Tag: bass

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Grace And Gratitude Tour, first leg Blog

Well, the first leg of the tour is over, and a lot of fun it was too!

The four dates were Cambridge, Southampton, London and Brighton, at each of them I was joined by Rob Jackson in support and also for some duet stuff.

Cambridge kicked it off – the venue was a place called CB2 – a tiny and very groovy cellar venue, with a low stage and nice simple lighting. Rob and I also had Peter Chilvers along on this one, and his set kicked off the show – a set of solo looping keyboard/sampled string stuff which was beautiful. Actually, he didn’t kick it off, I did with an ambient loopy thing, just cos we’d forgotten to bring a CD player for background music… :o)

After Pete came Rob’s first set of the tour – I’ve got Rob’s CD, ‘Wire Wood And Magnets’ and have heard him playing guitar for Boo Hewerdine before, but this was the first time I’d seen him play a whole solo set, and he was fabulous. Really really beautiful music. Very funny between songs, and a gorgeous tone. We mic’d up his little Cornell amp and ran it through my AccuGroove/QSC/Mackie rig, which sounded fanastic. Catherine street-team did an amazing street-teamers job of flyering and postering before-hand, bringing friends, doing the door and CDs!!! Good lord, the woman’s a god-send.

Then came my solo set – the first time I’ve played the tunes off the new CD live. I did the title tune, Shizzle, The Kindness Of Strangers, Despite My Worst Intentions and a few older numbers. Shizzle was a little bit shambolic but I largely pulled it off, although on ‘Despite My Worst Intentions’ I clicked ‘next loop’ to start recording the B section and it was already there!!! Possibly the weirdest two seconds I’ve ever had on stage, suddenly stepping sideways into some futuristic world where Echoplexes know what you’re about to play! what had happened was I’d played the tune in the soundcheck, but hadn’t wiped that loop, just the A loop, so everything else was in Loop 1, and Loop 2 was merrily waiting to be retriggered. Very odd indeed.

Stayed at Robs, brunch at The Orchard in Grantchester (the first of quite a few nice posh lunches on this tour), then back to mine to change, and get ready to head down to Southampton. I brought the box of CDs in doors to replenish from the previous night’s sales, and completely forgot to put them back in the car!!

Drove to Southampton, stopping for a bite to each in a pub in Buriton, Hampshire with Iain Martin from Stiff Promotions and his brother Ali.

The gig was at The Hobbit – a HUGE pub in Southampton, on about 5 different levels, outdoor bits, etc. absolutely massive. the music was in a little room in the middle, with a stage and a built in PA. The venue hire bands in to play, but don’t charge on the door. We set up, I realised I only had two CDs there to sell (doh!), and lots of friendly faces turned up. But the music wasn’t set to start til 10pm, and by then, a lot of very hammered people had also turned up and set themselves up by the stage, who proceeded to talk/shout/laugh/make dickheads of themselves loudly for the next three hours. The venue did nothing. No concern for either Rob or I, or the majority of the people there who wanted to listen to the music. So much for treating the musicians well. Given that the place was huge, it wouldn’t have been hard for the venue to ask them to move to another part of the venue, or for them to even have charged a couple of quid to get into the room we were playing in, thus filtering out the losers.

Anyway, the nice people outnumbered the morons, and we had a great night inspite of the shouting. Always nice to see friendly faces in the audience, especially Grant, Aidan and my Southampton mini-me, Vicky.

long drive home in the middle of the night, back to London.

Saturday night was Launch gig at Darbucka – possibly the grooviest venue in London, sumptuously decorated, great food, lovely arabic vibe. A marvellous place. Very nice to see so many friendly faces there (though I’m not sure how good it is that about a third of the audience already had the new CD via the advanced ordering thingie on the site!).

At both the Southampton gig and the London gig I had a bit of a Nightmare getting ‘The Kindness Of Strangers’ to work – it’s a really tricky tune to get the for rhythmic loops at the beginning in time with. you’ve got an initial loop, that gets kicked up an octave, as you start recording the next tune layer, then another little melodic line, and then the dubby bassline that takes it from a one bar phrase to 16 bar phrase. it was at about the time of my third restart on the tune that I realised how much harder the new stuff (and my new live setup) is to play! Blimey, these tunes are much more complex, and as more of them were improvised on the spot than on ‘Not Dancing’, it’s taking me longer to learn them.

