Low quality Casa

Casa played a gig for a wedding in Pembroke College last Saturday, which I thought I’d record, mainly for my own personal interest.  The personnel for the gig was a bit of a change around: one of the singers couldn’t make it, and neither could the keys player, so Tom shifted from trombone to keys for the evening.  Recording set-up was basic: a single line from the PA taking the horns, keys and vocals, guitar and bass DIed and a single mic pointed at the drums.  I remember rushing around all day doing various tasks, so arrived at the gig in a bit of a fluster, so after making it through the first dance (the karaoke classic Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You) for which I’d had the music infront of me, I went to begin the bassline to our regular first set opener and live soundchecker, Bring Down The Birds.

It was at that point that my brain core dumped and I forgot how to play.

After noodling around in Bb for a couple of bars, I was rescued by Mark joining in on guitar.  Once past this block things settled down a bit, apart from the fact that, as has been previously noted, large college halls aren’t really designed for amplified music, so we had really weird fold-back throughout the gig.  Anyway, if you’re bored, you can listen to some of the tunes here.  The only thing of note for me (apart from the fact that under no circumstances should I be allowed to solo until I can guarantee that all the notes will be in time) is that during the percussion break in Ritmo Rico I meant to turn my bass off, but instead turned the pickup mix knob from 50:50 to 100% bridge pickup.  When I started playing again I found my bass tone was much closer to the sound I actually want, much more top end “bark”.  I can’t believe it took a mid-gig mistake to find this out.  I was so pleased I left the bass in pretty much that setting (well, actually about 25:75 neck:bridge, because I love to fiddle) for the rest of the gig.  This might put paid to any vague ideas I had about buying a Warwick or, more realistically, a Fender Jazz.

Acuphuncture at John’s Ball

If you head over to the Acuphuncture Myspace page now, you’ll find a couple of tunes that we recorded during our gig at St John’s Ball (including one original: Brazilian Song.  We spent ages thinking that song title up, honest).  The recording was made from the desk to my minidisc player, which chose that evening to start having battery issues, so sadly we lost the first two thirds of the set.  Still, it’s enough to give you some idea of how it went; I’ll probably use other bits from the recording on the main site’s listenables page, once I get around to updating it.

Damn it, now I just want to get more gigs!  Though definitely ones at more sensible hours.

Phaser modification by Tipton Amps

Tom and I both bought Electro Harmonix Small Stone phasers towards the end of last year, and both of us came to the same conclusion: it’s a great-sounding pedal, but the volume drop that happens when you turn the pedal on is a royal pain in the arse.  I could work around it when using my Trace Elliot amp because that has configurable input and output gain on the effects loop.  However, my Session amp doesn’t have that facility, so when I used the Small Stone with it I added an overdrive pedal to boost the level back up.  This, of course, results in a bit of a tap-dance session prior to using the phaser, which is distinctly non-ideal.  I’d heard that it was possible to get the pedal modified by Analogman, so dropped it off at Panic Music when I sent my amp in for repair assuming they could do a similar job.  They surprised me by quoting me about fifty quid for the modification, which seemed way too expensive.

Fast forward to this year and the idea of getting the pedal modified popped back into my head again (read: I was bored at work).  Hunting around on the net, I spotted in the uk.music.guitar archives that someone had sold a Small Stone pedal modified to have unity gain, and that the person who had done the work had recently started Tipton Amplification.  I dropped Tipton a line, who quoted me a far lower price than Panic had, and so within a week I had the modded pedal back in my sticky mitts.  It’s fantastic; unity gain whether on or off, and better signal-to-noise ratio than before.  So to celebrate my entry into unihibited phasing heaven, I recorded a little tune; check it out here.

Acuphuncture John’s gig recordings

I’ve been busy for the past couple of weeks mixing the recording of the second Acuphuncture gig. The mixes are still a work in progress, and I haven’t finished all the songs, but I’m pleased with what I’ve done so far.  You can check out some of the mixes either on the Acuphuncture listenables page or on our myspace page.

To help with the mixes, I was looking into getting a pair of studio near-field monitors (something like a pair of JBL Control 1s), but then decided that they wouldn’t fit on the computer desk. I was initially trying to avoid getting a 2.1 system because I’d heard they had shite-all mid-range (two tiny satellites plus enormous sub woofer, made sense to me) but in the end I decided to not worry about it and bought a set of Logitech X-230s. It’s fairly safe to say that the sub on these things is a bit of beast – in an effort to tame it I’ve set the EQ on Win Media Player to cut the 31Hz band by ~50%, and it still sounds phat. Still, no-one’s living next door at the mo so I’m not worried

The Acuphuncture recording was made on DAT (crazy! They look just like video tapes! OK, I’d never seen one before and it surprised me), and I’ve been supplied with DVDs of wav files for each recorded instrument (including four for the drums: kick, snare and two overheads). Generally the process has been fairly painless, though Jen’s vocals and the drum overheads have picked up a lot of the hall’s natural reverb, so I’ve had to add reverb to the close miced instruments in an effort to even things up. There’s also a lot of subsonic crap in there, so I’ve usually had to go with a high pass filter at 30-50Hz. Finally I’ve been compressing and EQing the bass in some tunes because Diccon’s bass has huge amounts of low end and not much top, and in others I’ve compressed the master channel to… well, because I fancied it, mainly. Anyway, of the tunes available at the moment Water Torture is the best so far, though Brooklyn is pretty damn good too.

First Acuphuncture gig recordings

If you head over to the Acuphuncture listenables page, you’ll currently find a couple of mp3s from last Friday’s gig. Share and enjoy.

