A somewhat unproductive weekend

So despite having some good oppo's for music making this weekend, events conspired against me. Although I did give it the good old college try and recorded some bass parts at home yesterday evening, bloody bass is hard though! I just found out that the chap whose bass i was using had a baby last week which is some jolly good news! The main irritation was a model village recording session which petered out somewhat due to my inability to sing a note when i have such a bad cough/ cold. DISAPPOINTING, still ever onward.

to go electric or acoustic

On the one hand, I do enjoy my rattly acoustic guitar, with it's sharp edge frets and beautiful sticky marks from all the all access upstairs at the garage stickers I used to put on it. However, sometimes I want my fingers not to hurt quite so much, so I dug out my firebird, and also Piers' tele custom, and tried a few tunes on each. I realised that I'd not really played electric guitar for ages, probably not since the gig we did with casiotone for the painfully alone before christmas. Shocking, anyway, I dig it, but now the question is, how to record it? Previously I've mic'd my marshall mini amp with a wierd fake sm 57 that I got off the previously mentioned Mr Phill Rodgers, but I think I may hit ebay and see if I can score one of the sennhaiser e609 type mic's. We used that on Gareth's Vox AC15, when we recorded the Felix album. Nice sounds, to my ears! However I was quite surprised to find that I prefer playing my firebird, which seems to have lived a pretty seriously hard life, and had to have a lot of loving care from Jon Free. Here's a small pic' of it fret damage not pictured! Anyway the pickups are as microphonic as douglas baders metal legs, but it's easy to play, the tele' has a massive neck to my hands.. Now i just need to get dig my hagstrom out from behind the coat stand, the shoe rack, the laundry and a deconstructed ikea sofa bed!

Plans!

The whole sick crew is nothing if not pragmatic, and it came to me in a flash that a smart thing to do would be to record drums to a few songs at a time so as to minimise fuss, mess, complications, etc, and also add a bit of cohesiveness. So with that in mind, I recorded some more basic guitar and vocal tracks for the three old parts of what I'm trying to do. This involved me going on last.fm and checking the arrangement of one song, EmV, which in turn lead me to listen to some of my friends records from the same time particularly reynolds and their mighty tune Friday Bridge To get to March. I think Phill Rodgers should've kept his 24 track Akai hard disk recording thing and carried on knocking out good records in his basement. I occasionally think whistfully of what might have been had econoline not wasted £2,500 of someone elses money recording with other people and then thinking the tunes he did sounded better. Ho hum. Meeting Chris Summerlin from Reynolds on a train was very probably the only long term worthwhile thing I did whilst living in Welwyn a horrifying place in all respects!
Anyway so I recorded EmV, partly because it was the first decent song I wrote on guitar (i think), back in 1999 when I had my beautiful Dearmond Jetstar, (as pictured, though that isn't mine). It was an amazing guitar, which I sold to a friend for not much when I was potless, and then, when I had money and was after buying it back, it turned they gave it to their boyfriends niece, such is life!
Back to the tunes, the other reason EmV is appropriate is because it's all about the character V, from the book V. I don't just throw this together you know! I am also going to my loving tribute to pettiness, jealousy and rage, "I want to work" largely because I think it's quite fun to play. Which is a good enough reason right? This way, when I do get some time to go to Half ton, (the dates offered clashed with cavalier practice and a night of Tom looking after), I will be able to set up, and record at least three tunes. If I decide which my three borrowed tunes will be, I may even be able to get some more done. More on those crucial decisions another time!

done something!

So my weekend sojourn in the fortress of unsolitude that is a 15 person weekend in Elevden Centre Parcs inspired me to do some recording, and as it happens I have the house to myself tonight and tomorrow as Jane's mum's been a victim of the sheet ice that replaced the UK streets last week, nasty. So, anyway, Jane and Tom have gone to cheer her up. You'd never tell from the state of the front room though, as seen to the left. I decided that i probably wouldn't end up keeping the acoustic tracks I record now, for one thing I coudn't find my lovely closed back headphones so the click was bleeding into the mic when I was doing the over the shoulder positioning, so I went for a point the mic' at the 12th fret on the fingerboard and just get the sound approach. After a number of run throughs and a bit of squeaky chair noise that I was able to deal with by simply not moving while playing. I got something down that I was happy with, and did some very slapdash vocals too, to aid with the feel. So tomorrow I'm going to go completely mental and try and record some (very quiet) drums here! I will start early, and hopefully therefore not get murdered, once I have the drums, I'll redo the acoustic, lay some bass and slide on and then do a few vocal tracks, and bang the tune is done. To that end I'm off now to put a new strainer on my snare drum!

