Recording with the amazing cellist Mike Block at WGBH
We are in the control room of WGBH Studios in Boston, home of some world famous productions for radio and TV like “Masterpiece Theater”, the children’s show “Arthur”, and the like. What a privilege to record in such a legendary media space!
Antonio Oliart is our remarkable engineer, chief audio engineer here at WGBH.
The space here can accommodate up to a 60 piece orchestra. The soundproofing in the Fraser performance studio here is amazing, completely blocking out all of the sounds of a big holiday party taking place for all the studio production staff. How nice of them to throw us a party, of course, because we're special, right?
We recorded a whole bunch of tracks for a “secret corporation”, but we also kind of snuck in some time to shoot some awesome video too, with Aaron, our wonderful videographer.
Mike Block and I met through ArtistWorks, an online music lesson school where we both teach.
Mike:
"Hugh was there first, and when I was about to record my curriculum, I realized that they wanted backing tracks for everything I was going to teach. So suddenly on like a week's notice, they were emailing Hugh, who I'd never met. And we’re like, “Can you create backing tracks for The Swan and for Boccherini and all these other things?” Hugh was amazing, even remotely, to work with. So now here we are in person...
Hugh:
It's so much more fun playing live together, isn't it?
A little more about Mike: he is a multi style cellist and he just plays everything, every musical style. I'm so jealous of this guy. This guy is way more talented than I am because he can do everything. He's also an inventor, the creator of a strap that allows him to play the cello standing up or walking around.
According to Mike, there's actually a historical precedence. There's paintings of old cellos from 200, 300 years ago where sometimes the cellist is standing and they had sashes that they might put around the neck, and there's even some shockingly nice cellos that have a hole that was at the top of the back at one point, where they would somehow use a sash of some sort. So historically, it wasn’t such an unusual way to play the cello, but it never really took on with the classical players. And then actually it was the non-classical radical cellists from the folk scene that worked with improvised cello straps - folk cellists like Lindsay Mac and Rushud Eggleston and the like. They used guitar straps to play cellos chordally like a guitar to accompany singing. This inspired Mike to design a strap specifically for the cello to enable him to play classical music standing. This is the only strap design for the cellist, not a guitar strap, not an adapted strap or sash. While there are some people who have come up with really cool homemade solutions, this is the first product designed from the ground up for this purpose. To learn more and to get your own strap, visit CelloStrap.com. As a testament to its effectiveness, Mike recorded the whole session standing up!
