Brother Typewriter's Golf Ball

Rediscovering early 90s indie

2010-03-20T09:21:00.003Z

Great reunion gig by Chapterhouse at the Scala in Kings Cross a couple of days ago. "Autosleeper" still sounded as good as it did almost 20 years ago at the Reading Festival. And the drummer still had almost as much hair... this stuff seems to have weathered better than some of the more mushy by-products of that era.

Not going to many gigs these days, but it's nice when a good one turns up once in a while. And many thanks to Mark, who bought me the ticket.

RIP Super Bass Station

2009-07-25T00:40:00.003+01:00

I think my Novation Super Bass Station, purchased for £499 in 1997, has pretty much bitten the dust.

It has had a minor fault since 1999; when you turn the resonance up you get glitching distortion - which can be useful in certain circumstances, but is certainly not what it should be doing. Fortunately, the glitching only manifested itself when using the resonance control manually - not when switching programs via MIDI or the keypad, or when controlling resonance via MIDI CCs - so it wasn't an insurmountable problem. However, it was a pain in the butt.

Things got considerably worse in January this year when in the session in Derbyshire which yielded the "Buffalo Typewriter Sewing Machine" tracks previously documented on this blog, most of the numeric keypad on the Bass Station simply stopped working, and hasn't returned to life since. This means that it's impossible to change things like the arpeggiator settings, velocity sensitivity, or the distortion and chorus effects; the instrument's simply crippled.

I will check out the cost of repairs at the Synthesiser Service Centre or similar outfit, but it may be cheaper to buy the Dave Smith Instruments Mopho (which does all the same stuff except for MIDI/CV conversion) and sell the Super Bass Station on for spares or repair. Which would be a shame... it's a great synth soundwise, excellent oscillators and filter, the best thing available in terms of analogue 'bang for the buck' until the Mopho came out.

But it was just too damn unreliable - probably manufactured using cheap components. Mind you, it's lasted 12 years. We live and learn.

Listening to every Prom

2009-07-21T00:01:00.002+01:00

I got a little project this summer... gonna try to listen to (pretty much) every Prom. (I will probably miss out the last night for obvious reasons).

I'm doing a lot of work at my desk (mainly programming and literature reviews) this summer so why not?

I gave Prom 2 - Haydn's Creation oratorio - a shot today. Now, Haydn is a very long way from being my favourite composer. But if I'm doing this I need to do it properly, so I gave it a shot. And it wasn't that bad. In fact, the first 15 minutes or so - the depiction of the formless void, before anything was created - were great. Almost a 20th century sound. It went a bit downhill after that, but still OK. I think we can safely say that Haydn, whilst not really my cup of tea, wasn't a complete duffer after all.

Proposal for a new guitar tuning

2009-06-27T23:43:00.002+01:00

Something that's always bothered me on the guitar is that the number of semitones between each string is not uniform as you go up. In the standard EADGBE tuning, Of the five between-string intervals, four are 5 semitones (fourths) but the gap between G and B is 4 semitones (a major third).

Why does this matter? To be honest, for 90% of guitarists it probably doesn't. But some of us started off on the bass, and a great thing about the bass is that if you are shifting a riff pattern across strings - say you're going up a fourth (very common in blues, obviously): you can just repeat your pattern one string up. On the guitar, if your pattern involves the G string and then up to the B string, you'll have to remember to go up and to the right one fret (if you're a right-handed guitarist). In most cases this is no great hardship but if you're wanting to play at very high speeds it can be a pain, frankly. At least, I think so.

So what alternative to the standard tuning could we use that would get us to five consistent gaps between the six guitar strings? Well, the most obvious thing to do is to stick with five semitone gaps - i.e. fourths - all the way up. This gives us EADGCF, and indeed some guitarists do use this tuning. However there is one nice feature of standard tuning which is abandoned by this tuning - which is that the top string is no longer 2 octaves above the bottom string. There's a comforting symmetry about this which also helps with the development of harmonic ideas (IMHO). It's not a deal-breaker, but if I could end up with a situation where the top string is an octave multiple of the bottom string, I'd like to.

So how do we get to this holy grail of tunings? My solution is in two steps:

tune the whole guitar in major thirds rather than fourths - i.e. 4 semitone steps rather than 5.
buy a seven string-guitar.

Starting from low E as with standard tuning, this gives you E-A flat-C-E-A flat-C-E. So in terms of the note-span of the open strings, you've got 2 octaves E to E as with the standard tuning, but spread over seven strings rather than six.

the new tuning has certain appealing properties:

phrases can be moved up strings without needing to change the shape to compensate for different gaps between one string and the next. This makes transposition of melodic ideas much easier.
phrases can be moved up an octave just by going up three strings.
Major and minor chord shapes are very simple and can be done over two adjacent frets.

In addition there are certain properties which are interesting - not sure if they are intrinsically positive but I'll mention them anyway:

chord voicings become denser than on the standard tuning.
the open strings play an augmented chord.

The problem is, of course, that you need a 7-string guitar to do it properly. And not many people have those (although you can buy one from heavy metal guitar specialists Ibanez for not much over £300). Not wanting to blow hard cash on an experimental concept until I'm quite sure I'm happy with it, I've retuned one of my old guitars to G-B-Eflat-G-B-Eflat. This tuning presents a reasonable compromise between not wanting to break the lower strings and not wanting the top strings to be too detuned.