At both the Southampton gig and the London gig, Rob played marvellously again, and it became very apparent that it’s a really good touring combination, me and Mr Jackson.

Theo also came and played with us on the London gig, played a beautiful solo tune, did a couple of duets with me, and a really nice trio tune to end a marvellous night. Thanks very much to everyone who came down.

And finally Sunday night in Brighton. Or not – it was actually in Southwick, just outside Brighton, which on Pride weekend, is not the greatest place to be (my fault for choosing to tour in August, a notoriously bad month for touring). Add to that the venue changing hands a week before and the new owners putting up NO posters for the gig, and you’re not on for a big crowd.

thankfully promoter Rich did a great job, got his mates down, the room was fantastic with a view over the harbour, and the gig was great fun. A really nice listening audience in a gorgeous venue. Can’t say fairer than that!

So all in, a great four days. There’s some work to be done on the new tunes to get them up to the standard of the album, but they’re already sounding lovely in the set.

I’m now really looking forward to leg II – Glasgow, Berwick and Edinburgh. See you there!

soundtrack – right now, Michael Manring and David Cullen, ‘ Equilibre’. Before that, The Low Country, ‘Welcome to The Low Country’.

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Blog in the media…

Got a text message earlier from Rob saying that my website was name-checked in todays Observer Newspaper – intrigued, I bought a copy, to find that in their regular ‘What’s The Word’ feature about weird words, today’s was Gigalicious (a word that crops up here rather often, given that I lead such a gigalicious life…) – and my site was held up as the earliest useage recorded on the net – in 2002, using the phrase ‘it’s been a gigalicious year’ (probably in my year-end round up on the news page, which strictly speaking was my pre-blogging blog…)

Anyway, it’s always nice to get media coverage, even if it is for using made-up words instead of making music.

Sarda sent me a link the other day to audioscrobbler.com – a site that logs whatever you’re listening to in your chosen media player! Rather fun, especially to see what rubbish other people are listening to, and to see if my stuff is being played by people who have the software (not enough, so get it, and start playing the new album! :o) )

Anyway, from now on, I’ll try to remember to link to my audioscrobbler page from the ‘soundtrack’ link at the bottom.

soundtrack – Scritti Politti, ‘Cupid And Psyche’; Tom Waits/Crystal Gayle, ‘One From The Heart’; Ani DiFranco; ‘Little Plastic Castle’; Billy Bragg, ‘Talking With The Taxman About Poetry’; Sarah Masen, ‘Dreamlife Of Angels’.

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radio days

Last night was big fun! not Big Fun – they were a crap 80s pop group – no, big fun for me, on four different BBC radio stations simultaneously! The Sue Dougan show is broadcast on BBC Radio Kent / Solent / Southern Counties and Berkshire, 7-10pm, monday to friday, from Tunbridge Wells. I was down in Sussex visiting my grandparents yesterday anyway, so it timed well.

We’d planned for me to go in and play live, but due to (perfectly reasonable) concerns about the possibility of tripping the power circuit with all my music gear, it ended up not being possible – so I’d carried all my stuff in for nothing. Still, it didn’t matter, as it meant that Sue just played tracks from Grace and Gratitude and For The Love Of Open Spaces instead, and chatted for ages about my whole process, purpose and inspiration for doing music. Sue asked a lot of very interesting questions, and not being a bassist, passed on the ‘what strings do you use?’ question. All in all, much fun was had – big thanks to Sue and her producer Steve.

