From the mists it rose...

Hello again!

Well, it's been an age. Thankfully, it's the usual excuse - summer was full of music and geekery. The new band is progressing well: we've got a demo recorded (!) before we do any gigs - it's wierd to do this shit in the right order - and the songs are pretty good.

I've been performing uber-geek stuff in the day job. Ever used realVNC on a laptop over Wifi to remote control a server in the house which was running a virtual windows PC under virtualbox which was using a VPN client to get onto your company network and then used RDP to control your machine at your desktop?

I have. And it worked really well.

Music wise, I've got Bass Synth!!! The Roland system is installed on the 6-string, and it's truly brilliant. The tracking at the very bottom of the low B is a little slow, but if you're ready for it, you can compensate.

The band are rehearsing in a cool rehearsal space on a farm in the middle of nowhere outside Wokingham. It's pretty cool, the gear is pretty good (I'm using the stack though, good to crank it).

More later if you're listening and you're good.

Floppy Music

Just caught this through google video. It's musical geekery.



Insane! I love it!

Customer service or bad luck?...

Something just occurred to me. Since march, I've bought three things by credit card, either over the phone or on the internet, which I've had to get refunds for. These were:

• A headlamp for the car (scrapyard job - they sent me a bumper instead and I had to invoke a chargeback to get my money refunded)
• Mario Kart Wii from Amazon (waited an entire month for it to be shipped, they did their usual crap with the website, stringing me along while they kept my money)
• Some gear to turn one of the basses into a synth bass (this one really hacked me off. I did a bit of research, realised the bundles usually only come with the guitar pickup, not the bass one, so I went out of my way to confirm at every stage of the ordering they knew what I needed. They shipped the *&^# guitar one anyway).

It just struck me that I've never had such a lousy run of luck before. I'm going to stop shopping at Amazon because their JIT oriented user interface lies through its' teeth about the status of your order so they can get the cash out of you and give you the impression you can't get a refund when you can (what sort of strange state for an order puts it "pre shipping" for god's sake?). The scrapyard was a joke, but then again every time I rang them (5 times) apart from once I got someone who sounded like their skull was shaped like a frisbee. The time I got an intelligent guy he just didn't bother ringing back.

But somehow synth gear bums me out the most. I tried my best. I did all the hard work. All they had to do was check their stock, and send me the right thing. I found out since they don't even have the bass pickup, so it's refund time again.

I'm starting to think shopping in shops is actually a better idea. Online retailers are starting to take the piss and the pinch starts to bite (to mix my metaphors).

Quick geek post.

Sorry, this just made me laugh out loud. It's been about... oh... 30 years since I looked up rude words in dictionaries. The internet just gives you so much more scope.

So I typed "wiener" (a favourite crap american slang term of mine) into Wikipedia (as I knew it would return a lot of high-intellectual-value matches which I could snigger at) and the first link I clicked on was this one. Frankly the concept of an Extended Wiener Index makes me giggle uncontrollably but then I haven't had enough sleep!

Incidentally (on this blog???) I've got a new musical project! It's looking well funky, I've been writing loops with the guitarist at his (well equipped) studio on the edge of Reading, and he's got some bandwidth (no pun intended) to organise stuff. Good PA too.

Watch this space for links when we've got songs together - it's looking like an all-original setlist too, which is great. Drummer's no slouch, he's got good chops and he's very keen to work on the stuff, having been tied down to a covers band for too long - he wants to explore (and so do I!)

pip pip!

ReBirth of a ReBirth...

Well, the bad news is it's been a long time since I gigged. This doesn't mean I've been idle though - I think the last time I spent this much time working on technique I was still living in a shared flat in St Andrews: net result is I've got very strong hands, and Chromatic Fantasy is coming along very nicely (I've started learning page 3!) - I'm not having to warmup before playing Bach suites.

This stuff is really esoteric though, it's not something I would ever gig. And that's where music lives - playing live to real people - so the lack of gigging is chafing pretty badly.

