Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Music

Organ Recital

If you came to our wedding, you know that we have some extremely talented musicians in our congregation. The lady who played the flute is in the Seattle Symphony and the man playing the organ just completed his Masters Degree in organ. He asked me to help record his recital, and I, of course, accepted.

The recital was held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle. I don’t know much about organs but this one looked and sounded very impressive. I overheard somebody saying that this was one of the most impressive organ installations in the United States though I have no idea how authoritative the speaker was.

The audio recoding was being handled by an audio engineer, so all I had to do was take care of the video. I just got the recording in my hands and it will take a while to edit it all, but for now I can share some of the photos that I snapped. The best way is to check out the PhotoSynth.

In Depth Orchestra Viewing

The London Symphony Orchestra published a great website that lets you have four concurrent HD views of their music and you can choose which view you want in each quadrant. There’s some extra stuff thrown in that lets you drill in for information about each instrument in each chair too. This type of thing has been promised since DVDs were first introduced but it has yet to see the mainstream.

Stephen Bautista Visits

We had a visit from musician Stephen Bautista in church last Sunday. He travels around the country with his 7 kids and wife in a van and camping trailer playing music for churches in our synod. Various traveling musicians have come through before, but Stephen was in a class of his own. I heard lots of people commenting on how good he was. He’s still playing at other churches in the area so consider stopping in to hear him play. Everything is posted on his website at http://www.stephenbautista.com

Stephen played a bunch of songs during the service and then gave a mini-concert during the time slot normally occupied by Bible class and Sunday School. I recorded that concert and posted it on YouTube. The audio isn’t great, but if you like it, he has two albums you can buy and is working on a third. Both albums are on Xbox Music and Spotify so I’m guessing they’re available on iTunes, etc too. And of course you can buy music and get more info on his website.