I will be experimenting with the new tuning in the next immersion composition session with Burning Lodge and will let you know how I get on.

Live review: Holger Czukay at the Roundhouse, 14 May 09

2009-05-18T21:29:00.003+01:00

Sorry for the complete absence of Golf Ball activity over the last few months - as usual, Giroscope, gardening and work have been taking up my time (in roughly reverse order) and whilst there has been rock and roll activity behind the scenes, it's been badly documented, to say the least.

Over the next month or so I will be getting the Golf Ball back on tee (as it were) with some new stuff including links to the entire Brother Typewriter back catalogue for download, some remix action, effects pedal reviews, and more.

But first, a review of only my second live gig of the year (the first being Eliza Carthy at Chelmsford Civic Theatre last weekend, which I went to just so my wife would have someone to go with really, but in the end it was a very enjoyable gig - I should review that one too really, and I might do soon.) Actually if I count Tony Benn at Ipswich Corn Exchange in March, it's my third gig of the year - Tony was great but didn't play any music, which is why I left him out.

Anyway, this was my first London gig of the year, and it was at the Roundhouse. A one-off performance by former Can bassist Holger Czukay, once in the seventies, now in his seventies. And absolutely brilliant. He shuffled on stage, engaged in some very witty banter with the audience concerning some of his old record deals, and his early video efforts (around the time of his Movies LP; at which time we thought "great. A video retrospective". There were some extremely weird and witty video clips which he apparently recorded for the Can DVD compilation, and a video for the Can song "Mushroom" which featured some amazing old footage of the band.

The rest of the gig was audio-based and featured a huge range of pieces, from bangin' techno and drum and bass (his most recent stuff I think) through weird ethno-lounge-jazz pop through to augmented classical music (he did an amazing piece where he layered avant-garde keyboards over a Schubert string quartet recording - potentially disastrous in theory but brilliant in practice). Some of the tracks were just played back from CD, some featured additional keyboards, electric guitar (a very cool model - looked like a Vox - the same weird shaped guitar that Ian Curtis used on the "Love Will Tear Us Apart" video) or French horn.

There was one new piece featuring (recorded) vocals from Holger's wife against an ominous rumbling backdrop - a song about the London Underground - that apparently went wrong; one of the CDs was dodgy and kept glitching. (Holger said the rehearsal of the piece had been fine - it may have been that the increased humidity in the Roundhouse once the audience was there caused the CD player to skip? Seems a likely explanation). Anyway the weird thing is, the glitch version sounded great - if it hadn't been for Holger shaking his head and attempting a restart, no-one would have known.

There was also a remix of a Stockhausen piece (he "hated remixes" apparently; Holger was his pupil back in the 50s) and some early archive Can material (probably from the same period as the "Delay 1968" album): all fascinating stuff.

SO, brilliant even when it went "wrong": that was my verdict on the gig, and the friends I went with agreed. If Holger Czukay ever plays again in the UK, my advice is to pawn body parts to see him if necessary; you won't regret it.

Buffalo Typewriter Sewing Machine - Part 2

2009-01-18T18:06:00.002Z

Just finishing off my reflections on the session here with a review of the final 5 tracks, which were recorded on the second day:

11. The Champ

I felt we needed some 3/4 hard rock, so I laid down a beat without a click track using Native Instruments' Battery driven from the keyboard. I'm getting better at doing this, and until such time as I get the money and space to buy an electronic drum kit (maybe never), I'm gonna have to carry on getting better. I think once again BSM delivered a killer vocal here. The bass/rhythm guitar backing (from Sewing Machine and Buffalo respectively) rocks out. I enjoyed laying down some hot lead guitar.

12. Toss the Torpedo

Lyrics here derived from Brother Buffalo typing things into the predictive text input of his mobile phone. I'm not sure how else you could come by this sort of stuff. I think this sounds great until I came in with a ludicrous 'horn section' part in a 'whole tone' scale. What happened was that on the patch in Native Instruments Kore, you could actually use a knob to control what scale you were playing in, so I became obsessed with that. Started out in Whole Tone and ended up in "Messiaen IV". And I think that killed the track somewhat. Oh well, we live and learn.

13. Drone Structure

I was really pleased with this one - the Reaktor ensemble "Synth-in-a-Case" (an EMS Synthi AKS clone) provided the basic 'drone structure', to which we added guitar, bass, and ring-modulated slide guitar. It's a rip-off of Experimental Audio Research to some extent but I'm still proud of what we did here.

14. Into the Arms... of the X Factor

Yet another of my free-form story excursions over the top of a tasty backing track. I found a Rick Wakeman style 70s synth patch on Native Instruments' Pro-53 and just went for it. Very funky bass from the Sewing Machine (via the MXR envelope filter pedal) and great guitar from the Buffalo. Nice.

15. Angels of Anarchy

To round off, another great little drone tune - this time more in the style of Spacemen 3. But did the Spacemen ever use melodica and recorder? I don't think so.

