[Live] Vultures Quartet Live 18th Dec 2011

Vultures Quartet will be playing a short set at the Mopomoso Christmas Party, tomorrow (18th Dec) from around 7pm.

This takes place at the Vortex in Dalston.

Should be a lot of fun!

[Live] Gig with Vultures Quartet - 5th Dec 2011

I am playing with Vultures Quartet tomorrow night at Boat Ting - the information is slightly incorrect on the Boat Ting website as we are actually playing with Steve Beresford rather than Neil Packer.

This is our 50th gig so far and a bit of a celebration for us. Should be a lot of fun and we all enjoy playing with Steve, which is something we haven't done for a while.

[Live] The Miller Test and The French Electric

I played with The Miller Test on Friday at the Bowery which was a great gig, lots of people there, good venue and more importantly we played well. 

On Saturday (after about 4 hours sleep) I had to run sound again using the dreaded Yamaha 01v. This was for an Amnesty International benefit gig at the King's Head in Islington. The line up included Gagarin both solo and with Roshi on vocals and keyboard - I am something of a fan of the music they create together and really rate Gagarin as a solo artist. He's also worked with all sorts of people, Nico and John Cale  amongst them.

Also playing were the Rude Mechanicals - who are absolutely brilliant fun. 

Grassy Noel was reciting some of his poetry. There's a video of him doing just that at the Foundry on YouTube. Great to see him as I don't think I have seen him since the Foundry closed. Don't get me started on what happened to the Foundry - suffice to say I think it was criminal the way it was closed down and the reasons for it - it was the last outpost of anything decent in Shoreditch - an area which was truly re-established by the artistic community which has now been completely ousted by corporate crap and moronic lowest common denominator "entertainment".  At least the Foundry managed to stick it out for longer than  most.

There were other people playing but I can't remember who they were! Brilliant accordion player and a good singer songwriter.

After doing the sound I had to scoot off to a gig with The French Electric at a burlesque night at Dusk Till Dawn (or what used to be the Archway Tavern). It went pretty well. The picture above is of Simon (left) and Jim (right) at that very gig - thankfully I am not in the photo!

[Releases] Under a Big Red Sun

Under a Big Red Sun was released in August in the US on Zos Kia Sounds but we've only just got some copies of it over here in the UK recently. Vultures Quartet features quite heavily on it with a piece by the three of us and a solo piece by Will and one by Anthony. 

There are alos a heck of a lot of other people we've played with on there: FluiD, Anton Mobin, Akoustik Timbre Frekuency, Philippe Petit and PAS.

And all the proceeds go to Oxfam - so if you want to buy a copy, contact me via my website.

[8-bit] C programming directly to /dev/audio

My friend James sent me a link to this site yesterday. I have never actually seen anything like it - obviously being an old git I have heard all this stuff before - remember playing Specturm and C64 games in the early 80s? I used to program bits and pieces of audio on my BBC B Computer but it was almost as hard as Supercollider to do - without sounding good. SuperCollider does sound incredibly good by the way.

I've had a really fun day playing around with this stuff and it is making me want to pick up my K'n'R book again and get back into C - let's face it, C does not muck about - it gets the job done and faster than pretty much anything else.

I've just been playing around with stuff today and it has been hilarious - just changing the algorithm in putchar() is daft as a brush and you never know what will come out.

I was using the wrong sample rate to come out of it - but I think this, in itself, makes the sound evolve.

Brilliant fun.

As ever uploaded to my site - the last few things on the page - or at least, the above pic is a screenshot of the site, so I suppose that makes them easy to find.

[All Sorts] Busy, Busy Busy!

Well, it's been a while since I posted an entry on here. I've been kinda busy - rehearsing, recording, gigging and even had to do some live sound.

Played a gig with The French Electric last week which went really well. Did some recording which will be used on some new Vultures Quartet sometime in the new year. I had to do the live sound at a friend's birthday - which was scary as I had to use a Yamaha 01v which is a pretty old digital mixer - not amazingly easy to use as it is menu driven. 

