the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Over the last couple of years, the joys of parenting have meant that both Lobelia and I have gigged less than we’d might… Which has the knock on effect of people thinking we’re not available for gigs…
Time to fix that. 🙂
So, what’s happening?
I’m available for gigs. Simple as that. Continue reading “Book A Gig!”
This last weekend was all kinds of fun – I had two days at the London Bass Guitar Show and a wonderful improv gig in Derby…
The bass guitar show was my first ‘official’ outing for Markbass – Having been using the Markaudio PA gear for about 3 years (those incredible tiny speakers you’ve seen us use on UK house concerts? Mark Audio), I’ve just got a pair of unbelievable combos from Markbass – the Combo 121 Lites, designed in conjunction with Alain Caron. Continue reading “London Bass Guitar Show and My new Markbass Amps(with video!)”
So we’re back in England, tired, jetlagged, weirded out by being away for 2 months. It’s the longest I’ve ever been out of the UK in one stretch, for sure.
So let’s look at some tour facts ‘n’ stats: Continue reading “Tour blog Pt 2 – This is The End (or ‘how we lost money on a successful tour’)”
So, we’re 7 gigs into our tour – Green Brook, Toledo, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Wisner, Boonville – We’re having all kinds of fun, meeting up with so many wonderful friends, and making new acquaintances all over the place.
Bizarrely, 3 of the gigs so far have been in art galleries. That wasn’t planned, it just happened, and for that we’re happy and grateful. Playing music surrounded by great art is a real honour, and a deep inspiration. Continue reading “Tour Update”
I’ve got a lot of posts to write about this tour, so I’ll start with one of the easiest – the music gear round-up. For the kind of small-scale touring we do, getting this bit right is SO important.
We need the trinity of tech spec – small, reliable and super-high-quality. Continue reading “The Tech Side Of The Tour – Six Weeks In Music Gear Heaven”
One of the joys of releasing music through Bandcamp (officially the world’s greatest digital music release platform, as voted for by me) is that album releases can be progressive.
We’ve already added ‘Happy‘ to the live album, when it became our de facto single, thanks to the awesome video. Continue reading “Supersizing “Live So Far” – Three New Tracks Added To Our Live Album.”
OK, this is going to be fun, and you can help – we’re playing in Cincinnati, in a week’s time (or less, depending on when you read this). So we need your help to get the word out to the lovely people of Cincinnati, OK? 🙂 Continue reading “Promoting A Gig In A Week (Cincinnati, July 6th!)”
We’ve been in the US nearly 2 weeks and this is my first blog post – what a bad blogger I am!
Anyway, we’ve had 4 shows so far and met up with friends old and new, having our usual fabulous time. We started out in Brooklyn, playing a house concert hosted by an American friend met in London. It was a great night, not least of all because it was a chance for Samantha (the host) to talk about The Urban Collective Project – a fabulous music industry social enterprise that has been a great success in the UK and is now launching in the US. Continue reading “Our US Trip So Far…”
I’m SO glad that our new live mixer set up allows us to multitrack record everything. It means we can capture lil’ moments like this one, when I decided to open the House Concert in Camberley with a version of Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello‘.
I’d previously played it at home, but just the chord melody bit. The weirdness in the middle was a whim – I’ve blogged before about the way that the house concert set up lets you take more time over things, and more risks in your playing. Here, they paid off: Continue reading “House Concert Footage: Hello?”
We’re just back from a fabulous run of house concerts in England and Scotland. All kinds of good times were had, friends were made, internet chums suddenly existed in meat-space too, and a lot of very fine music happened. Big, big thanks to the truly awesome people who hosted the gigs in Leeds, Camberley and Edinburgh. Expert humans, one and all. Continue reading “New House Concert Video”