It’s often been said by those of us in Casa that this band needs lights.  This ranges from a need for small clip-on lights so that people can read their pad of music (the horn section complains that their parts are more complicated than the rhythm section’s, because they’ve got, like, notes and stuff?  So they can’t memorise them), up to a full set of stage lights, lasers, dry ice, mirror balls, and fireworks.  The reason we haven’t bought lights yet is that they’re just one more piece of kit to lug around, and given that Dave, our drummer, already looks after our PA, and he knows full-well we’d get him to carry the lights too, he’s vetoed it.  However, for the gig we did on Saturday we were presented with a large, souless hall with two possible lighting settings: inquisition glare or moonless midnight.  Fortunately we had Derek on drums, and he has a friend who was willing to lend us 3kW of lighting rig at short notice.  For once we looked totally professional!  Err… ok, we were a bit easier to see on stage.  But, given that I carted the lights home and returned them on Sunday, I think Dave has a point: more kit is A Bad Thing.  I think that in the next life I’ll be a singer and just roll up to gigs with a microphone.

(Oh, one more thing: if you click on the photo to view the original on flickr, look closely and you’ll be able to see Derek’s ‘tache in the wild.)

I’d request your presents as well, but perhaps that’s asking a bit much.  Anyway, we’re playing a gig at B Bar this Thursday, the 21st day of August 2008.  Come down.  Buy beer.  Dance.  Or just sit stoney faced and stare at us, it’s what the crowd did last time.  We’re on from 9 and it costs nothing to see us, so it’s credit-crunch friendly too.  And as long as you avoid the Erdinger I’m sure it won’t even affect your productivity on Friday.

Acuphuncture played the opening set at Clare Ball on Monday night, at the work-friendly time of 9 til 10.30PM.  This of course meant that we played to an empty tent, because most punters arrive at a ball and immediately head for the food and booze; the biggest crowd we had was mainly thanks to the band who were on after us, The Anomalies.  Incredibly we even managed a soundcheck, thanks to the Anomalies finishing their check on time, however due to the usual fucked communications at a May Ball, the tech sheet we had submitted hadn’t been passed on to the sound guy.  This meant that Myke (our intrepid multi-instrumentalist and backing vocals chap) had to channel all of his musical output through the single remaining SM58 that the soundman had brought.  Irritating.  Our set up on stage was made even more complicated by the headline act, The Delays, refusing to allow any of their kit to be moved after it had been set up, resulting in us being perched in a long line across the front of an already less than generously sized stage.  The Delays are obviously cunts.  Still, the gig went ok, though our linear set-up meant that we had a few communication issues.

Casa kicked off this year’s May Week festivities with a gig at Hughes on Saturday night/ Sunday morning.  (Is it wrong to make a Phil Collins reference in a post?)  Booked from 1AM to 3AM, that was actually pretty much the times we played.  We were preceded by a pair of guys doing rock covers; both played guitar and sang, and used backing tracks to fill in for the rest of the band.  They were quite good, and I felt sure that if I’d challenged them with any guitar-based number from the 50s onwards they’d have been able to play it.  I bet they go down a treat at weddings.  They also had the gear issue totally sorted; both used a pair of mic’ed up 1×10″ combos combined with Boss multi FX units, and the tones they got were frankly ROCKING.  Size isn’t everything, kids.

The gig itself was good, though I was severely flagging towards the end of the second set.  In fact of all the things that happened on Saturday, by far the most remarkable was walking out of the underpass next to Hyde Park and being passed by the of the World Naked Bike Ride.  The word peloton is apparently derived from the French for ball.  It was never more appropriate.

I just got back from a gig with Acuphuncture.  This is what I learned this gig:

1. It takes a non-zero amount of time to load my gear into the car.  (Though I learn this every gig and forget by morning.)
2. Effects pedals have little red lights on them to tell you when they’re on.  These are rendered useless by a fuck-off huge red stage light pointing at them.
3. Grappa, whilst MANKY, is the only spirit left in the house.

