Friday 22 March 2013

Exploring "The Pig Rig" part 1: Geoff's Sennheiser 441

Trying to populate the blog in these early days we thought a series of posts about some of our more interesting gear could be fun. So here's our first edition of Exploring The "Pig Rig" featuring Geoff's Sennheiser 441 microphone... It's sort of special for a number of reasons, not the least of which being it's odd appearance.
 
As you can see by the following ad they've been making them for a while and Geoff's is serial number 009811 which, by my estimates places it's manufacture somewhere in the mid 70s. If you have a chart for dating these things I'd love to know for sure as I picked mine up in a pawn shop in southern Alberta for an insane price (it needed a little soldering) so I don't know it's original purchase date.
 
 
In the rock and roll world these mics are usually used for drums these days but some rock legends including Prince and Stevie Nicks have been know to use them as vocal mics live and in the studio




I'd post the Prince video for "Kiss", a song where he recorded the vocals with a 441 but he'd probably send a team of assassins to destroy me as is his style... So here's an awesome video of him playing guitar instead


So there you go, some largely uninteresting drivel about a microphone.

Possibly more interesting is the news that this weekend we'll be practising some tunes with our occasional lady singer Tara "Hamila" Kean. She'll be joining us for a couple shows at Jack's Pub in Tofino on April 12th and 13th and we hope you can join us too.

Our next "gig" is jam night this Monday (also at Jack's) come rock some tunes with us!

Finally, Happy Birthday to Hawksley Workman, here he is performing a song Geoff's been known to cover in past bands... maybe it will find its way into a Ballistic Pig show one day