Vultures Quartet played at The Cube in Bristol which was excellent and a brilliant venue, really friendly and I saw lots of the Bristol theatre people. Thanks Anna for giving me a lift up there and somewhere to stay - and the same for James and Leila the next night.

More gigs coming up in the next few weeks.

Also look out for the new Classwar Karaoke online compilation - I've got a piece on there made with Daniel Thompson - an electro acoustic piece with realtime Pd processing and acoustic guitar. Have a look at the site - this will be the 16th "survey" so there's plenty there to listen to before it is released on the 30th of November.

Also, Seth and I listened to what the Goldsmiths students on his MA course had to say about our prototype for the video piece we've been working on for ages. Thankfully that went really well and they had a lot of positive things to say about it.

[Bands] The French Electric

I played my first gig with The French Electric on Friday last week at The Enterprise in Camden (which currently has a very funny "message to our customers" on its home page).

The gig went really well - it was also Simon's first gig with the band, in fact it was Simon's first gig ever. Seemed to go down well, particularly our rendition of an old Rhesus favourite, Performance.

I wish I could remember the name of the sound engineer, because he is worth a mention - absolute star, he got a great sound both on stage and front of house within about 5 minutes. Nice friendly vibe there too. 

Oh, and we're on twitter: @French_Electric and Facebook

[Live] Why Camels Have No Wings

My next gig is at Shoreditch Church, next Wednesday 5th October. This will be with Daniel Thompson (acoustic guitar), Kay Grant and Will Connor. Will is part of Vultures Quartet and I have been working with Daniel for a few months now on an electro-acoustic project. I haven't played with Kay before but have seen her perform many times at the Boat and think she is an amazing vocalist.

At the moment the plan is for me to process Kay's vocals through my computer using real time patches written in Pd. 

Should be a good night and the sound in the church is absolutely amazing - I saw a performance of some Xenakis pieces there a while ago and it sounded incredible.

[Live] Vultures Quartet 04/09/11

Thanks to Giles for filming this, our first Vultures Quartet gig for months - I think the first one this year in fact. Went down really well with the audience. We had a lot of friends there this time, so thanks everyone for coming and supporting us - it was a fun night.

[Pd] py / pyext

Finally I am back and relatively sane after being in Edinburgh for over two weeks performing every night. Whilst I was there I was trying to find out an easier, or at least more conventional, way of writing logic in Pd. Originally I was looking for a Perl plugin / extension but there are none of these, but there is one for Python. Not being a great Python programmer I wasn't massively keen, but in my past life as a programmer at Getty Images I had written some Python CGI scripts for querying a (huge) Oracle database, so, apart from being used to programming in Java and Perl and other bits and pieces of C based languages and therefore more than prone to slamming a ";" at the end of every line and using curly braces (whilst also indenting properly it can be a bit weird(sometimes, when you can dothis too){and then do something else on the same line;} it seems a very nice language.

I had some initial problems installing the py/pyext library, probably due to not doing an RTFM and ended up Finking, Porting different versions of Python, compiling one using gcc along with compiling Flext and py/pyext from scratch too. In the end, no matter what I did to my environment variables either in OS X or Pd, py/pyext would only load and, more importantly work, when I used the library I had compiled with the version of Python that the library wanted (which is the preinstalled Apple build of Python 2.5.1). No matter what I did py/pyext wanted that Apple build so it must have hardcoded paths to the Apple Python Framework stuff - even changing where the symbolic link to python was pointing didn't help (thankfully it didn't break anything either).