Acuphuncture played at a bar in town on Wednesday night, which was a pleasant change from the soulless gymnasium we played in last time. My challenge this time was to play along with Katie on the melody for Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly, and it revealed that while I’ve got my 16ths and general timing a lot more together than it has been in the past, I’ve mainly been focussed on bass playing, and so most of my practice has been on short, repetitive, one or two bar phrases. The melody for Butterfly mixes long sustained notes with syncopated linking phrases, and this highlighted that while I can count 16ths through short sections, I will often stop counting during long notes and so end up losing my place. Still, I think I managed to muddle through well enough, and it’s something I’ll keep working on.

Other than that minor worry for myself, the gig went well! Hopefully they’ll invite us back to play again; it’d be nice to get some more regular gigs with Acuphuncture, as it’s a fun band to play in. Currently there are a few mp3s that I recorded (using my minidisc player as discussed previously, so not great quality) available here, so you can check it out for yourself (though I forgot to turn the machine on at the start of the gig, so we lost Chameleon).

Casa played at a local company’s summer BBQ on Sunday; this time I was on guitar, with Diccon on bass. I decided to take along my minidisc recorder to to tape the gig; last time I’d used it, the damn thing gave up half-way through and lost a load of good stuff, and Tom had asked me to record this Wednesday’s Acuphuncture gig at La Raza, so I wanted to make sure there was nothing seriously wrong with the MD.

The great thing about real life is that usually when you make a mistake, the passage of time will gently ease you further and further from the source of your embarrassment. This protection is removed, of course, by the creation of some permanent record; one can enjoy every crap solo, mis-timed bit of rhythm playing, and pencil-thin distortion tone again and again and again to one’s heart’s discontent. How enervating.

I’ve actually noticed this a few times before; I think I’ve got a reasonable live tone, or at least one that’s surprisingly recognisable as “me” despite using various guitars and a couple of amps. However, every time I listen to a recording of bands I’m in, I think I sound shit. They say tone is in the fingers: it seems my fingers are brown. There are a few samples available here, though I’m actually only playing in one of the three that are there at the moment (I always grab some percussion for the latin tunes). I don’t know, maybe I’m my own worst critic. This gig was supposed to be a boost towards this Wednesday’s gig with Acuphuncture at La Raza, but now I’m just worried.

I had a relatively light May Week; only four gigs, no ridiculously late/early starts and nothing mid-week.  All the gigs were for Casa (though not for lack of hassling Ball organisers about hiring Acuphuncture), and all went fairly well.  The only real events of note were a tripped fuse in the middle of our set at Hughes Hall resulting in an impromptu trad jazz moment with horns and drums (it also made me grateful that I always connect my amp via a surge protector: who knows what happens to the supply when a fuse trips), and the near total lack of realistic organisation on the part of the guys at Darwin ball, who assumed it took approximately zero time and space for a nine-piece band to set up, and that monitors aren’t necessary, despite what we told them beforehand.  Ah well, they’ll know in future.

Of course, no matter how much you practice your sight reading, if everyone in the band is working from a transcription that’s in a different key things are going to sound bad.  Very, very bad.  In one song we played think we had the horns working from a C part that I also had a copy of, so I was a tone out from them, but our keys player had a different transcription that was a fourth away from that… it was rather jazz, shall we say.

At least the rest of the gig went well, and I got to jump between guitar and bass fairly often, which was good (I just don’t get enough gigs on guitar at the moment).  Which is unlike what happened to some small unheard of outfit called the Police, as Stuart Copeland describes on his website.  That sounds like a nightmare from start to finish.  I don’t know whether it’s reassuring that the professionals can make such mistakes, or whether it’s galling to think that however much you work at it there will always be shit gigs.

I’ve been away, hence the slight hiatus in posts. Acuphuncture played at Jazz at John’s on March 2nd, which was a nice bit of repeat business, though with all the same presentational issues of the last time: why do they hire a big PA and sound guy set up, yet insist on keeping all the house lights up? Hire some lights, guys, it’s supposed to be a party! Regarding the sound, I’m starting to wonder about Mulletboy’s style; I remember Derek commenting on the recording from last year’s gig that his kit sounded like a huge rock monster, and the same effect was achieved with Seb’s kit this time (Seb kindly standing in for Derek whilst the latter was off doing a big band gig.)  Still, disregarding this stylistic difference, it’s difficult to fault the quality of the sound, so I shouldn’t split hairs.