What else of late? Central heating boiler started leaking a week ago, so we got John the plummer round, and a very fine plumber he is too. Yesterday and today he replaced the boiler and swapped over our totally-useless-70s-style skirting board radiators for normal ones. As I was away visiting my grandparents, The Small Person was left with the job of moving all my stuff in my office/studio to give John The Plumber access. No mean feat, given the amount of crap I’ve accumulated. Still, it’s a great excuse to actually tidy up… yeah, riiiight…

Other than that, I’ve been sorting out flyers and press releases for my edinburgh festival dates – the venue people are incredibly pedantic when it comes to style, but it’s probably a good thing, and I’m pretty nifty with Quark and Photoshop so it’s not taking me long to make the changes.

oh, and on Sunday, my mum, The Small Person and I went up to the Otter Trust in Norfolk for a day out – TSP and I had been there before, mum hadn’t. It’s such a cool place – otters are exceedingly groovy animals anyway, but the trust also has deer and wallabies and millions of ducks ‘n’ geese. A fine day out. ‘Twas also nice to find out that the captive breeding and releasing programme of the otter trust has brought the wild otter levels back to where they were about 50 years ago, to the point where they can’t release any more without upsetting the balance. Very good!

Stuart Maconie played ‘Shizzle’ from the new album on his Freak Zone show on the other night, and describe it as ‘if david lynch directed Seinfeld, this would be the theme tune’ – very nice! :o) 6 music is a fantastic station – I listen to Jane Gazzo’s Dream Ticket in the evenings, and stream Bob Harris and Tom Robinson‘s shows during the week from the archive.

In other music news, much of last week was spent recording with Calamateur, AKA Andrew Howie. I’ve known andrew for over a decade, he even bought my old bass off me when I left college, and he’s since become a fantastic singer/songwriter. His latest album, The Old Fox Of ’45, is wonderful, and we were working on some new stuff, some of it was me putting bass and strangeness onto tracks he’d already been working on, one of the tracks was just a vocal and guitar that I then messed around with a bit and added some bass and strangeness to, and the last one we did from scratch, using varisped samples of a crappy old nylon acoustic guitar I’ve got here, some weirdness from the Kaoss Pad and Andrew’s voice. All fine stuff! Sadly, most of it is pretty much unplayable live, or we’d do the new tune on the upcoming gig dates we’ve got together…

Soundtrack – Lewis Taylor, ‘Lewis Taylor’; Billy Bragg, ‘Talking With The Taxman About Poetry’; SplatterCell, ‘OAH’; David Torn, ‘What Means Sold, Traveller?”; Talking Heads, ‘Sand In The Vaseline’; me.

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Looking at a thing in a bag…

So I’m at the vets, picking up the aged feline, who being nearly 19 is quite understandably a little dehydrated, so was in on a drip for a few hours, and two people come out of the vets surgery, apparently without a pet. She puts her bag on the table – small clutchbag type handbag – which promptly starts to wriggle… ‘what’s in the bag?’ asks me, ‘a rat’ comes the reply, at which point gorgeous cute rat sticks her head out of the top of the bag for a sniff round. Very very cute comedy moment.

In other news, Edinburgh festival dates were up in the air, as the one venue I was going to be playing in won’t exist. Then, about an hour ago, I get a phone call from another venue wanting me to play there instead! marvellous… :o)

More good news is Peter Chilvers has been added to the bill for the cambridge gig. Peter’s a fantastic musician – very fine bass player. I’ve seen him play a couple of times, and duetted with him at a gig in Norwich which was great fun.

So today is sorting out flyers, sending out posters, getting gig details pinned down. All that admin stuff that happens between the playing…

Soundtrack – Stevie Wonder, ‘Hotter Than July’.

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Too long in the wasteland…

…out of blog-dom. So let’s catch up.

When did I blog last? er, 25th, so let’s start from there…

Friday 25th was Rob’s leaving do – Rob’s a friend from church, moving away from London down to Devon (wise man, methinks), and it was lovely to see so many friends turn out to give him a good send off. He’ll be missed…

Saturday 26th – Masterclass at Colchester Academy Of Modern Music‘s Bass Day. Lesson number one in the Steve-makes-mistakes-so-you-can-learn-from-them book is always check the address of the venue – I got an address off the website for what I assumed was the college venue, but was actually the home of the organiser. Got there, rang him, and was fortunately only 5 minutes away. Lesson two is not to trust the RAC website’s directions to anywhere – very shoddy indeed, and resulted in a 45 minute detour on a journey that should’ve taken less than 2 hours anyway…

However, the masterclass went really well – seems like a great little set up at CAMM, run by good people. The questions asked were good, and we were able to talk a lot about the process of learning an instrument and how to apply practice material to real music… A fine day.