Anyway I got there in the end and played around a little bit with it, although as the patch above more than suggests I haven't got very far with it yet. The Python code is:

import pyext
import sys

class trythis(pyext._class):
    _inlets=3
    _outlets=4

    def _anything_1(self, *args):
        for x in args:
            if x % 2 == 0:
                self._outlet(1) 

            elif x % 3 == 0:
                self._outlet(2)
            elif x % 4 == 0:
                self._outlet(3)
            else:
                self._outlet(4)

...which does nothing clever at all. It just takes a Pd list which py/pyext turns into a Python array then does a modulus on each number and outputs a [o] where relevant. The [mksnd] sub patches just output a bleep at nice intervals with a shortish [adsr~] envelope, doesn't sound interesting but it's sort of nice.

Also, there is a mismatch between inputs and outs - sort of. If you wanted to route a message straight through from input 0 to output 0 it wouldn't happen - there is no output 0 (as far as I can see) the first output is output 1... I am going to look at the C API for this!

It's ok though Pd still rocks and Thomas Grill knows what he is doing. I don't.

[Various] New stuff and Edinburgh

Just recorded and uploaded a new track for the CWK 0015 Survey called Plasticked. It's also on my website. It's bits and pieces of the Und soundtrack that I put together for the Edinburgh Fringe performances, very heavily processed by using Soundflower to route the audio from QLab into my realtime Pd patches. It sounds quite strange and very granular.

Speaking of Und the performances are still attracting quite a few people every night which is great and the performance really seems to vary quite a lot from night to night in terms of delivery and pace, which I am enjoying - generally they're just getting better every time.

We've had a couple of good reviews as well... apparently. I have no idea where they are!

Had a day off performing today but it was still filled with job applications and music making.

Time for bed.

[Cycling] Firth of Forth

Worth getting back up the hill to see this view - the Forth Rail Bridge is just visible in the far distance, if you use a magnifying glass... Might have a ride up to Queensferry and look at the bridge again, I cycled a fair amount around here a couple of years ago and it is very beautiful.

That's Eli on her bike drinking much needed cold, fizzy Coke. It was actually warm and sunny this afternoon - the second couple of hours sun in the last week. And I thought Lancashire was wet and grey...

Meanwhile my chain is getting slack on the single speed very quickly, within days - I think it is probably about to give way under the strain of slogging up the hills. Edinburgh seems to be pretty tough on bikes. Hills, terrible road surfaces and dreadful weather. But then you get stunning views all over the shop, so it's worth it.

[Und] We seem to be settling in

Last night's performance seemed to go well, in fact it was the best so far, so we're improving each time. I only missed about 2 sound cues out of 124, so not bad. Annette was great and the live sound by Igne and Eli gets better every night. The balloon popping moment made everyone jump and the performance was pretty dark (I know that sentence seems pretty paradoxical but you have to be there to understand).

I made myself jump out of my skin when I played a sound that was cued up and ready to go - I thought it was something quiet but it was the loudest part of the audio for the play - it was in the right place, my mind wasn't. That made me jump too.

[Cycling] Another flat... but a weird one

It's never ending. I left the venue last night to find that my back tyre was flat again. Today I did the inner tube in the sink thing to see where it was leaking... it was the valve. Then I noticed that the valve actually unscrews from the, um, other bit of the valve that is connected to the tyre. I've never seen this before. I doubt I will ever have an inner tube that will outlast its valve but I suppose it is quite a cool to be able to replace them. Those are the bits that unscrew on the right hand side of the pic above.

Anyway, you live and learn I guess.

Seems to be fixed but I bet the damned thing is flat again when I head out in 15 mins.

[Cycling] New Tyre

Well, having had a meeting about last night's performance that went on until around 5pm I had to get out sharpish and get a new back tyre for my bike. Having no spare inner tubes I could use and having managed to lose the glue from my repair kit I had to pump the blasted one up and try to get to a bike shop - there was a local one. I asked for Gator Skins and the fella said "Nah, they're pish, pal". Possibly because all of his stock is Schwalbe... so I got a Durano Plus, didn't have a lot of choice. And he was wielding an 8" long pedal wrench. And he was bigger than me.