recording acoustic guitar

So now i have to figure this out, how to record my lame encore steel guitar and not make it sound like a lame encore steel guitar. I'm thinking take the LDC I have over my shoulder like my ear? As I quite like the sound. I have a really nice pickup courtesy of Mr P Chandler, as well. Hmmm, it's probably awful, but I love that box, it was an 18th birthday present from my brother. My niece, who was 18 herself last year, came in from the car before my brother and asked me "do you like your guitar?", somewhat spoiling the surprise. Never mind though, one can hardly hold 2 year olds responsible for such things (although secretly i did!). Probably no posts this weekend as I'm going on the first family holiday I have had since I was about 11, strangely I am now the dad. Centreparcs, are you ready?

"studio" time

So i've decided I'm going to record the drums for this first tune in the Portland arms. It seems a good idea since the place is under threat, so I may even have one of their massive burgers between recording one tune and practice with cavalier, and FIGHT THE POWER. The big live room should give me ample opportunity to get some room sound going on. Maybe I'll do the recorder man thing



with my sdc naiant mic's and use my Rode LDC as a distant room mic. Hmmmmm decisions, decisions!

DRUM THRONE

So my Mapex Drum THRONE arrived, Jane and I laughed at the hubris of the Mapex dudes with their "throne" which was delivered in it's own special box, but hot damn! This thing is comfy. I envision much bum (and spine) related comfort to come!
LOOK AT IT! I might take it to work and use it as an office chair.

missed a day

But i did figure out how to play the tune I want to record! HOORRAY! I'm thinking acoustic guitar, slide, bass, and drums.

This dude looks like Casey Kasem from America's top 10, brilliant late night tv from my teen years. Maybe that's why I'm into his drum tuning vid's. Not that I've looked at a lot of them, I intend to follow his heavily accented advice at the soonest conveniance, probably monday. When I'm rehearsing at the portland, which I hear may not be much longer for this world. Which would be a shame, it's the first place I played in Cambridge way back in 2001, and I think every band I've been in since then has had a really good gig there, econoline with blood red shoes, black horse with racoo-oo-oon,ellie walker and the group hugs with The Pony Collaboration, hey colossus with gruel, admittedly i wasn't in the band at the time, but still I did play on that bill with ripping yarns, who also had a great show there with the dudley corporation. Also my most recent start cavalier played a good show (in the sense that the other band was good) with Ungdomskullen who ruled. So it would sadden me to see the end of the portland, but then, what can you do, the march of time etc. Apparently people need more posh flats and less nice pubs to drink/ rock in. Which is a shame.

thursday night fever

Had lots of friends round tonight and one very sleepless baby, but still managed to sneak in a bit of bass drum fixing, nice to get things done! Now all i need to do is figure out
a) how to tune them
b) where to tune them!

lots of videos online, but it's late and I keep hacking up flem with blood in! Good night!

Got some studio time pencilled

The ever willing bugs at
Half Ton has clued me in to some free evenings in the studio later in the month. Mayhap I will get a more than one bit of drums done. I intend to record drums using the tried and true Glyn johns method. I realised last time I recorded that I'd been doing it wrong for ages, as I'd been using omni condenser mic's instead of cardioid, what a div. I am eternally grateful to the people on the forum at electrical audio for all the masses of useful info that can be gleaned from it! The Glyn Johns method for drum recording is awesome in it's simplicity, as pictured! All of this exciting news comes amidst more snow, sadly not enough to close my place of work, or failing that destroy it completely, I wander if there are ever any Tsunami in essex?

and so on

So in what could be seen as another push for me to get on with this, someone quit one of the bands I play in today. See, i need to be in a band that consists entirely of me, and then I only have myself to blame for inactivity! I've decided the first tune I'm going to record is one that I wrote for one band I played in
ripping yarns, and ended up playing in another band, model village. However neither band seemed particularly into it, but I dig it, it's about growing up and not being such a bad person all the time. Something I can thoroughly recommend. It's called "I feel like Lou Reed", it's a reference to "I've been tired" by the pixies, cos hey i was often tired and didn't make much sense when I was younger.

but directly relates to the Lou Reed album, Berlin, versus the Velvet Underground tune, "I found a reason" from Mark Radcliffe's "best rock album ever" Loaded. Which is an awesome song with an amazing talky bit, "i found a reason to keep on living, and baby that reason is you" even if he's taking the piss. I'm not.

watching face/off!