This week I’ve been to a couple of gigs – the first was G3 at The Albert Hall – G3 on this tour is Robert Fripp, Steve Vai and Satch. Fripp was up first, and was, as expected, remarkable, playing a beautiful beguiling, deep, rich soundscape, to an audience half captivated, half disinterested. Breathtaking stuff, but pearls before swine methinks for much of the audience. Then Vai came on – did a solo intro on a triple-necked guitar, before getting his band up on stage. Now I had high expectations of Vai’s set – I know he’s an incredibly gifted technician on the guitar and have heard some stuff by him that I really liked, but tonight was a bit of a disappointment. Actually a huge disappointment. Not helped by possibly the worst mix I’ve ever heard in a major concert hall – no drums, very little bass, a tiny bit of keys and second guitar and then Steve’s guitar ripping your face off. And it’s not like I had some weird seats up in the gods – I was not far behind the sounddesk, so apparently in a good aural vantage point. Anyway, the material didn’t grab me at all either, and the shredding got tired very quickly. Especially following Fripp, it seemed unbelieveably dated and teenage. It’s a shame, cos I really wanted to like it, but it so didn’t happen for me. That coupled with the fan on the front of the stage blowing Steve’s hair back… oops.

Last on was Joe Satriani – This is the fourth time I’ve seen satch, and the third time in 18 months, and by far the best. His current band of Matt Bissonette on Bass, Jeff Campitelli on drums and Gaylan Henson on second guitar is, IMO, his strongest ever, the tunes were there, the shredding was well placed, the mix was better, the interplay between the musicians was great, and Fripp joined in on some numbers towards the end of the set. The playing was a bit freer than before, with Joe giving Jeff and Matt a fair bit of space to play, deservedly so, as they are definitely one of the finest old school heavy rock rhythm sections I’ve ever heard.

The encore was matt and jeff with all three guitarists doing Ice Nice, Red (a King Crimson number) and Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World – apart from the obviously surreal experience of seeing Fripp and the Shredders takling Neil Young, it was a great choice of tunes, and Free World an inspired choice of closing number. The aftershow was fun too, with a chance to catch up with Jeff and Matt and Matt’s wife, and see Jakko, Clive and a few other old friends too…

Wednesday night was an altogether more satisfying musical experience, watching Spearhead at the Jazz Cafe (thanks to Deb and Alice for the ticket!) – one of the finest live bands on the planet, they were well on form tonight, if a little loud. A heavier reggae content than the last couple of gigs I’ve seen, they were nonetheless as groovalicious as ever, with Franti’s tales of his recent trip to Iraq an inspiration to everyone there. Very late finish though – why on earth did they start at 9.30 if they wanted to play for three hours? surely starting an hour earlier would have made sense…

Which brings us to last night’s gig, an improv sesh with Filomena, Orphy, Dudley, Roger and Roland, along with some improv theatre and dance stuff. A slightly shakey start before the gig got underway due to a couple of misunderstandings about the nature of the gig, but the gig itself was fantastic – great players, lovely people, some marvellous music and surprisingly engaging dance and theatre stuff. All in all, a marvellous night. It’s always great to catch up with the lovely musicians on these gigs, and Fil gave me space to play a solo tune from the new album, which was a great plug (and I sold a few CDs afterwards too… :o)

anyway, in between all those events, I’ve spent the last week doing album/tour/promo stuff – emailing radio, sending out CDRs, ringing venues etc. all trying to get this bass-show on the road! Things are looking good!

Soundtrack – Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’; Muriel Anderson, ‘Heartstrings’; me, ‘Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 1’ and of course more of the new album.

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All systems go on the new CD!

