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.

This is how I spent the weekend: doing wedding stuff. The above is Chittering Barns, which is very pretty and set in some great countryside, but it’s just a touch too small for what we think we need… hmmm. And on Sunday Kyla and I plus the inlaws went around a wedding fair. If you’re a bit peckish, find the nearest wedding fair and pop in - there’s so much freebie cake and chocolate that after being there for an hour or so I thought I’d given myself type II diabetes. Nice.

War on Terror, the boardgame; fantastic work from the lads who made the We’re All Neighbours site. As they say,

Everyone starts with the best intentions. Then things start to get cramped. Then you notice your neighbour has more oil than you. Before long, war is waged, nukes are dropped, revolutions are fought and terrorists are doing your dirty work, before turning on you…

Pre-purchase to make it happen!

It’s that time again: the CD rack is full and I don’t want to have another cluttering the living room, so it’s time to weed my musical garden. The last time I did this I thought I’d been quite successful, until a few months later I was suddenly left wondering where all my Faith No More CDs had gone. And the Crow soundtrack. WHERE HAD ALL MY ROCK GONE? Fortunately I’d kept Appetite for Destruction so all was not lost. At least these days I can archive the songs I like on a computer and pass the actual CD on to a charity store (so while still technically illegal, I’m effectively giving money to charity so I get a slight warm glow inside). For your amusement I present a list of Stuff That I Listened To Once But Not Anymore, a cautionary tale of one boy and HMV’s never-ending sale:

• Extreme - III Sides To Every Story. This purchase demonstrates one of the main reasons I’ll misguidedly acquire albums. I like Extreme’s Pornograffiti album a lot, though never had a copy of my own. Therefore I bought this album. It’s not as good. (Though Rest In Piece does rock.)
• Van Halen - III. See above: I liked Balance a lot. I don’t own Balance. I buy III instead, particularly after reading a lot on the intermaweb about the development of the guitar that Eddy uses on this album. The guitar might be good, but sadly the album isn’t. Hmmm, two hair metal albums, both with the Roman numeral III in the title. Maybe there’s a pattern…
• Various artists - React test 3. A brief dalliance with techno. So brief in fact that I don’t think I actually listened to this album. Good job it was only three quid. (Hang on, another “3″!)
• Lo-Fidelity Allstars - How to operate with a blown mind. The other thing I’m prone to: buying albums on the strength of one tune. Battle Flag rocks bells, the rest of the album’s crock smells. (OK, that rhyme was poor and contrived.)
• Golden Claw Musics - All Blue Review. Weird water based ambient stuff by a chap who used to be in Pop Will Eat Itself. I liked PWEI a lot. This was a damp squib.
• Steve Vai - Firegarden. The album where I finally tired of Mr Vai. Generally uninspiring, but I do like Warm Regards.
• Alisha’s Attic - Alisha Rules The World. Honestly, what in Satan’s arse was I thinking here. Actually I was given this as a gift. Honest.

Why this sudden need for space, you may ask. Well, I’ve been trying to expand my classical music collection, and now own some Beethoven, Grieg and a lot of Debussy. My problem with classical music is the same as my problem with house music: there’s loads of it out there, but I have no idea which bits are any good.

Another entry in the Kids Do The Craziest Things competition, it’s a crazy drum solo video. I sense another pushy father behind this one. There’s some very impressive double bass pedal skills on display, and it’s nice to see him just groove out a few times; I particularly like the disco shit he’s got going on at about 6min11s. And then there’s a classic “Twirl one stick over your head while going crazy nuts with the remaining three limbs” moment at about 5min50s. Bonkers. (Spotted by another Fenland correspondant, Chris.)

End it now! It’s been quiet on this site for a while for a couple of reasons.

1. Kyla and I have got engaged. Yes, finally. This means my time is being increasingly occupied by making lists of everyone I know and ranking them in order of “Do I want you at my wedding”-ness, and searching for venues for the ceremony etc. The actual proposal was a delightful combination of planned and unplanned, in that I’d been thinking about it for about six month and hence the plans were escalating wildly up to something like “Whisk Kyla away to hill overlooking lake, arrange for incredible sunset by having people living near horizon create large quantity of airbourne dust, propose. Iif reply is positive, cue fireworks.” What actually happened was that I proposed in a curry house. I can’t work out what annoys me more, the fact that I proposed in a curry house or the fact that it wasn’t even our favourite curry house.
2. My company has merged and moved to a new office. The location of my desk is now such that everyone else in the office can see what I’m up to. So no more idle surfing.