Hopefully this will change soon! The open night I used to go to in Windsor died on its' arse following some rather shady machinations (not least that the venue location sucked, unless you enjoy getting lost is a building site underneath the railway in windsor), but Tony, who was running the nights, is a great guitarist, and he's keen to start something with the sort of funky vibe I enjoy playing. He's got a great vocalist already, and percussion is lined up - we need a good drummer, and I reckon keyboards will be vital too (Terry was a huge part of the Janeiro/Tempa Tempa sound).

It's nice to be there on the ground floor - at the start - and I want to make this something special. I've got gear which hasn't been gigged itching to sit behind me on stage, and at the moment there's a lot of lines jumping out from under these well exercised hands every time I start playing. It's time I got out there.

TTFN

A spot of politics. Sort of.

Anyone who knows me knows I hate politicians. Well, modern politicians anyway - you know the sort, the ones who make it to the front bench, the eton/oxbridge/etc educated career politicians who dabbled in law before they "heeded the calling" and decided they'd prance about in a gothic craphole getting pissed on our taxes...

But the recent budget has me slightly hot under the collar, and not because I'm some telegraph reading twat who's concerned about the residuals on his mondeo ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/15/ncars115.xml - "Families to suffer" ) - but because ( I should mention I'm under the heathrow flight path) of the brutal hypocrisy of the government with regard to air travel.

Nearly everybody who lives in this area thinks the third runway is a pisspoor idea - in Slough it's apparently 100% (dunno how they managed that one) - and it appears that the department for transport is also in deep deep collusion with BAA to try to push this through ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6726613.stm"Heathrow runway collusion denied" but then they're not going to admit anything, are they?) and besides, some of the original figures used to justify the expansion are massaged ( http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3423583.ece "BAA rigged figures to hideairport delays" ) - and Ruth Kelly actually supports the expansion of Heathrow with a third runway(!) - there are voices of dissent in higher places, thank god ( http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article2982701.ece "Report attacks heathrow expansion" ).

This doesn't stop the CBI from spreading the usual pinstripe hysterical blackmail - "Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, recently said major financial institutions would desert the City if Heathrow was not expanded." - and the quotes from some self-interested conglomeration of parties whose livelihood is intertwined with air travel have suggested that 500,000 tourism jobs would be lost without airport expansion(!)... what a load of sensationalism.

So. Cars = bad, planes = good. Because we all know planes run on carbon dioxide and spew out oxygen! Oh yes...

I see in some of these stories that other bodies than groups of citizens are objecting to BAAs relentless lobbying. NATS and the CAA have concerns, and if your air traffic controllers reckon there isn't enough room in the sky, I'd listen. Before a 747 falls on your precious houses of parliament after crashing into another 747.

Seriously, we have to rebase how we think about "progress". It's not economic growth. Economic growth brings us, amongst the good stuff, some really bad stuff (I'm using this mode of speech deliberately). Gordon Brown went to China and wilfully ignored how they treat people as he wants their cash injected into our economy...

We have to slow down. We've only been running this hot as a species for a hundred and fifty years, maybe. If we don't slow down we're going to come to an abrupt halt.

The arts as a business

I confess I'm a little cynical about this, but it might be to do with the total lack of support I had from any official sources to admit that talent and hard work in a "creative" field would get me anywhere - no, when I met with careers advisers, they were all obsessed with "good jobs". God help you if you fancied doing something creative.

so http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7258096.stm is an interesting development. Perhaps Gordon is gradually coming to the realisation that 1) we ain't competitive in making anything tanglible, 2) the square mile and legal crap working out of london is responsible for far too much of our GDP, and 3) we do actually have a reputation in the world as a country which makes some decent music.

God knows why though - perhaps the endless self-flagellation of shit jobs, crappy pay from gigs, and exhaustion trying to persuade fat gits in suits you're worth a punt makes the music better through hardship :)

I'll leave it there...

When techie-diagnosis bites back

Recently I took a really long car ride with my wife, about 12 hours in total. We were heading for a winter hol and had covered about 70 miles on our way to the chunnel when we heard what sounded like static coming from the windscreen area.