So, the new Cd – Grace and Gratitude – is recorded and is being mastered as I write, the artwork’s finished and been sent off to the manufacturers, there’s a page up in the e-shop about it with some MP3s and preordering details, and gigs are getting booked! This is the fun bit – I really enjoy the hustle and bustle of making this work – making CDs, booking gigs, sending out press releases and all that. It’s a little daunting, and I’m easily distracted, but when I’m on a roll, it’s great fun.

It looks like I’m going to be doing a few dates with Rob Jackson around the time of the album release, which I’m really looking forward to – Rob’s a hugely talented solo guitarist, and I’m sure that anyone who digs what I do is going to love his music. I’m trying to book a launch gig at the moment, and might be going out to check out a venue this afternoon… watch this space.

Had a great response to the MP3s so far, which is good news – I think this is my best album… I’ve thought that with each album I’ve released, and I don’t think it’s just that I’m enamoured with newness… It seems like there’s a definite progression from one to the next. This one takes some of the more advanced looping that’s going on on ‘Open Spaces‘, and combining it with the more melacholic side of my solo stuff (Ok, except Shizzle, which is good ole’ fashioned stevie-style-funkiness).

So what’s still to be done? Posters need to be sent out for the gigs, more gigs need to be confirmed, Edinburgh promo needs doing, websites need informing that the CD is out, as soon as I get the master CD back I need to start burning CDRs to send out to radio for airplay ahead of the release date, and I need to resume talks with the various distributors who’ve expressed an interest in the CDs, and see if we can come to some sort of mutually beneficial deal to get this stuff into the shops… On top of that, I have a set of John Lester’s tunes to learn, and I need to go back and learn all the tracks on the CD in order to be able to play them live! I also need to mix and master the extra disc, ‘Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt II’ – I’ve got lots of extra tracks that I really like, so I think it’s going to be a rather lovely CD once again…

Other than that, I had a marvellous gig last night with Jez, Tom Hooper on drums and Michael Haughton on sax – it was a function gig in a gorgeous hotel near Bath. Now those of you who do function gigs will know that the staff in hotels and function suites often treat bands as less than vermine, but the entire staff at this hotel were SOOOO helpful. It made such a refreshing change! The event organiser was totally on top of everything, we played really well, got paid – what’s not to love? It was great fun getting back to playing with a quartet, and we used my Accugroove/Mackie/QSC set up as the PA, and it sounded incredible. Ain’t no other bass rig I could use as a PA for sax, piano bass and drums!!

Got back at 4.30 this morning, so slept in late. Am only now just getting into the land of the living. Need to go and post off some Cd orders, reply to some email, go and check out a venue for the album launch, contact some venues and send out some press stuff. Busy day!

Soundtrack – right now, Public Enemy, ‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’; yesterday – cathy burton, ‘Speed Your Love’; Brian Houston, ‘Thirteen Days in August’; David Torn, ‘What Means Solid, Traveller?’

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Developmental Myopia…

I think it’s fair to say that my progress thus far as a solo performer has been a series of myopic fixations. And not without good reason – I’m the kind of person who thrives on creative restrictions, giving me something to bang up against and come up wtih interesting ways to subvert or supercede those limitations.

This is most evident in the development of the compexity of my live and recording set up, and the way advice that I receive often takes years to filter into practice.

A few examples –

back in 2000, when I was first doing solo gigs, I had also recently signed up to the Loopers Delight discussion list . I was a fairly avid fan and advocate for the Lexicon JamMan that I Was using at the time. Much of the discussion on the list revolved around the relative merits of various looping devices and a lot of the users therein recommended the Echoplex Digital Pro over the JamMan because it had feeback control. Pah! says I, who needs that, I can just stick a volume pedal inline after the JamMan and fade it out that way, not really getting the point of feedback, and not having the wisdom to enquire further as to its usefulness. Fast forward a couple of years to me getting an Echoplex, and finally the merits of a feedback control are very plain to see. Had I asked earlier, maybe I’d have got to grips with the loop function in my Lexicon MPX-G2 a lot earlier, that having feedback control….