Not having seen this movie before, I am somewhat surprised by how thoroughly lame it is! Perhaps this speaks more to my foolishness than anything else? Seriously though, terrorists, that are American, who do one liners? Who would believe such a thing, and that's before the titular face/ off gubbins! Anyway. I was back at work today, it was as bad as could be expected. SO. The Whole Sick Crew, game plan, tactics, etc. I intend to record one song a month for a year, split into quarters, like you know, at work and stuff. So the quarters will be

Old, winter (three old songs I've had around for a while)
Borrowed, spring (three songs by other people)
Blue, Summer (I don't like summer much, three songs about bad t'ing)
New, Autumn (I like autumn best and this gives me a chance to write three new songs between now and the end of the year, which is a pretty big ask what with all the other stuff going down around these parts!)

This came to me last week when I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed on my side watching my wife and son sleep, we were all sick over christmas, just colds and that, just enough to put us off the booze! I think that helped me think of all this business instead. I have been a little worried that this is a waste of time, or at least not the best use of my time, but then i was trying to google image search a picture of nicolas cage from face/ off and found the blog of some chap who can offer wicked advice on how to make exact replicas of the fancy guns nicolas cage's character has in the movie. So all in all, I don't feel so bad about my little plan. At least it doesn't involve lethal weapons.

Sunday 3rd

3 days into the new year, so I thought I'd try and get some more thoughts down. For a little while I've been wanting to actually finish some music for my own satisfaction.
Quite a few years ago I had an idea that I wanted to record a song for each place I'd lived in, that was a paper idea for a long time, but was never really practical or particularly inspiring (i lived in a lot of depressing and/ or boring places), but I got around to having a band name, "the whole sick crew".
I'm pretty sure there's a million bands with that name, but since I never intend to play live, or sell a tune, I think i'll get away with it. The name comes from the Thomas Pynchon novel "V". The edition i have is from 1975, the year of my birth, and the cover is over there on the left.
V was Pynchon's first novel, I read several of his later books first, and got to V' in about 1998, when I was finishing university, I think I read more books that year than before or since, I guess displacement activity is a good way to expand your reading list. It probably would have helped if i wasn't trying to finish a chemistry degree though.
V is the old story, man loves possibly imaginary female personification of desire, loses her, retraces his unreliable father's diary, gets involved in some strangeness and then finally finds her and she appears to be a clockwork robot. You know how it goes?
Anyway, I always liked this particular cover, i like to think it pictures main crazy man, Herbert Stencil and the rather bad lot who comprise the whole sick crew in the midst of one of their swinging do's. I came by the book in a rather underhand way, my apologies go out to Putney library, a very nice building there on the right. It's a long time ago now, though, perhaps a veil could be drawn?
The Whole Sick Crew, represents the absolute apotheosis of how I've always lived. I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of parties I've been to which didn't end up with me feeling somewhat depressed, but that's why I like the name really. Incongruity.
So, when I decided that this year I would actually use all the various bits and pieces of musical equipment and recording gear I have lying around the house and finish some music, rather than as a potential obstacle course for my soon to be toddling son. I thought I'd use the name, it seemed even more pleasingly incongrous, because I intend to be my own one man whole sick crew. I'm going to use this blog to post pic's and video's from recording and maybe even writing, although that's probably less visual. More on libraries and the over arching plan tomorrow.

day 2

home to Cambridge to start the whole sick crew year of music making larks, hi jinxx, etc. More plans tomorrow and monday, but essentially a song a month, all done my me, recorded by me, maybe some video's by me, probably some terrible artwork by me and all.

pinch, punch first of the month

A post a day, but not always much to say