I quickly flipped into techie-diagnosis mode and started examining the aircon, fan, proposed that it might be the roof box noise coming through automatic cold air vents on the front etc.

It perplexed us (and at one stage we caught some taxi talk too) for the next half hour, with nic saying it was coming from her left, and me saying it was on my right, and it sounded like the sort of "flat noise" you get which is often hard to place.

Nic then suggested it sounded like static on a radio, at which point I remembered I had a walkie-talkie in my pocket. It had switched itself on against the centre console!

A sobering revelation. The WT was in my pocket as it's the orphan of the one I lost: I'm hoping to find another pair to go with it, and had been looking earlier in the day.

Sometimes though, occam's razor really ought to be applied early. Consider my forehead slapped. :)

Studios and an old lesson re-learned

Funny how some old addages can help you out, eventually. In my case the last few days have been a righteous return to "RTFM, idiot"... if you're not sure what that means, I'm sure the web will provide.

I've got a fairly old (but plenty powerful) athlon machine with cubase SL on it, and a cool software-driven mixing desk with MIDI out. I've been trying on and off (most off, I got frustrated) to get the desk to control Cubase as a control surface. I'd tried using my Innate Sense Of Technology but this was tricky... the desk has various modes of control, including direct control of ADAT machines, etc - so you have to choose your mode of operation carefully. Hence reading the manual. Once I worked out that the desk could transmit everything as MIDI messages, and read the cubase manual about configuring the generic remote control, I soon had the whole lot talking nicely.

I do suspect I need a newer version of cubase though: the desk is fully motorised and it would be useful to have the desk controlled by cubase, restoring fader levels, etc...

On the live music front, it's still quiet at the moment... there's a lot of interesting stuff coming up on StarNow, but I don't know if I want to pay the buggers so I can respond to the want ads :) I suspect the first thing I should be concentrating on is making my website a better advertisement for my talents... so the studio it is then.

If you're out there, Jamie... give us a shout mate :)

StarNow leads in London

I've got some interesting looking leads to follow up which the RSS feed from StarNow is sending me - I'm currently looking for a new original act to join, or help form.

You could say that this is in fact another rebirth!

Incidentally, I've really rediscovered that Aria of mine. A cracking passive bass!

Oh - and the studio PCs gone tits up, but in a moment of serendipity, my dad returned his old PC as he has a new one - same mobo! So I have a donor... and, bless, more memory for the PC.

I've also found a Victor Wooten book I forgot I had - and I'm working on the transcription of Sinister Minister in there. Wacked out! Got to be careful I don't become too virtuoso though: it's the easiest thing in the world to slide into playing fantastic solo bass, but that's not what I'm about. I need an act with some creative and happy people to bring out the best in my playing. Music is pure playfulness, pure quality!

Hello! Blimey... closure?

Interesting.

I used to work for a fairly major Japanese electronics company, in their handset division. I was there for 7 years all told, far too long to hold a post really but I suspect I just got too comfortable. The last 3 years there were pretty bad apart from a great automation tool we worked on, which worked rather well.

They had 2 rounds of redundancies while I was on the employee forum: both times, I participated in the process, working on the definition of what would decide who stayed and who got paid off. Both times I was left in the company: and the second time, it hurt rather badly and I'm ashamed to say I behaved like an asshole for about 6 weeks. Ultimately I recovered a bit but eventually it just became too much to wait around for the final axe to fall, so I left almost exactly a year ago and spent the three months in Andorra playing bass with Janeiro in the Aspen bar in Soldeu (wotcher peeps).

I heard today that the final axe fell: I stayed in contact with the guys I used to work with ( a great team - we had a Xmas meal this year, and more than 20 of us turned up - remember, this is an EX-system test team) and now I'm trying to help throw jobs their way.

And it feels pretty good. Not gloaty good, I'm not grinning because the place is shutting down, I feel good for the guys who are still there as this will a) give them a healthy payout and b) give them a chance to work somewhere where they will feel really valued for the talents they have (Darren, Sean, et al - you are wasted on those dumb ineffectual bizarre Japanese idiots at head office: you care about quality, they care more about losing face and honour!)

