’s also a baseline to which you can try out other crazy things, like metal Yanagisawas or massive Berg Larson grained ebonite.

Summary

The concept of buzzing is not just a brass-player thing but and core skill for saxophone and clarinetists too. Admittedly we musicians tolerate brass players warming up this way, but we’d get funny looks if we started doing this on a saxophone or clarinet at the beginning of a rehearsal.

As it’s core though, the concepts are the same, but it also reveals some truths about our playing technique that we may not have been aware of.

No. 40 from Progressive Studies for Clarinet book 2

It’s been difficult keeping my YouTube video releases happening because of all the other non work related activities recently. There was finally an overseas trip, the West City Concert Band played at the NZCBA festival, and of course there’s a bunch of running events to go to, and Chartopia to work on.

The consequence being that, even if even if there is a bit of spare time to whip up a video, the energy levels aren’t there to take the plunge.

But I finally got a video up that I’d been meaning to do for ages. I’d previous recorded number 40 from the Progressive Studies for Clarinet book 2 a few weeks ago, but I played it way too fast. Given that I’m trying to teach it, playing it too far beyond its prescribed moderato tempo didn’t seem a good idea. Admittedly, I was having too much fun with it to even realise I’d gone way beyond the tempo directions, presuming it was one of those kind of technical studies that implied that you ramp up the speed.

After the disappointment of realising I needed to record the video all again (and doing one take videos is hard work), I then re-recorded only to listen back and notice I’d played a certain note wrong all three times! I’ll admit I was pretty annoyed because I’m supposed to be the one setting the good example, but from this came an opportunity. I wanted to “declare” that the mistake was known about, so I learnt how to use the keyframe feature in DaVinci Resolve in order to do a simple animation of a “Wrong Note Alert!” image. I also learnt about some other features along the way which will hopefully stream line some of my video editing efforts in the future. DaVinci Resolve: yet another tool to learn; add it to the todo list.

See if you can spot my declarations.

EMC Funk

I wrote a funk piece! I have been wanting to write a non-solo composition for a long time, but with so much going on (day job, working on Chartopia, running events) it’s difficult to just sit down and write.

What happened is that Rubber Monkey, the audio visual store whom I’ve spent a fair chunk of my pocket money, held a composition competition for NZ Music Month. The basic rule was that the piece had to have at least one real instrument (excluding voice so as to not turn it into a singing comp), and a recording; either audio or video. It could have between written at any time in the last year, but I was going to try and pull it off in two weeks.

I thought about writing a clarinet or saxophone solo piece because I’ve been wanting to make a decent length piece that can be played by students for high school level performances, but fortuitously, my work colleagues have a covers band (drums, guitars, bass, vocals). Why not write a funk piece!

I really like classic funk for reasons I can’t explain. Maybe I respond well to its groove, especially bass lines. That’s how I started this compositional endeavour. I came up with a couple of cool bass line and started to form up a structure for a piece that would go for about 3 mins. This wasn’t to be 7 minutes of improvisation, this was to be a well formed piece with some structure, and be something that could be easily reproduced by anyone who wanted to play it.

With the bass line down, I sat at the keyboard and tried some chords that sat well with the bass line. It looked like I’d settled on C minor, so after a bass groove intro, the drums (playing a funky rhythm) join in with a lead-in fill, along with the guitar playing Cm7 rhythms. We’re off.

There’s no vocalist for this, because I’m no poet and I’m no James Brown, so it’s up to the saxophone to play the melodically interesting role. Bass intro, drums plus guitar, then the saxophone is off. We’re now at bar 10, so for a 3 minute or so piece at the tempo I’m after, we’re about a 6th of the way through. 60 or so bars to go.

Chords have to change, or else the music is a bit boring after a while. Rhythm can only sustain interest for so long when there’s no lyrics to listen to, so I needed another chord. For some reason, I settled on Bmaj7 at bar 6 of an 8 bar phrase and wow, that was a happy musical accident because it sounded great.

So that’s taken the music to bar 18, with an 8 bar melodic line established. Now for some development, but, why not pad this up: enter the 2 bar bass solo followed by 2 bar drum solo, and now we’re off to part 2. It’s the saxophone’s time to unleash and the bass line changes to something new. Now we’re alternating between Cm7 and Fm7 with a new cool bass line and I’ve sketched out some melodic ideas for the saxophone. 8 bars is enough, so I gave the bass another 4 bar solo to take us into another section. A new bass line and now we’re alternating between Cm7 and Dm. I quite liked the bass line for this one.

20 bars of saxophone led melodic interest, then I had the bass take a 4 bar “turnaround” to take us into a progressively busier 8 bars of Cm7 with the saxophone screaming some notes out to the finish. Boom done.

This is where I admit that the above didn’t happen in one go.

In fact, the idea of writing a composition was half baked when I wrote down some funky bass lines with some chords then took it to a Wednesday 4pm jam session with the guys in the EMC lab. I didn’t know whether or not a funk piece would even work, so I jotted down the ideas in Dorico after hammering out ideaa on the keyboard, printed it out and gave it to the guys. The drummer put down the beat, the bass player toiled away at my bass lines and the guitarist put down some funky rhythms with all my Cm7 chords. Meanwhile, I improvised on top, but trying to keep it as tuneful as possible. I didn’t want to go into crazy town with this.

I recorded everything on my refurbished iPhone 8 using the memos app, and lo and behold, the mics on cellphones have gotten so good now, that there’s no clipping when the drums are playing away.

I had a bunch of recordings that proved that this was going to work, it was just up to me to simplify the chords (I had some exotic ones in there that weren’t necessary) and write out some better saxophone lines. I didn’t want to improvise this thing, because it needed to be reproducible. I loaded the recordings into Audacity and proceeded to transcribe as much of the good stuff as possible.

I had a week to get the structure sorted, so the following Wednesday, we gave it a good shot. The guitarist knew his chords, the bass player relished his challenge and the drummer was super clued in. We did some run throughs and during it all, another work colleague recorded us via mics and a mixer, and filmed us on his phone camera.

As good as it was, it was still rough as guts, but everyone was keen to give it one last shot two days later, and the comp closed the following Tuesday. With the mixer recordings loaded into Audacity I had a better idea of what was working and what needed some tweaks. I extended some sections that had more to say, simplified more chords and wrote simpler bass lines toward the end. I took some of my improvised saxophone lines and transcribed the best motifs into the music to ‘set it in stone’. By request, I also gave a midi recording to the guitar player so he was sure he was getting the general idea (yes, we’re amateurs after all).

Eight takes later on Friday, we had something. Well done team. With a bit of Da Vinci Resolve smoke and mirrors, the rehearsal video recording of Wednesday was edited with the final take from the Friday session.

In case anyone is wondering, EMC stands for Electromagnetic Compatibility, which is something that is tested in the labs and Navico. It also doubles as the Salty Dogs‘ rehearsal venue.