Support was provided by a random student band that apparently was going to be the house band for a play later in the term… though they didn’t play anything from their show, instead doing a bunch of Commitments style covers.  It was passable enough, though a little difficult to explain what the hell they were doing at a jazz gig until the chap who organised the evening turned out to be in the band.  Ah ha.

Unusually everything ran pretty much according to schedule, so we played 10.30 ’til midnight, with a setlist that only included one new cover, Jamiroquai’s High Times.  (I’m particularly pleased to be covering this because it contains one of my favourite guitar solos - it’s not tricky, it’s just right.)  Because of the busy-ness that I’ve mentioned previously I hadn’t done much practice, so I opted to substitute volume for skill and took my big amp.  This actually turned out to be fortuitous, because our on-stage levels were up in the ear-buggering zone; generally I’ll run the amp in half power (20W), but I had to take it up to full power to maintain a reasonable clean tone.  However the foldback was able to cope nicely, so despite the volume we were all able to hear what was going on.  All told, not a bad gig; I’ll have to start doing my bit and see if I can land some others, because I think Tom’s sorted them all out so far…

I was back on guitar last night for the final gig of the Christmas season, Casa del Funk plus special guest appearances by Diccon on bass and Derek on keys. After the comedy levels hassles I had last week, I had vaguely intended on simplifying my set-up and just taking a wah. As it was I actually took an extra pedal (a delay) and swapped the flanger for a phaser. I can’t resist having an overly complicated set-up; last night the drummer nearly beat me in packing-up time. Last week I ran the pedals in-line infront of the amp, so the signal chain went guitar -> flanger -> wah -> compressor -> amp input. My reasoning for this was that I like the wah to have the percussive wakka-chikkas (technical term there, kids) at the same volume as normal notes, so I put the compressor after it to squash the dynamic range. I also figured if might help reduce any perceived volume differences from the flanger, and also I inferred from here that modulation effects might have an interesting sound at the front of the chain. Anyway, as I said last week I couldn’t get the levels to sit still, so spent the evening madly fiddling with the settings when not actually playing.

This week I thought I’d go all conventional and set up like this: guitar -> compressor -> wah -> amp in -> fx out -> phaser -> delay -> fx return ( -> amp speaker out -> 2×12 cab -> compression wave in air -> audiences’ ears). Anyway, this was a lot more successful; I also combined it with my lesson re-learned of having the amp’s volume set so that the quietest sound (coil-tapped humbuckers and pickup selector in the middle, so out of phase and half-power compared to a full humbucker) was at the right level, and for every other pick-up and effect setting I just turned the guitar’s volume down.

Of course, despite the fact that I had what I felt was a reasonable tone and level (apart from thinking that my Boss CS-2 is perhaps a bit aggressive, which led me to leave it turned off as much as possible last night, however I did need it to get to the sustain required for Smooth), I couldn’t play for shit. Still, at least it was nice-sounding shit. Must do more practice. (How many of my posts end with that sentence? Too many, I bet.)

Casa del Funk played for charity at Hughes last night. Due to Mark being off in Japan I shifted back up the octave to guitar and Diccon filled in on bass. I’d got quite excited about the prospect of taking my big amp out on the road again, and had been thinking about what effects set-up I was going to go for. I also wanted to try out my recent guitar purchase (a Patrick Eggle Berlin with coil-tapped humbuckers). Having recently picked up one of those effects power brick thingies from Maplins I felt it was appropriate to take a few toys, so I went with my compressor, wah and flange. As it turned out, between the two channels and two master volumes of the amp, the wildly different volumes of the full pickups vs. tapped, and the perceived volume changes from the effects, I couldn’t get a decent level or tone out of the amp. Disappointing. Well, it was until I just turned everything off (apart from the wah when necessary), turned the amp up and ran the show from the guitar’s volume and tone controls. It’s a lesson that I keep forgetting: the dials on the front of the guitar aren’t just for decoration, much musical gain can be made there.

Actually the Maplins power brick, while generally fine, has one hassle for me: the power cables supplied with it aren’t very long, so your effects end up a bit packed in; I’m not the most delicate of stomper mid-gig, so like my pedals suitably spaced apart.

Anyway, I get to try again next Thursday with what appears to be the last gig of the year for me, playing guitar for Casa at one of the college’s MCR Christmas dos. Antlers and Santa hats strictly optional.