About a year later on Looper’s Delight, another discussion comes up about how to wire all the different boxes together (I think a picture of the kind of geeks we are who sit around discussing looping all day….) – and various wise and learned loopers are talking about running looping devices in Auxiliary channels on mixing desks (if you don’t know, you don’t need to know, believe me – skip all this waffle and read something else instead), and once again, me having up to that point run my gear all in a straight line poo-pooh’d the idea, suggesting that such things were overly picky and not to be worried about. Jump forward a couple of years to the recording of Not Dancing For Chicken, and I discover that by borrowing the Small Person’s mixing desk, I can put the various looping devices in auxiliary channels and make everything much tidier and the signal much cleaner…

On the preliminary sessions for Not Dancing For Chicken, Jez and I set about recording it in his studio. ‘shall we put each looper and processor into a separate channel on the computer?’ asks jez. No, says I, cos I want to be able to record it all through a mic’d bass amp… One failed session later I realise that on studio recordings, mic’ing bass amps for reverb and hifi regenerating delay sounds is probably not such a great idea. Still, I then went home and recorded the entire album in stereo when I could fairly easily have separated it all out if I’d not been fixated on my one way of doing things… Fast forward once again to this latest album that I’m just finishing up, and having finally bought a mixing desk with insert sends on each channel, I’ve been able to record the signal from each of the G2s and each of the Echoplex onto separate tracks, making the signal cleaner, the mix far more maleable and the end result my best yet…

So those, along with various other options I really should have taken up a long time ago have lead me to a place where I have a hugely versatile set up, incorporating about 5 years worth of accumulated advice, all of it seemingly on a three year slow release mechanism… From a mono rig with a bass combo at one end and only one looper with no feedback control at the other to my current set up which is stereo live and has six different channels in the studio, allows me to use one of the processors before or after the loops, or both, loop from one EDP to the other, fade one, sync them, apply effects from the Kaoss pad and pan any of the above signals to anywhere in the stereo field – it’s been a fun journey thus far.

Having said all that, my rate of technological uptake has kept pace with the speed at which I’ve learned what each bit of kit does. I got good with the JamMan, then added the G2, got good with those before adding the Line 6 DL4, swapped the JamMan for an Echoplex which then became two echoplexes, then added the kaoss pad and a simple mixing desk and finally added a second MPX-G2 and a more complex desk… If I’d just gone out about bought the set up I have now five years ago, I’d have had no idea what to do with any of it…

so there you go.

Soundtrack – me! oh yes, the new album is pretty much finished to pre-master stage – I’m just tidying up some mix elements before sending it off to Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering to add his fairy dust to it. I’ve mastered all the previous CDs myself, but this one deserves the full treatment. theo put me onto Denis, and it transpires that he’s mastered albums with me on before… However, the bit that sold me on him was that he mastered Spirit Of Eden by Talk Talk, which is one of my all time favourite albums. So he’s the man for the job!

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Two more great gigs and The Godfather Pt II

so, what’s been happening?

Last Friday night, Evil Harv and I went to see The Pixies at Brixton Academy. I’d really really been looking forward to this, having missed them when they were around last time (I lived in Berwick on Tweed, so didn’t get to go to many gigs!). Graham Coxon, the ex-Blur guitarist was the support, and was surprisingly good – I didn’t really have high expectations, but his blend of Blur’s noisier moments (it becaume clear what his part in their sound was) and the 80s american hardcore of bands like Husker Du and Black Flag was marvellous. Fine voice and some great guitar playing.

Then the Pixies came on, and played non-stop for over an hour. Not a word was said between songs, no breaks, no nothing, just out of one song into the next. It was marvellous. Loads of stuff from Doolittle and Surfer Rosa. All fantastic. A brilliant brilliant gig.