It really feels like some form of closure: like something let go of properly. It's good.

A Fine New Year!

Mad couple of weeks. Hope you had a great christmas and new year.

Nic, bless, got me a mega iPod (giving me a total of 200GB of iPod space when you take my 4th gen clickwheel into account!) so I've been spring cleaning my music collection and converting some DVDs using some wicked freeware I found out there. Bourne ultimatum actually looks pretty good.

In the last 3 days I've stashed loads of stuff in our lofts for long-term storage, built a tabletop out of 12mm chipboard and 33mm profile wood batons which fits on top of the pool table and gives us a dining table which will comfortably seat 12 (possibly 14!) but which breaks down in about 20 minutes to give the pool table back for after-dinner gaming. The jukebox started misbehaving shortly before Xmas, but once I got around to fixing it I did several component replacements and connection cleanings on the wallbox and now it's perfect, and did a great job last night during our meal (nice 5hr stewed beef bourginon) where it provided excellent background music.

Good friends, good food, and Ravin Rabbids 2 on the Wii with 4 controllers. Ever seen 4 people trying to run away from a big rolling rock a la Indy? Hysterical!

I may even have some video of it :)

And in addition, my studio now has good square footage to walk around in. I'm feeling good about 2008 - I think it could be a very creative year. Certainly I'll be finding something local to do...

----- Today's Practise Diary -----Something original in the STUDIO

Jukebox stuff

Last weekend we finally got up to Castleford near leeds and collected our 70CD series 3 Sound Leisure jukebox. This weekend I've finally got it wired up with fresh tangent speakers from Richer Sounds, it sounds cool!.

Tetrion for blogs

I decided to day to take a minute to fill this in a little. Without giving too much away to the identity thieves, of course.

Good things that have happened recently:

• eBay - won a CD jukebox, "regency" series 3 from sound leisure, popped up to Castleford (!!200 miles!!) to collect it and it's great!
• Found somewhere I could source an EL84 (just the ONE) but their ordering system turned out to be pants so - surprise surprise, modern e-shopping nightmare - it's sat in a bloody Citylink warehouse in Hayes waiting for pickup. Why couldn't I have it delivered to work you MORONS?
• Chrimbo tree is up and looking very pretty
• Updated the Wii and posted my Friday the 13th Mii onto the new Mii competition channel (they've got some well freaky stuff on there)
• Restrung the old white Aria, took it to a jam night in Windsor and the bass blew them away - that old beast has the most fantastic sound for a passive bass. A real peach, and the strings are so light I found it tricky to play! That's always a good sign.
• Get together with the old crew from Panasonic - which was very very well attended, how many people can say they had a Christmas works dinner with their ex-colleagues and more people came than where they work at the moment??? Lots of good natured loud boisterous chatting over excellent Indian food at Spice in Thatcham (I'd recommend it, they put up with us, they'll put up with you, trust me) - well done Andy Beith for organising it.
  

That's a short list for 17 days. I really need something local and musical, the Windsor jam night is fun but I'm not sure how many contacts I'll make that way. I think I'll have to bite the bullet and find something in west London, maybe Ealing. A bit of a hotbed of jazz-funk there.

Wish me luck. Incidentally, I'm back on the 5-string fretless again. Erp!

CAPTCHA with a conscience???

I'm a geek really. A gear geek and a bit of a computer geek as well.

So the story on Techworld about a Quicktime exploit allowing nasty people to do things to your computer if you're running firefox was of passing interest. Much more interesting was the CATCHA image at the bottom for weeding out spam comments from bots! Not only does it have something political to say, which is an interesting and new viral idea spreading idea, but I love the logo - "Stop spam. Read books." It almost sounds like a bored mantra of someone who writes captcha code for a living :)

Music - the stack needs a new EL84 for the valve channel (arse!) but the solid state is good so tonight I'm going to give the new Warwick NEO cabs a baptism of fire in O'Neills - come and see Janeiro at their best, we'll rip the roof off again!