So overall, almost certainly the best session I've ever been involved in. Much longer than most of our previous ICS efforts at 56 minutes in total, and perhaps a hard stretch to listen to in one go. But well worth it.

In terms of the technicalities of recording, we used Brother Sewing Machine's "Plan-C" recording set-up and it worked extremely well. It was an experience to be working with a nice mic - AKG I think it was, a step up from the SM58 I normally use. His monitoring and hardware input channels were also top quality. And he had several sets of headphones! Sequencer-wise, I can't pretend to understand much of Cubasis (which is the preferred package of both the Sewing Machine and the Buffalo) but BSM knew his way round it like the back of his hand. Aside from a couple of easily corrected sync problems, everything ran smoothly.

I must also thank BSM and family profusely for feeding and watering us for 2 days, and his next door neighbour for accommodation!

Do we want to do it again? U Betcha!

Buffalo Typewriter Sewing Machine - part 1

2009-01-11T09:23:00.007Z

Just posting an in-depth review of the session by Brother Sewing Machine, Brother Buffalo and myself which took place on the weekend of 3rd and 4th January up in Matlock, Derbyshire and which is currently available on the 'listen to the songs page' at Burning Lodge (and will be posted on the Buffalo Typewriter site once we get it up and running properly, i.e. once I get enough time to get the files FTPed on the site. I hear very faint cries of "SORT IT OUT!" But anyway...

I think this is the best session I've ever been involved in. Now I do tend to say that most months - which is either a good sign, or a sign that I'm insane - but this time I've just listened back almost 2 weeks later and it now sounds much better, to my ears, than it did at the time. And I thought it sounded pretty good at the time...

The quality level is so high that I feel a track-by-track account is certainly helpful. I'll round up any thoughts on technical issues relating to the session at the end.

1. BTSM Theme

This laid down the general vibe for the faster tracks of the session - funky, a bit messy, killer beats from Brother Sewing Machine's seemingly endless collection of loops. That's Brother Buffalo laying down some killer megaphone vocals for ya, and Brother Sewing Machine on the fuzz-bass and melodica (oh yes, the melodica saw heavy use... I laid down some effected clavinet and also a 70s-fusion style synth line using the trusty Korg MS10 - then decided to overdub some screaming guitar over the top as well. Nice start.

2. Party

Here, for the first time in the session, we encounter the utter brilliance that is Brother Sewing Machine in balladeer mode. The lyric is improvised, like most of the session. The chord sequence is the kind of thing I like - 3 pretty standard chords with a slightly odd 4th chord thrown in (G minor/major 7th I believe it is) with Mellotron string samples to give that slight early King Crimson ballad feel. The guitar playing on this (Brother Buffalo) is brilliant.

3. Cybernaut Banjo Man

For this one I think we were trying to do a Damo-Suzuki era Can and throw all our electronics into the mix against a 'motorik' beat. The initial bassline is on the Novation Super Bass Station, which will be taking a trip to the synth service centre soon as more and more of the buttons are failing. I picked up an egg shaker just to hold the beat down a bit more in the absence of a live drummer. The second synth arpeggiator line which is in 7/8 sounded a bit like some kind of robotic banjo to my ears - hence the 'cybernaut banjo man'. Brother Sewing Machine overdubbed another synth line which I then processed in real time using a Zoom 1201 effects unit. I love this one.

4. No Lane Markings

For this one we are into the type of classic chord sequence which Brother Buffalo does just about better than anybody, with those warm major 7ths. Something I've always been lacking is a decent electro-acoustic guitar, but fortunately BSM has a great Yamaha which I just jammed on through the whole thing. The singing here is Brother Buffalo on the verses and BSM on the choruses, which is the reverse of the Buffalo Typewriter Sewing Machine prototype 'Baby Lend' from the October 'Live Lodge' sessions. The backup singing on the choruses didn't quite come off in technical terms but I like it because it reminds me of 70s bands like Man who attempted a harmony vocal, didn't quite have the vocal chops to get there but still managed to thicken the sound up. I was also very pleased with Brother Buffalo's combined piano/synth strings patch. I don't normally like blended patches like that as they remind me too much of 80s workstation keyboards and the rather gloopy sounds associated with the likes of the Korg M1, but here it works well.

5. Big Fat Dirty Beat

The backing loop for this came about because BSM had a loop which he'd constructed for one of the earlier songs but it didn't quite work so we held it over for later use. But when he loaded it in it was glitching all over the place, but it actually sounded fantastic! So we proceeded to play all over it. As with many of the tracks, there is A LOT going on here, and perhaps 7 minutes was pushing it, but it's certainly rock'n'roll. I'll freely admit that the lyrics are ludicrous. In terms of instrumentation we've got:

fuzz guitar

heavy bass

stylophone

vocoded stylophone(!)

melodica

about 5 minutes in, some weird ring modulated guitar sound I found using Native Instruments Kore to process the guitar and I've saved the patch as it was a classic, but I've no idea how the hell I found it.

nutter singing through a megaphone

...And that's not the half of it. Perhaps you had to be there...

6. My Life's Love

This is more your standard organ-based ballad - I think we were trying to get back to Planet Earth with this one. Again, nice vocalising by the Sewing Machine. Killer recorder solo from Brother Buffalo on this one.

