Duke's new up-and-coming musical artists will soon be able to record their albums with updated studio equipment.
At Tuesday's executive board meeting, senior Colin Tierney, co-founder of Small Town Records, presented a financial proposal that would allow the label to upgrade its microphones and cater to a wider variety of student artists and groups.
"All this equipment is stuff we've known about before, and we know they work really well so we know they're cost-effective," Tierney said. Small Town will be using part of its own depreciation fund to pay for other studio upgrades, he added.
The proposal, which asked for $680 to cover the price of three microphones, was passed unanimously.
According to the funding proposal, the Sennheiser MD 421 II microphone costs $480, and the other two, the SM58 and SM57, cost $100 each. The proposal did not note the brand name for the $100 mics, but Shure makes an SM58 and an SM57. Tierney said each microphone purchased would allow Small Town Records to branch out into different types of recording.
"[The Sennheiser] records 360 degrees of sound instead of just directional sound," he said. "We see that people are doing a lot more acoustic stuff, and acoustic work depends on a lot of sound reflection.... This would really help with the recording process for folks who come in with guitars and other stringed instruments."
In addition to allowing for more diverse recordings, Tierney said he also hoped to save student artists from paying high fees at an outside studio.
"We've been getting more requests from a cappella groups, and with the SM58, which is primarily a mic for vocals, we can give them a studio-quality recording instead of what would otherwise be a live recording," he said. "These groups have to go out and spend money to get it recorded outside of Duke whereas we can spend a couple hundred dollars and do it for them for free."
Toward the end of the meeting, DUU President Chamindra Goonewardene, a senior, said he hoped the Union would continue to evaluate and critique its progress.
"We want to figure out where we stand in relation to other student unions across the country," said Goonewardene, naming Vanderbilt University and Emory University as schools with outstanding student unions. "We're doing really well with the variety of committees that we have and the balance between large- and small-scale programming, but it's good to have an additional perspective of how things are going at other comparable universities."
In other business:
Tickets for comedian B.J. Novak will be available to Duke students at the Duke Box Office starting Thursday, Feb. 12 at 10 a.m. General public tickets will be available starting Friday, Feb. 13 at 10 a.m. Tickets will cost $18 and $26, respectively.
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