Just do be careful at the front of the stage. Jay usually ends up with at least one woman who crashes into his lap (not that he isn't used to it)...

Bit the bullet, did the deed: now 20 kilos lighter!

It's not quite as it seems... I've traded in all the cabs I owned (1 4x10 Warwick cab, 1 1x15 Warwick cab, and a 2x10 Trace Elliot cab) and bought two Warwick NEO PRO cabinets to replace the 4x10 and 1x15 cabs - and they weigh masses less! As an example, the old 4x10 weighed 41Kg(!!!) and the new one weighs 28Kg... and handles 200W more power (nice.)

I can safely say they sound fantastic. And I did all this in Brighton at GAK - the title links to them - and they were friendly, enthusiastic and didn't bat an eyelid helping me get the three cabs into the shop from the car 2 streets up, and getting the new cabs back to the car. Top fellas.

I just woke up in the morning, looked up some prices (I've been lusting after these cabs for a while!) and decided to bite the bullet and finally do the job.

Incidentally - on the geek front - just got a proper conference call on Skype working (fixed the video banding problem with newest S3 drivers for my laptop) and it's wicked! Got the whole family on with a reliable skype link!

TTFN!

Laughing my arse off!

I heard about the lost child-support database CDs when the story first broke and was open-mouthed for about 10 seconds until I started laughing... I realised pretty quickly what this meant for a government obsessed with holding as much information as possible about us, and their precious (apparently terrorism-beating) ID card idea.

Now, I don't have kids, and thank god: my bank account details, national insurance, etc should be safe - so I can laugh like a drain at this story (http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL2354801820071123?sp=true) and hope beyond hope that the UK public make their anger known in some other way than voting for the opportunistic tory scumbags who sit opposite in our ancient corrupted democracy!

It's time for the UK public to demaind that our ruling classes GET A LIFE - I mean it, they need real-world knowledge, not this horribly insular bunch of lawyers (who the hell decided to let the country be run by them, for god's sake????) who studied politics at Oxbridge or whatever. Maybe some of them should get a real job before running the country?

Public confidence in the government of the UK has apparently dropped from over 60% to 28% since september - the question I'd like to ask is, "do you believe our system of government is high time for a change?". Our ruling class needs a wakeup call, but I fear we're all too busy paying tax and trying to survive... which is a whole other story!

Still, I'm still laughing at this sorry tale! It's even funnier that the whole database was on there because government IT strategies mandated they'd have to pay a third party IT contractor to work up the new version of the database minus the sensitive data, and thus they didn't bother!!!!! Pointy haired bosses in Whitehall?? Whod'a thunk it?

*** Scary financial rant alert ***

Spotted this today - I think it's in the US but one of the "companies" they refer to is based in London: it seems companies are buying and selling discharged bankruptcy debt!!!!!

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_46/b4058001.htm

this is off the wall. If this insanity can produce a “robust market” in discharged bankruptcy accounts, what bloody hope is there? Apart from the poor saps who find themselves unable to progress because organisations are demanding funds that have been legally excused, surely that “market” in this dead debt can only be worse than the current madness in the entire global financial market about badly labelled investment vehicles that looked like gold but had crap sub-prime mortgages sitting underneath!

A bigger picture proving the need for screwing down these insane bent suits I cannot think of!

The horribly irony is, it doesn't matter if you're a follower of the "neither a borrower or a lender be" and you lead a comfortable but non-40" LCD TV existence: ultimately this soaraway $$-pupil greed will see all of us royally shafted as the world economy goes down in debt flames and the same suits retreat to safe distance in Monaco, Switzerland etc and wait for the dust to settle before sharpening their steak knives and salivating again in 10 years time...

When will we learn? Kill the suits.

P.S. buy your strings from Strings Direct - they rule.

Quick post in a hectic week...

Hullo punters! What an insane week. Two days of madness on monday and tuesday, a mad drive back home on tuesday night getting back at about 2am, then a full day's work behind that desk I keep on about...