7. Limbo

Jeez, this one really is off the wall. I recorded a small tale over the top of this but it didn't seem that interesting so I thought it would be best to reverse it and keep the rest the right way round. (We may have been better off doing it the other way round, of course!) LOVE the flanged drum sound BSM gets here. That's Brother Buffalo having a go on the Korg synth for the first time and he doesn't disappoint. I'm responsible for the slightly bizarre mellotron choir riff.

8. Vocal Turds

I'll stick my hand up and say that this is probably the weakest lyric EVER recorded. Goddamnit, I was low on ideas. But I'm pleased with the slide guitar sound. I was trying to get the most chorused guitar ever and I got kind of close.

9. Lonely Sea

I just love this one. It's that early Roxy Music combination of a soft ballad with eccentric background instrumentation. The synth plays a slow random - but diatonic - sequence while I vary the delay time and filters to give that 'sea-wash' effect. I'd be so up for doing this live.

10. Dire Tonic Man

This is a satire about a guy who is scared of stepping outside the box musically. I feel there's the makings of a decent pop song somewhere here. I was also very pleased with the synth pad I got here, which I think is a combination of a Korg Polysix emulation and Arturia's CS80V. It's got 'early 80s stadium band' written all over it. I had a laugh singing the lyrics for several of these songs, but I think this one especially.

OK, I'm knackered and the post is long enough now, so I'm going to post my thoughts on the other 5 tracks from the session and some overall impressions tomorrow. Enough to be getting on with here for now.

Welcome back to the Ball

2009-01-11T09:17:00.003Z

Hi folks, and sorry for not posting for over 8 months!

The Golf Ball will be back on the scene in a big way in 2009. For a start, having done a session every month for Burning Lodge last year, there is a lot of music to catch up on. Due to space constraints on the Burning Lodge website, sessions are now being taken down approximately a month after they're uploaded. But don't worry... later this month when the Buffalo Typewriter site is up and running (at which point I'll post a link), all previous Brother Typewriter material will be made available for download until the site runs out of space (probably some time during 2011, at which point I'll make the most recent sessions available and the rest on a rotating basis). That's of course in addition to selected BT tracks being available on dilated choonz.

New computer: update

2008-04-21T17:50:00.003+01:00

Having completed April's Burning Lodge session (should be up on the songs page soon over at Burning Lodge), I've now got a little time window which I've used to install the new computer. I'll put a picture up on this post once I've had a chance to transfer a camera file from my phone to my computer (the Bluetooth dongle seems to have gone walkies right now) but it's certainly looking good.

The Silverstone case measures about 20 cm (height) x 27 cm (width) x 40 cm (front to back). Much smaller than my previous computer, which is sticking around for business use. The Gigabye motherboard comes with good instructions and it was very easy to install the CPU and fan/cooler. As I've got no optical drives installed in the case (we're gonna be using case at gigs and there didn't seem any point carrying the extra weight around so I've just used my LG external CD-Rom to handle all the installation of Windoze etc.), and only one hard disk in there, it's actually a very airy case. The case includes a fan-mount for two additional fans - I've installed one to help with cross-flow of air, and temperature so far does not seem to be a problem (OK, so we've not tried it in a hot rehearsal room or gig venue yet... I'll get back to you on that one.) The whole thing is pretty damn quiet... a little fan noise, that's all. Quieter than my previous PC, which was an Antec case specifically advertised as quiet... still, I guess no-one's gonna advertise their case as 'noisy', are they? "Go figure".

I haven't installed wireless networking as I've now got a couple of MSI ePower 85 powerline network sockets - one's connected to the crappy BT Broadband hub (pretty duff but it was free!) and one in the studio. This powerline ethernet equipment is great - they are now down to not much over £50 a pair and I can highly recommend them. More reliable connection than wifi in my house at least, and more secure (unless your neighbours are tapping into your electricity supply, and if they are, it's not just data security you should be worried about!) The end of unsightly Cat-5 cable criss-crossing the house... give the person who invented this system a medal.

Basic Windoze installation was relatively painless (to be fair, Windows XP is a lot better than previous incarnations of Jump-out-the-Windows in this regard. I ain't gone for Vista of course... no sir, I want a working computer, please!) The previous computer, as well as being for business use, now becomes a full dual boot affair with Linux - probably 64-bit Ubuntu. That'll be some good fun right there. I'm on 32-bit Windows on this new machine despite the fact it's a 64-bit processor as I am very far from sure that Windows XP 64 is a reliable choice for the working musician. I'd rather be slower and rock-solid reliable than fast and crashing half the time, thanks.
Then the fun of installation of music software begins. Sonar 7 Producer Edition is first up. This seemed to install OK although there was an interestingly fascist end-use licence agreement saying that it was forbidden to sell the software. If I'm right that means that there will be no second hand market in Sonar! Is this legal? If I own the product shouldn't I have the right to sell it on the open market? Imagine not being able to sell your house or your car, for example. If you're from Cakewalk and you're reading this please enlighten me as it seems preposterously draconian. What next - tattoo me with the registration code??

