Rock'n'roll innovation means 14-CD box sets at £100 a pop?

Just been having a look at King Crimson back catalogue on CD and DVD Audio. Most of Crimson's albums from the 1969-74 period (and also the early 1980s incarnation of the band) have already been reissued 3 times - the original 1980s CD reissues (which I never heard, but if it was like many of the CD reissues of the time, it was probably pretty bad), a late 1990s "30th anniversary" remaster, and the 35th anniversary remaster in the early 2000s. Now, for the classic 1973 album Lark's Tongues in Aspic (possibly the worst album title ever, but don't be put off, because it's a goddamn classic), there is a CD and DVD Audio 40th anniversary release, but also a 40th anniversary limited edition box set (priced at £100), the contents of which deserve a full listing as they are pretty extraordinary:

Limited edition boxed set, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the classic King Crimson album Larks' Tongues in Aspic: 13CDs, 1DVD-A, 1Blu-Ray in 12” box with booklet and memorabilia.

DVD-A featuring 5.1 new surround mix, original and new stereo mixes in hi-res stereo, a full album of alt mixes by Steven Wilson and more than 30 minutes of unseen footage of the band live in the studio.

Blu-Ray content as per DVD-A with further hi-res stereo material – all presented in DTS Master audio, 4CDs of studio content including CD of session reels featuring the first recorded takes of all pieces on the album, 1CD live in the studio, 8CDs of live audio restored bootlegs and soundboard recordings

plus a 36 page booklet with an extensive new interview with Robert Fripp, notes by King Crimson biographer Sid Smith, album sleeve print, concert ticket replica (with code for further concert download) and band photo postcards.

Now this is a pretty colossal amount of 1973-era Crimson for anyone to get their ears around. I was going to post something along the lines of "who the hell would want 14 CDs of 1973 King Crimson" but then I realised the answer was "me, if I had the money"! I look forward to the 200-CD edition for the price of a small family car in 2023. One interesting question is: Who's buying this stuff to listen to, and who's buying it as an investment? Mrs Berstram bought the Sandy Denny limited edition 19 CD box set for £150, about 2 years ago; it's now selling for at least £900 second-hand. Compared with (e.g.) the stock market, that's a good rate of return (although I'm not sure whether it's suitable for bulk investments.) On the other hand, it seems rather sad just to have the thing sitting on the shelf not being played. My father-in-law has just got into buying vintage guitars where the same kind of considerations apply, I guess.

Reactivated at Dilate!

Happy New Year everybody,

Just to let you know that Hal Berstram is active after a layoff of almost a year at Dilated Choonz... currently posting every couple of days on a Space: 1999 theme. As with this collective of blogs (giroscope/groscope/here), the objective is to post something every day in 2013; so far I'm running at 3 posts in 5 days, which is a little short of that, but still much better than my previous post rate of one a year. We'll see where this mad escapade takes us. Cheers! And it's good to be back on here after a 3 year layoff.

Rediscovering early 90s indie

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

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

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

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:

1. tune the whole guitar in major thirds rather than fourths - i.e. 4 semitone steps rather than 5.
2. 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

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.