A new musical game

I’ve decided to try and mix things up for myself by playing a recording “game”: I’ll just choose a tempo on my metronome, record a few minutes of the resulting clicks, then just make up an idea on the spot. The first product of this is a tune I’m calling You’re The One. The title is from the soppy lyrics I wrote which didn’t make the final mix as I’ve had a sore throat for a week that’s done no favours for my already poor singing. Unless I’ve wanted to sound like Tom Waits. Which in this case, I didn’t. The idea behind doing these recordings is to allow me to spot what I do wrong. The majority of my mistakes are timing-related: most of the drum fills I play are rushed, and the chorus guitar part is a bit hit and miss (disappointing, as guitar’s supposed to be my strongest instrument!) Kyla’s criticised the bass part for sounding like a scales practice, but after years of pentatonics the major seventh sounds quite interesting to me. Hey ho: on to next idea! Perhaps I’ll get involved in the guitar recording collective to give myself some more ideas than just a tempo to work with.

Alex band music

Rehearsals are going well with the Alex Harris band. We’re now a quartet, gaining Russ on lead guitar, and we’re building up to our 45 minute set at the Royston Town FC beer fest on the 29th May (6 bands, lots of beer, you know you want to come.) I’ve been recording the rehearsals and lobbing the mp3s to the rest of the band as it’s useful to go back over what we played and spot what works and what doesn’t. Additionally, Alex comes up with about three new ideas per session, and if we didn’t record them they’d quickly get forgotten! I’m still finding my feet bass-playing wise; I’ve only a limited idea about what to play, and tend to emphasise rhythm over melody, focussing on locking with Paul, our drummer. I think it might be interesting to try and use Alex’s vocal melody as my bass part, to try and break up my usual pentatonics. Just to share what we’ve been up to, here’s a song called Captivated. Low quality and mono, but you’ll get the drift! That’s one mic on the drums, another mic on Alex, DI’ed guitars and bass, compression on guitars and vocals added in my little Roland recorder, no final compression, just normalisation, so it’ll be a bit quiet. Alex’ll kill me for posting this as a) I don’t think he’s finished the lyrics and b) we recorded it at the end of the rehearsal so his voice was a bit shot. But, tough

WinNMD and an old Casa tune

I bought a minidisc player at the start of last year. Yeah yeah, why didn’t I get an mp3 player instead; the reason was that there weren’t any reasonably priced mp3 players that contained a mic preamp, and I wanted to use the device to record rehearsals and gigs. The model I purchased is one of the Sony NetMD ones, which can transfer tunes quickly from the computer via USB; however you can’t transfer from the player back to the computer, natch. Thus the latter process involves manually controlling the recording process. Recently I found a program that at least makes the process hands-free, even if the transfer still occurs in real time: Win NMD. This little beastie controls the MD player via the USB connection, and will create a wav file (named using the track info on the MD) of each song you select for transfer, all while you put your feet up in front of Hollyoaks: top banana. I used it to transfer a Casa del Funk gig from the end of ‘03, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time as it was quite an old-school Casa line up, featuring Derek Scurll on drums and James “Reg” Regan on keys. Here’s the closing song of the first set, Jazz Carnival. I note at the end of that tune there’s a particularly fiddly bit of guitar sound, but I can’t work out if it’s Reg’s keys sound or me playing it! It sounds a bit too even to be me, normally I fluff more notes . It’s particularly exciting as, all going to plan, I might be playing with Derek again on a more regular basis, once Tom O’Grady (he of playing Rhodes with Kirk Degeorgio fame) gets his much anticipated funk band up and running. Of course, that would put me in three bands: the jazz soul band, Alex Harris, and Tom’s funk garden (not the official band name). I think I’ll have to axe the jazz in order to actually spend some time at home. A shame, as I was just getting into fingerstyle.

Winter v2.0

Managed to get some more recording done rather than wasting my life infront of Half Life 2. I’d made an original recording of a song I’d provisionally titled winter back in october (original post here). I had a change of plan about the song, which involved reworking it to include a melody line played on the ebow Kyla gave me for Christmas and generally aim for a more Radiohead-esque kind of feel. And so I give you Winter v2.0. This was recorded in my usual manner at the moment: one track of metronome as a guide, then rhythm guitar, the ebow, drums, then finally bass (the new 5 string!). I have even written some lyrics for it, but they’re fairly uninspired so I don’t think I’ll bother recording them for the moment. I had intended to have a final section in 7/8 time, but quickly discovered that I could barely play my idea on the guitar, let alone drum it. Let’s face facts, I’m still having enough trouble drumming in 4/4; the drum lines I used in this are deliberately less complicated than the ones I’ve attempted in previous recordings, because they’ve all sounded shit. It turns out my bass playing isn’t that much better than my drumming; I have a spectrum of playing that ranges from (root notes only + in time) (interesting bass line, badly out of time). And I’m still getting lots of unwanted strings ringing… hey, it’s a learning process, and recording things helps, I think.

Sproing

Heh, as it turns out there is something bad about fitting fat strings to a cheap bass: the damn machine heads can’t cope with the tension. The A peg has escaped its gears somehow, so I can only tighten the string as far as G or so. Nutbags. It’s doubly annoying as I’d just recorded a couple of tracks of guitar and drums and was looking to add a bassline to finish it off. As I’ve got today off I thought I’d try and put something down without trying to tax my creative juices, so, inspired by The New Mastersounds, I recorded a little thing I’ve called Funky. As ever my timing’s dodgy; I first put down a track of metronome as a guide, then recorded the guitar following it. After recording the drums, however, I noticed that throughout the piece I was rushing the drum part ever so slightly, so I went back and rerecorded the guitar part to follow the drums. I must practice more with a metronome in 2005! Then I discovered that my bass is b0rked but I thought I’d upload it anyway, so passed Digital Fishphones Blockfish compressor over it and away we go.