I haven't had a chance to use any of the new goodies in Sonar 7 yet - to be honest I didn't use much of the goodies in Sonar 5 either. The Sonitus plugins - compression, reverb, delay, modulator were the one thing I used all the time and they're pretty basic stuff really but very usable and sounded fine. Just a selection of the new stuff available for those interested:

LP-64 linear phase mastering EQ and compressor/limiter: to be honest, I haven't been doing much mastering during the Burning Lodge sessions. I've been mainly sorting EQ, compression etc out on a track-by-track basis and then mixing down and normalising to 0dB. This has resulted in slight variations between loudness levels on different tracks but really, who cares? These are demos, not albums. Once or twice I've used NI Reaktor's Finaliser mastering tool as a last-ditch effort to rescue a dodgy mix, but that's about it. I can't stand brick-wall compressed fatiguing listens, and a quick visit to The Loudness Wars wikipedia entry will explain why!
Z3TA+ waveshaping synthesiser - dunno anything about this one.
VC-64 Vintage Channel Compressor - yet another compressor, that's what the world needs. Well I'll certainly try it anyway...
Dimension LE software sampler with Garritan Pocket Orchestra - I'll certainly compare notes on that with Brother Oak of Burning Lodge, as he's got GPO for his complete Tracktion 3 Bundle.
FLAC file export - not that exciting to most people but I thought I'd mention it anyway...

Anyway I'll let ya know how much of an improvement Sonar 7 is over 5 (if any) once I've had a chance to try it out a bit.

Next step was installation of Native Instruments' Komplete 5 and Kore 2 package, which DV247 were selling for £649 all in - the nice people. That is a lot of software, and indeed hardware for your money. My previous experience of Native Instruments started with Generator 1.5 back in 1998 and my most recent rig consisted of Reaktor 5, Absynth 4, Battery 2 and FM7. I will review many of the basic elements of the Komplete package later in the year when I've had a chance to get my head round them. First impressions for now of the stuff I haven't used before:

FM8: in terms of usability, seems to be a huge improvement on FM7 (which itself wasn't bad).
Pro-53: fairly good Prophet 5 simulation but seems rather limited compared with much of the rest of what's on offer here.
Massive: extremely impressive 'analog-style' synthesiser. This is a very crowded field but this might just be pretty much the 'best' sounding softsynth I've heard. Of course "best" ain't always what you want, but nonetheless...
Akoustik Piano: 4 very nice sampled pianos.
B4: excellent Hammond organ simulator. Only problem now is I don't have a double-manual keyboard to take full advantage (although I will be getting bass pedals soon...)
Elektrik Piano: very nice electric piano/clavinet sounds although it doesn't sound that much different to Mr Ray 73 and Ticky Clav, both of which are free plugins, so hardly essential.
Kontakt 3: finally I own a proper software sampler. The last DVD of the library failed to load properly on my external DVD-ROM but would read OK on an internal DVD rom which I installed temporarily. Weird?
Guitar Rig 3: absolutely superb. The surprise package really as I'd completely forgotten about it when I ordered the upgrade. Seriously, if you're at all interested in recording electric guitar in a studio context, you have to get this. I'll post a much fuller review once I've had a bit more time to fiddle around with it. I'll probably be using it a lot in the next Burning Lodge session.

That just leaves Kore 2, which certainly looks cool and I think is really gonna do the business live, but I need to spend a bit more time figuring it out first.

I then reinstalled the Arturia softsynths I own, and a few other free plugins, and bingo! A working system. This rig will get its baptism of fire in the May Burning Lodge sessions where for the first time I've agreed to do 20 songs in 12 hours straight - see dialogue on the Burning Lodge site for more. This is pretty mental, given that I haven't studied any of the enhancements in Sonar 7 yet - I feel a bit like William Shatner with the new version of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Let's hope I don't fall into a wormhole like they did. Session is probably going to be on Sunday May 11th... we'll see.

Back in the DX7S...

2008-03-28T17:02:00.005Z

(with apologies to Half Man Half Biscuit.)

I had a week off work this week and finally I've gotten around to tidying up the studio space a bit (thank f*** - it was becoming a complete quagmire!) Partly in preparation for the new music PC but also because there are a lot of rather dull jobs I have put off as long as possible. One of these was to sort out the mountain of old CD-Rs that I have accumulated over the last decade or so since CD writing has been an economically viable technology. These fall into 3 categories:

stuff people have given me (mostly MP3s).
stuff I downloaded from work in the old days before I had a broadband collection at home (pre-2003).
back-ups of my old computer hard disks.

It was the third category I was most interested in, as there was some interesting music stuff on the hard drives of my old computers - going back all the way to 1998 when I had a 350Mhz Pentium 2 from Mesh. There's some interesting ambient stuff from 2001/2 recorded with Burning Lodge's Brother Oak and demos for Halberstram, which was an embryonic hard rock outfit from 2003/04 with Ace, of General Store / Tin Apes / RAF Widows fame. (Well, not really fame, but he should have been famous, as that's three of the best hard rock acts of the last 2 decades). Also some techno stuff that I was doing in about 1998/99 (some of which unfortunately isn't playable any more as it used sounds from a Yamaha SW60XG soundcard which had an ISA interface and so won't work on modern motherboards. Maybe Yamaha do an XG softsynth VST plugin but I've never checked - probably one for the next time I get time off...)