Saturday night, the small person and I went to see the new Harry Potter film – The Prisoner of Askerban. I enjoyed the other two, but this is the best of the three so far. Darker, faster moving, better acting from the three main kids, a great cameo by Gary Oldman as the Prisoner. Excellent stuff.

and Sunday was Godfather Pt II – regular blogsters will remember I was godfather to Angus a few months back, and on Sunday I was godfather to Charlie. Forgot to take any photos, but I’m sure there were plenty taken, so I’ll see if I can get hold of one for here. A ‘triffic day – Jonny and Rosie Didj are Charlie’s mum and dad, and live on a barge, so the party afterwards was marvellous. Much fun. And of course, I get to be Charlie’s godfather as he grows up, and with him and Angus being around the same age, I can take them both out to weird gigs as they get older! :o)

Monday morning Evil Harv MSN’s me offering a free ticket to see Peter Gabriel. I saw him last time round, and it was amazing, so a bit of diary juggling, and I was able to drive straight from a recording sesh at Jez’s in the afternoon in Oxford to Wembley for the gig.

Two support acts, the first one playing what sounded like Lloyd-Webber/Ben Elton compositions – crappy west end show tunes that did nothing for me at all. Second one was an african dude with a guitar who was much better.

Then Peter and band came on. Any chance to see Tony Levin play is a treat, the guy’s a bass legend and a genius. Another mindblowing gig. Lots of clever staging, lighting and of course Peter and his daughter zipping round the stage on Segway HTs – I SOOOOO want one, but they’re a bit pricey… if anyone should feel like buying me one, please get in touch… ;o)

the set was similar to the last gig, though I don’t remember there being a huge train wreck in the middle of Salisbury Hill – someone in the band lost their place completely, and I think Peter had to count them back in! After the show, it took me almost an hour to get from Wembley back to the North Circular!! grrrrr.

On the recording front, I’ve got a version of the album finished, which is nice as it gives me a strong reference point. Anything that I record now that’s better than what’s on there, I can swap into the album, or it can go towards it being a double… lots of fun.

Soundtrack – once again, me me me…

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more great live music in London.

Given that he’s so supremely crap at ever letting me know when he’s got a gig on, it was a rare pleasure to see theo travis play with his quartet at Pizza Express on Dean Street (this distinction is an important one, given that Dean Street Pizza Express is a proper jazz club, as opposed to a pizza restaurant with a couple of blokes in the corner playing some jazz…)

Anyway, it was a double bill, with Aussie bossa singer, Karen Lane, who was very good indeed, helped along by having Andy Hamill on bass – one of my favourite double bassists anywhere…

Theo’s quartet also featured Andy, along with Marc Parnell on drums and Simon Colam on piano, looking almost exactly like Howard Jones did 20 years ago… Mixing Theo’s prog fetish with acoustic jazz, his is one of the finest jazz quartets I’ve seen in a long time. It’s mad that bands this good aren’t put on in double bills with the big american jazz stars that come over – it’d be a great way to expose the Barbican and SBC-going masses to some home-grown talent. There aren’t many of the american young jazzers that could keep up with Theo’s quartet, or Ben Castle‘s quartet.

So what else is new? Well, my copy of Adobe Audition 1.5 arrived this morning – which rather helpfully supports VST plugins so I’ve got loads more to choose from, which is nice… Just recorded a fun jazzy piece, with lots of backwards looping, which as with everything else I’m doing may or may not end up on the album. It’s track #25 to be recorded though, so the chances of it being a double album are pretty strong…

Soundtrack – mememememememe.

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adventures in multimedia

yesterday I downloaded the 30 day trial version of Adobe Audition – a bit of multitrack recording software, that used to be called Cool Edit Pro. I used the Cool Edit version at Luca‘s house in Italy earlier in the year and really liked it, so in prep for doing this new album, I thought I’d get it, but I’m just trying out this download version first before spending the cash on buying it.

So I’ve been recording some new tracks, with the direct bass signal and the loops on separate tracks. I still need to get a new Soundcard, as the one I’ve got only has four inputs, and I need at least two more in order to record the post-processed signal as well as the other stuff, and could do with 8 in order to record other people as well. So I’m probably going to get another M-Audio Delta 44, which is what I’ve already got – the software will happily managed multiple cards, and it’ll be cheaper tha replacing it.

on top of that, I’ve been taking more web-cam photos, so here’s a few moody Black and White ones…

Soundtrack – Calamateur, ‘the old fox of ’45’; Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’; some new recordings that Luca Formentini and I made back in March that he’s just sent to me, and rather fine they are too!

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