Trip and I have been friends for over a decade. We met at the NAMM Show in LA in ’99, and I was immediately a fan of his music. I doubt he heard anything I was on at the time – I was still 11 months away from my first ever solo gig, and he’d already been doing the solo bass thing for best part of a decade – he was SO far ahead of the curve, inspired by Michael Manring, playing opening shows for big name acts in The South all on his own. A real inspiration. Continue reading “Two EPs On The Way, Duets With Trip Wamsley”
The Tech Side Of The Tour – Six Weeks In Music Gear Heaven
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.
- If the gear is too big, we can’t travel.
- If the sound is bad, you can’t hear what we’re doing,
- if anything breaks, we can’t afford to carry spares so it needs to be fixable.
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”
Supersizing “Live So Far” – Three New Tracks Added To Our Live Album.
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.”
Promoting A Gig In A Week (Cincinnati, July 6th!)
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!)”
A Crazy-Busy Week In Nashville.
Tomorrow we drive to Nashville – I love Nashville. Some of my favourite people in the world are there. Clever, lovely, talented creative people. What’s not to love about it?
Which is why we’re there for a week in the middle of this tour. We’re doing a lot there. Here’s the list: Continue reading “A Crazy-Busy Week In Nashville.”
New Live Album… Recorded Last Week!
Ahh, the future – it’s a wonderful place to live.
So, as I said in my last post, our live set up now has a MOTU Ultralite soundcard at the heart of it, is wired with all super-high-quality Evidence Audio Cables and on this tour we’ve got killer live sound from QSC K8 speakers. Which all adds up to us being able to record ourselves, multitracked, on every gig, and to play very well given the consistently marvellous sound that we have at the shows.
So here’s our brand new live album, Live So Far: Continue reading “New Live Album… Recorded Last Week!”
Our US Trip So Far…
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…”
House Concert Dates! (Pt 1)
We’re off to the US of A this week, taking Baby Flapjack over to his place of nationality, to meet the family.
While we’re there, we’re doing a handful of House Concerts, as is our want. 🙂
Here are the first few dates, with links to their Facebook event pages. Please send me a message too if you want to go. These are, for the most part, private events, so the addresses aren’t public, and the people whose houses they are want to know who people are, naturally… So email me, tell me who you are, check out the page, and I’ll put you in touch for more details. (it may be that some of the gigs are either full, or the details are not available for some reason or other – please don’t be offended if this is the case – the privacy and wishes of the hosts win out here…)
here’s the first batch of shows: Continue reading “House Concert Dates! (Pt 1)”
House Concert Footage: Hello?
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?”
New House Concert Video
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”