Another lost gem I'd completely forgotten about, though, were the Yamaha DX7 patches I programmed in 1997-99 when I bought a DX7 second hand. The DX7 presets sound pretty lame to modern ears - partly because the synth had no onboard effects (as it was made in 1983), but as a programmers' synth it's got to be one of the best of all time. My DX7 was unfortunately stolen at the end of 2000, but fortunately I had dumped all the patches as Sysex using a long-forgotten patch librarian program called Soundlib. Because Native Instruments' FM7/8 software synth reads DX7 patches I was able to hear them again for the first time in years. In a few cases the conversion doesn't sound 100% accurate to me (although it might just be that I have a bad memory), but mostly they were fine, and happily (or perhaps worryingly) they sound a lot better than anything I've been able to program through the front end of FM7 itself. Not sure why that is - maybe I was just trying harder back then. Anyway, some of these patches will probably find their way into my next Lodge session - we'll see. The lesson? Never throw anything away (unless you've archived it first).

For more nostalgia, check out this DX7 site. Ah, the days of membrane keyboards... (I had an original DX7 and not a DX7S by the way but DX7S worked better in the title for the Half Man Half Biscuit spoof. Sorry.)

Shopping for a new music PC

2008-03-22T23:55:00.002Z

Had a fun time today going online to order components for a new PC to use for music recording (and, increasingly, for music making - plugins really have taken over. How long before the patented 'Typewriter guitar sound' is replaced by a plugin?)

Now, some readers will have thought 'fool' as soon as they saw the word 'PC' rather than Mac, so I'll address that issue upfront. Whilst I do agree that Macs are good for music applications, and Logic is an awesome sequencer package, I've simply got too much invested in the PC platform from a software and hardware knowledge point of view to make the transition unless absolutely forced to. (For sure, Microsoft Vista might force me to, but we ain't there yet, 'cos Windows XP is still available for the next few months - partly why I upgraded now).

On the software front, if presented with Logic I wouldn't have a clue as I'm a dyed in the wool Sonar man and always have been (and before that, Cakewalk). Apart from when I use Reaper, which you should try immediately if you haven't already... but that's Windows too. I have no idea if Sonar is the best sequencer package around, but who cares? It does pretty much everything I want and I know my way around it, which is the main thing.

On hardware, I am addicted to building my own PCs and again this is where the Mac, for me, lacks the sheer excitement of self-build. Of course many Mac fans will point out that building your own computer is a recipe for disaster, there are too many potential incompatibilities, etc. Well, I've done OK so far, fortunately. Nothing's blown up when it's been plugged in - yet. And I'm no technical genius, so if i can do it, anyone can. (Well, anyone within reason... I wouldn't expect my dad to try this stuff as he can barely send an email...)

As this is nothing if not a blog for technically minded musicians, I thought I'd post the exact spec of the PC for future reference. So here goes:

Case

Previously I've gone for fairly large tower cases on my PCs due to the need to have enough room in to fit several hard drives for the requisite amount of recording disk space and back-up storage. But this time I've taken the opposite approach and gone for a SFF (small form factor) case - namely, a Silverstone SUGO SG02W. It seemed to have some good reviews online and didn't break the bank, so there it was. Also it accepts a full-size ATX power supply unit, which is great: the one thing you don't want to do in a PC is run out of power. Got a 500W Silverstone PSU to fit in the case, which should do the job nicely.

Motherboard

The Silverstone takes a microATX size motherboard. My requirements were quite specific: I wanted integrated graphics to avoid having to get an additional graphics card (who needs high-end graphics for a music PC?) and I wanted firewire (I've got an old external LaCie firewire hard drive which comes in handy now and then, and also in case I ever decide to get a firewire multi-channel recording interface, which is unlikely, but you never know. These criteria, plus cost (didn't want el cheapo but didn't want to pay over the odds either), led me to the Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R board, which looked as good as any.

CPU

Again I've turned over a new leaf here by going for Intel instead of AMD. In 2005 when I last built a PC, AMD were kicking ass at the low-price end of things, but Intel dual-cores (and even some of the quad-cores) are now so cheap and powerful that AMD, this time, was a non-starter. Most of the quads were still a little bit pricey for what I wanted so I went for a mid-range dual core: a Core 2 Duo 6570, with the 65nm "Conroe" core. About £115 including VAT. My existing machine, running a lowly Athlon 3500, rarely struggles even with my most demanding musical arrangments, so this baby ought to blow me away. We shall see...

RAM

No reason to stint on RAM at current prices - went for 4Gb of Corsair DDR2, PC6400. Why only 4 gigs? 'Cos I'm gonna be running 32-bit Windows XP - for now, at least - and the OS won't see more than 4 gigs. It should be more than enough, anyway.

Hard drive

Hard drives are now so large that there is not so much reason to stuff every machine to the gills with extra hard drives - for now I've bought just one, a 750Gb Western Digital model. I'll probably partition the drive into a small partition for the OS and main system files and a lot more space for everything else - given that Windows can be flaky, it makes it easier to restore in the event of something going wrong. I've also bought a LaCie external hard drive to back up everything, which I promise to do regularly this time...

stuff I didn't bother with

Didn't bother with a DVD writer as I already had a perfectly good external one. Likewise, I already have a good monitor and I can fit the M-Audio Delta 44 I've got in my old PC into this new one, so no upgrades required there.