Then I got the chance to be a bassist in shining armour for the jam night at Havan in Windsor - this has proven to be a great place to meet new musicians, and the standard of playing is high, I ended up well outside my comfort zone the other week playing fretless 5 string fusion jazz of sorts, definnitely a stretch for me - anyway, I was considering a quiet night in on wednesday night, but the call came at about 9pm - "We've got 2 drummers and no bassist - can you come down?"

"I'll be there in 20 minutes" I said. I'm close enough to Windsor to mean it's a short hop (especially compared to driving to O'Neills in Oxford as I often do for Janeiro/Breeze gigs)... I had a cool night, met another drummer (a man I'm sure I've exchanged emails with, Colin Bibby) who has a nice line in grooves and reggae and got home relatively early for a music night.

Last night I thought... I'll have a quiet night and recover. Fat chance! I'm on my way home after another full day at work and Jamie rings me - O'Neills need us, the stuff they thought was on wasn't and Jamie has been offered a gig. Not one to turn down the chance to boost adrenaline levels both inside and outside myself, I stopped off for pie and chips on the way home, grabbed the 5 string fretless again (hell, I'm way way way outside my box now) and shot up the M40. What a night - Steve was totally left field, I don't think I've heard him ever play Sweet Home Alabama that way, it really groooooved. Jamie was ready for a gig as well, and it was just the 3 of us, Andorra style: good to be at the front and out from behind the speaker stack!

Plus, the PA behaved - last gig we did (a wedding in Oxford) it developed feedback problems when nothing was plugged in(?!) but Jamie tracked it down to the crossover, which appeared to be feeding back by itself!

Great crowd in there last night, lots of good natured revelry. Oh yes.

GEEK NEWS...
I got put onto this by a friend in the office - A tiny solid-state drive laptop from ASUS - it looks rather spiffy and it's fairly cheap. Looks like you can load it with anything you want - linux, windoze etc. With an external SD slot you can slap 8GB in there, and the internal drive being another SD card the wear-levelling of the SD standard will def come in handy, although with the number of cycles modern cards can handle I'm sure it'll do well. It even has a built in webcam and skype installed in the linux distro that the beast comes with. I'd probably load ubuntu myself... Looks like a useful and neat little piece of kit.

Tonight I'm off again, watching some shakespeare... wish me luck, hopefully I'll stay awake! I feel for the poor cats, they've barely seen us!

An update! Local music is alive in Windsor...

Wotcher.

It's been a good week: I've fixed the linkback to Musicians-in-my-city from my website (they seem to demand that their little graphic is in every frame) and got a few emails as a result. One was from Jayson Norris's band, who are looking for a bassist, it seems. I'll be getting in touch with them: he's from New Zealand and I like their sound. It's like a more energetic Jack Johnson, and the songs are better written, I reckon...

I also got to 2 gigs last weekend with Janeiro in Oxford, one classic O'Neills mad night, and then a Saturday night wedding in a place called Dragon School on the way into Oxford centre. Wierd gig but the audience was very into it!

And finally, on wednesday night I took the plunge and took the 5 string fretless to a jam night in Windsor at the Havana pub in the station. Happens every wednesday (I'm sure I mentioned it before) and the gear is brought along by Tony from Phat Tone studios in Reading. Nice fella.

Great night, I ended up doing wierd 6/8 jamming in some odd new-jazz thing at one stage. Was insane for the first 5 bars as I found my feet, then when I realised what the feel was, I started to pull it around like a piece of blutak. I made some of the best 6/8 grooves I think I've ever done!

Other stuff... Richard and Judy are splitting the band! I love the article -
"It is understood Judy Finnigan, 59, plans to move away from television to write books, while her husband Richard Madeley, 51, will pursue a solo career. "

So Judy's going to get Pickfords in, and Richard's going to play a piano in a big white room and sing about peace and love and good happiness stuff. Hmmmm.

I just found a myspace page for local music hereabouts which includes some tuesday night jam nights in Maidenhead! Excellent!
----- Today's Practise Diary -----I must learn 2 more bars of chromatic fantasy :)