So there you go! But I do have some other stuff to write about, so as soon as time and inspiration co-incide again, there will be updates.

Clinical trials are the last phase of drug’s development, where the compound is tested in patients and other willing volunteers (OK, let’s be honest, students) looking for positive and negative effects. As you can imagine, this is a lengthy and expensive process. Sadly, the people who get to name clinical trials are afflicted with some sort of obsession with contrived acronyms, hence we get things like this. Hmmm.

I parked next to a Volkswagen Behemoth in the carpark the other day. (I think it was a Behemoth, it might have been a Leviathan, I’m a bit hazy on car models.) I noticed something was up when I looked out of the side window and was confronted by the VW’s door handle. On getting out, I found that the damn thing’s about the same height as I am! These Chelsea tractors really piss me off, on a global level they use too much petrol dragging their one ton chassis around, and on a personal level the headlights are exactly at my eye height and they’re usually fitted with those fucking ridiculous migraine inducing xenon bulbs, so being followed by one of them for a few miles is the equivalent of backstreet laser eye surgery. At least most of them have taken the pedestrian-killing bull bars off the front, though there are still a few offenders on the streets. There have been a few campaigns against these over-sized kiddy transporters, for example the Alliance Against Urban 4×4s, which has some cracking parking tickets for the anti-4×4 militia to use. This are all very well, but the people who drive these things are highly unlikely to suddenly start thinking about the environmental consequences of their recent purchase. I propose a new method to campaign against the urban 4×4s, one that is targetted directly at the improved driving experience and feeling of safety these cars are supposed to engender: don’t let the fuckers in at junctions. Sounds simple, but while they’re stuck in junction purgatory for four hours, making little Tarquin and Jemima late for school, perhaps they’ll reflect on their environmental crimes. We could all get bumper stickers (I know, car stickers are so 80s, but we need to get the message out somehow) declaring our mission. Either that or we’ll cause the 4×4 drivers to start driving like road-hog pillocks, thus putting their insurance costs up and hopefully making their car financially untenable.
Anyway, it’s just a thought.

George Galloway enters Big Brother house.

Presenter Davina McCall said the MP’s main loves in life are “his daughter, sunbathing and sex”.

… though hopefully he never combines all three.

After reading a few posts over at Bassworld, I decided to review and change my right-hand technique (oo er missus) on bass. Until now I’ve been using my thumb as an anchor on the neck pickup and using two fingers to pluck the strings, keeping my fingers in a plane orthogonal to the plane of the strings (unlike Stanley Clarke, who seems to point his fingers back towards the bridge of the guitar in a video of him that I saw. Weird.) Apaprently it’s easier on the hand if you use a more floating position, not anchored, which also allows you to use your thumb to pluck the strings. At the same time I’ve started working on adding in my ring finger in order to develop a four fingered pattern for rapid 16th note grooves (apparenly this technique was brought to prominence by Matt Garrison, though there is a video demonstrating it over on Mike Flynn’s site here.) Having worked on this technique change for a couple of weeks, I’m not really sure that having a floating right hand position is any more comfortable than an anchored one, but maybe it only becomes obvious at the end of a two hour gig. I’d also kind of assumed that the four fingered thing was going to be another one of those “run before I can walk” kind of things I’m prone to (see my working on Wooten-style open-hammer-pluck stuff for a bit.) However, it suddenly found an application when I was practicing the Jackson 5’s I Want You Back. This has a bastard of a fill in the middle eight after chorus two that looks something like:
4...1...2...3...4...
G ---6---------------6
D --7----7---7------7-
A -7--4-7-5-7------7--
E ------------5-------
(Only something like, I’m not guaranteeing 100% accuracy!) This is a real pain to play with two fingers, but go to four and it’s far simpler. In addition I’ve been working on a tune from the new Jamiroquai album, (Don’t) Give Hate A Chance. This has a fairly mental bassline, the main rhythm of which goes something like:
1...2...3...4...
G ----------------
D --44--44--44--44
A ----------------
E 2---2---4---2---
For me that’s bastard tricky to play with just two fingers at the tempo required, but is made far simpler by playing the D string with index and middle fingers and the E string with my thumb. It’s probably quite possible to play two fingered, but this method means I can be a lot more relaxed about it, which can only be a good thing. It’s nice to find something useful to do with what I had thought was just going to be a technical exercise!

Happy New Year! I wonder if this monitor of mine is set a little bright, can anyone else make anything out in this photo?