February 2008 – Manifold Recording / The Miraverse

Construction photos: week 7 (screed level nearly done)

The masons got an amazing amount of work done last week, I have the photos to prove it!

First, do you remember my Week 5 photos showing all the gray block on the site? Well most of those pallets are now here:

Many of them went to the garage:

The blocks are covered in plastic because the forecast was for rain and the mortar was still a bit “green”. But the garage walls were not the only ones being built up this past week, as you can see from this view of the overall site:

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Construction photos: week 6 (first mitered corners and block diagrams)

This past week was one of much work and little visible progress. On the construction site, the masons gave their new saw some more exercise, but it developed a wobble and needed to be rebuilt. By the end of the week they had managed to build two two-course corners at the foundation level. One of the mitered corners is pictured here:

Actually, the picture shows several features of the planned masonry construction.

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Construction photos: week 5 (grayblock below grade)

More than a dozen pallets of greyblock are now positioned on the site to be placed on the footings and create the basin into which the concrete slab will be poured.

Pallets of grayblock

You can tell how far up the grayblock needs to go: the wood framing on the far side of the site shows where the finished floor elevation will be. We’ll use architectural block for the course that brings us to that level (and then to where people can see it), but grayblock all the way down. As you can see, there’s quite a number of courses to reach that point, which looks like “up” right now, but will seem “down” when the slab is poured and ultimately the dirt, which is also in the background, is replaced. Here you can see how “high” (or “deep”) we’ll be going:

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Remembering a Dream: Queen's Night at the Opera

Brian May re-visits Rockfield Studios and helps piece together the history behind Bohemian Rhapsody. What a great bit of history, and what a great motivation to do everything we can at Manifold Recording to capture everything that technology allows: HD (or better) video, high-rate 24-bit audio, the works. Enjoy!

Linda Ronstadt had her chance…but who’s going to get it now?

Growing up in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt was one of the first female vocalists that made me want to spend more time on the Rock and Roll side of the FM dial and less time listening to classical music on our local NPR affiliate, WMHT. But a few weeks ago, completely by chance, I heard her talking about her experiences in the Music industry as a special guest of the NPR news quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, and the course of the interview practically wrote a blog posting for the Miraverse concept. Here’s my transcription of the relevant stories:

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