Anyway, there you have it (I've probably forgotten something but we'll see...) This kit all arrives on Friday so there'll be some fun assembly going on. I'm gonna do my April session for Burning Lodge on the old computer though as I don't want to be messing about with new installations at the same time as I'm trying to record tracks. That's a recipe for disaster.

Oh yeah, one last thing: the supplier is Scan. Often marginally more expensive than Dabs but Dabs use Amtrak for deliveries and they are totally useless. whereas Scan use Citylink, who are a bit better. Also you can specify an exact delivery date on Scan and it will actually arrive on that date... whereas when I paid extra to specify a delivery date with Dabs, they seemed to just ignore it. All computer suppliers are shysters, but some are shyer than others, if you get my drift. More info and maybe even some pictures of the new PC when i've put it together...

Some March thoughts, and a few more for February

2008-03-16T08:12:00.003Z

This month I've got a bit more time so I'm able to switch to proper thoughts rather than just 'thunks'. The February songs from Burning Lodge are now posted up at the song page (under 'Session VII'), so these comments won't just be happening in a vaccuum.

I was pretty pleased with the whole February session, although I lacked much of a clue lyrically. As I wanted to do at least some songs rather than all instrumentals I was forced to cannabalise lyrics from wherever I could. So we have Staking a Claim, which was taken from an insurance claim which Brother Buffalo submitted to a poetry anthology that our friend John put together in 1999. And Badass, which is taken from a character in The Onion called Hubert Kornfeld who was an accounts receivable supervisor in a midwest office supplies firm but thought he was a gangster rapper - kind of a cross between Ali G and David Brent, if you think about it. Very True Things is a tribute to my friend Steve's blog of the same name (currently done up in Welsh red, white and green to celebrate the boys' much deserved Grand Slam. With a dragon and everything. Lovely colour scheme, Steve.) The idea was to have a 16-note sequence running throughout the whole song and then play different stuff against that - which sort of worked, I think. Actually it was more to do with the fact that I couldn't be bothered to write any more complex sequence in Moog Modular V. I am VLT - Very Lazy Thing.)

Over The Line is about those occasions when a normally sensible person you know loses it completely. We've all been there. I've had various reactions to the run-out synth solo (done on the old Korg MS10 which makes we wonder how the hell to reproduce it live? Probably with the Super BassStation, that's quite versatile.) But people either love it or hate it, which is good either way, really. Georgi Markov Theme is a good example of getting an idea from writing a synth patch first. Once again it was the Moog Modular V: there's a module in there called a Bode Frequency Shifter which can give you either a chorusing effect or a very metallic sound or both, depending on how you set it up and modulate it. I did a patch over Christmas and thought I'd give it a shot. The scale used seemed vaguely Eastern European to me, hence the title, although Brother Oak mentioned Air as a comparison, which is v nice of him and after listening to the 'Virgin Suicides' soundtrack again I can see where he's at. (Interestingly, does patch construction count as 'pre-composition' and hence violate Immersion Composition rules? It seems unlikely, but what about for synths like Absynth when you can basically write a whole song as a patch? An interesting borderline case.)

Piano Manis the same thumb piano clean and then overdubbed about 7 times at different ring-modulated frequencies. I never liked Billy Joel so I thought it would be nice to steal his song title and destroy it. Off The Hook is a throwaway really, about the fact that I'll do anything to get out of doing stuff I don't wanna do. But it did offer the opportunity to try singing in a higher register, which was interesting.

We had the March listening session at Sister Selkie's place a couple of days back, and once again, she and Brother Buffalo delivered absolute killer sessions. You must watch out for SS's Poorly Piano and BB's There's the Line, Now Tow It, for example. The latter is almost certain to be a mainstay of Buffalo Typewriter's live set when we get the band up and running. That, and Good Numbers Boys.

I won't mention specific tracks I've done yet as it makes more sense once they're up on the site. But some general observations from the March session:

I'm continually amazed by how many times accidents happen which make the songs better - composition seems to be as much about keeping your ears open for things that are happening to you and around you, as about one person's struggle for the perfect musical intentional statement. For example: I had one track where I'd intended to do a pretty standard guitar solo but then I accidentally selected a quite weird patch that sounded like backwards guitar which I'd been working on a few weeks back. I wouldn't have actively considered that for the song in a million years but when I started playing it sounded much better than what I'd originally intended.
Tweakbench's Papaya VST instrument is great fun (like all the Tweakbench stuff - they are all small synths which do a few things extremely well rather than the behemoth instruments we've become used to. A much better design philosophy in many ways - I thoroughly recommend visiting the Tweakbench site if you're looking for something a bit different and useful).
The Yamaha AN1X still has massive usefulness as a synthesiser even though it is now more than 10 years old and hence probably very outdated technology in terms of virtual analog. But I used it quite a lot this time round.

Anyway, that's it for me until the newest set of Lodge recordings gets posted up on the site - probably later this week.

February thunks

2008-02-17T19:18:00.003Z

Following the tradition of BHaPPY, five "thunks" from my February Burning Lodge session (recorded Thursday 7th February, played to the first meeting of the 'London and Home Counties Lodge chapter' yesterday):

Finally getting something useful out of Arturia Moog Modular V (full review to come); for a long time I felt CS80V was a much better piece of kit but after several months of scratching my head I've finally figured out how to get some good sounds out of the thing. It's not a particularly easy softsynth to use but effort pays dividends with this one. But I prefer it as a polysynth to a mono, which is weird. The Bode Frequency Shifter module is one of the best things I've heard from any software synth.
If you overdub thumb piano several times, each time through a different frequency ring modulator, you can get something close to a gamelan sound. Strange.
Tracks where someone else suggests the title seem to come out as good, if not better than tracks, where I choose the title (on my session 'Over The Line', on Brother Buffalo's session 'Gonna Have To Be Friday' and 'Well We Could Do That'.
Accounts Receivable office supervisor Herbert Kornfeld (of 'The Onion' fame, but recently deceased, sadly) is a good subject for a song.
Never underestimate the appeal of simple call-and-response vocal patterns (particularly when they're done in different octaves).

More when the tracks get posted up on the Burning Lodge site. And congrats to all Lodge members who participated this month, on a killer session.

Floating Off At Dilate Choonz...

2008-01-23T23:26:00.001Z

I haven't had time yet to post a full report on the Burning Lodge session we did last Saturday (19th Jan) and Brother Oak (the lodge head) - I'll do that later this week. Suffice for now to say that everybody's songs were great, and everybody in the lodge seems to be coming on in leaps and bounds as composers, singers, players, arrangers and producers.

I have posted one track from the sessions, Floating Off the Coast of Lowestoft, at the Dilate Choonz music blog. Done in about 25 minutes - just a patch I had kicking around on the Arturia CS80V and some electric slide guitar (in open minor tuning, bizarrely enough.) It's an ambient take on your basic 2-chord jam. I think I accidentally hit the ring modulation at the end there.

See what you think.

Everything's gone green...

2008-01-18T14:23:00.000Z

Just to let you know that the initial 'Barney' background colour seemed like a good idea for about 12 seconds, then was trouble. So I've changed it. Much happier with this!

Teeing off...

2008-01-16T22:06:00.000Z

Hello there all you rock'n'rollers, and welcome to "BTGB". The purpose of this blog, in the first instance, is to talk about making music in an "Immersion Composition Lodge". But what is Immersion Composition and What is a Lodge? The Immersion Composition Society website provides a lot of useful information on this, but for your convenience and entertainment, I will summarise below.

Basically, Immersion Composition (IC) is a technique for writing songs quickly. IC was invented a few years back by two guys in Oakland, California, USA called Nicholas Dobson and Michael Mellender. Faced with a creative block that was stopping them writing songs, they hit upon the idea of spending a whole day trying to write as many songs as possible. Their chosen method for doing this was called the "20 song game".

In the archetypal version of the 20-song game, each participating musician goes into the studio (or the Batcave, or wherever they record music) for 12 hours solid, and attempts to write, record and mix 20 songs. The rules of the game are:

The songs should not use any of the musician's previously composed material (although 'found' material like samples, etc. is allowed).
The songs can be any style, and any length. In fact 'pieces of music' would be a better description than 'songs', as lyrics/vocals are not mandatory.
That's it.

In the strict version of the 20-song game, at the end of the 12-hour session each participant burns their songs to a CD. Then all the participants meet up and listen to each other's output.

An 'Immersion Composition Lodge' is just a group of songwriters who record 12-hour sessions (sometimes called 'day sessions') on a regular basis and then meet to listen to each other's work.

Brother Typewriter is in the Burning Lodge, which began in July 2007 when Brother Oak a.k.a. Ben Dalby made the very, very welcome decision to form his own IC Lodge having begun with the Heater Lodge just a month or so before. Brother Typewriter has been active in the Burning Lodge since September 2007. He has so far recorded 4 sessions, and a total of 26 tracks. Three of these sessions are up on the Burning Lodge website.

This blog will contain the occasional observation about the tracks I've recorded, but to a large extent the results will speak for themselves, for good or ill - and all tracks are freely available on the site should anyone wish to download them. This blog is going to be more about the technical and technological aspects of the recording and songwriting process - so expect to find things like:

reviews of, and favourite patches for, VST instruments and effects
tips for working with the Sonar digital audio workstation (my DAW of choice)
observations on working with the limited set of guitar, effects and synth hardware I've accumulated over the years
more general computer stuff - e.g. tips for building your own music computer, should you wish to do that.
observations on particular ways of songwriting which seem to have worked well (or badly!) for me.
tablature for guitar parts I'm particularly pleased with.
thoughts on the relevance of music theory for rock'n'roll, insofar as it impacts on the songs I'm writing.

and so on... you get the picture. Or if you don't, you probably haven't read this far anyway!

To many people this kind of thing will sound incredibly dull, but then I never claimed I was writing for a mass audience. If you're looking for more of a cultural and political grab-bag then giroscope may hold more interest.

Anyway, the next Burning Lodge session is this Saturday (16th Jan) and once that's out the way, I'll post some observations on the tracks I've recorded this time round, which I'm particularly pleased with. Until then... rock on.