So, let's see what happens tonight, it'd be nice to have an evening without a puncture. No doubt the Continental on the front wheel will go this evening and I'll be walking home in the rain. Again.

[Cycling] Bike Tyres

Don't buy Continental ULTRA Sport 700c x 23 bike tyres. I've had 3 punctures in 7 days. I'd be better off wrapping the rear wheel rim in tea bags than using these things. I hate those stupid Specialized racing inner tubes too, they're about as thick as a latex glove.

Off to get some Gator Skins, mind you Continental make those too, but they are supposed to be better.

Getting a puncture 3 miles from home in the rain at night having fitted a brand new inner tube earlier in the day is just not funny. At all. And it's definitely not summer anymore in Edinburgh.

End rant. Sorry.

[Recording] The Miller Test

The weekend before I headed off to Bristol The Miller Test spent a weekend recording over in Willesden at the notorious Theorem studios. Ably engineered by the one and only Mark Aubrey who is an excellent engineer and is very good at getting the best performances from people. As ever it was great to get some advice from him about equipment and just to watch how he goes about his job as an engineer.

It was a fun weekend and I think we've got some really good takes - the songs were Place Your Bets, SSCB, Misleading and Devils in the Soul. We had the usual core line up along with Emma Gosnell on backing vocals and a very pregnant Catherine Earnshaw also on backing vocals.

And yes, Sam "The Kid" Taylor was as pesky as ever... but then he would be wouldn't he?

Unbelievably we managed to get two of the backing tracks down in one take for each - Place Your Bets and Misleading. This was followed by a celebratory curry and beers down the road.

Hopefully we'll be uploading some mixes to the Miller Test website soon as well as the inevitable myspace and bandcamp  sites.

Stay tuned for some of Al's pics of us all looking stupid and incompetent.

[Live] Vultures Quartet, The Cube, Bristol

Vultures Quartet have confirmed a gig at The Cube in Bristol on the 31st October 2011. More details to follow, but needless to say, Will is over the moon about playing a gig on Halloween!

I am sure we will have more upcoming gigs very soon when I get back from Edinburgh and Will has finally completed his PhD thesis. It's about time we did, VQ gigs have been far too thin on the ground this year.

[Und] At the Edinburgh Fringe

After rehearsing most of last week and composing bits and pieces of sound for the performance of Und in Bristol we arrived in Edinburgh on Friday night after a long drive (thanks Martin and Anna!) and dragged all of the (fairly extensive) set into the venue. We had a tech run through on Saturday night from 11pm until dawn and then a dress rehearsal from 8.30 am, followed by the first performance at 11.15pm. A gruelling 48 hours during which I think I managed to get about 30 mins sleep.

I didn't really feel that my audio stuff really sounded all that great. In part because I am using samples that are faded out - this means that even though they have been treated with reverb and, in places, with delay, there are no reverb tails after the sounds have finished. To my ears that doesn't sound good or "right" and certainly isn't natural.  In the end I came up with using SoundFlower to route the audio from QLab to the main output and also to Garage Band (!!) where I can add various AU effects to the audio. This seems to work but GB complains about feedback every so often and decides this is bad and stops processing audio. This is a bit of a concern if I am going to try this method of effects processing tonight. I can't work out how or why it would be feeding back as the documentation for SoundFlower implies that the output from GB and QLab should be mixed at the output stage, I must be missing something.

Also, thanks to Anna for showing me QLab, I thought it was a really expensive application but in fact the standard and free version of it does everything I need it to. It's a little weird to understand at first as it simply has a linear timeline but it is possible to have sounds mixing into each other and crossfading, it just isn't immediately obvious this can be done. That said it has saved my bacon for these performances which are mainly sample based.

You can buy tickets for Und here, should you wish to.

And thanks, Jay and Mikey for making it to the performance last night - really good to have friendly faces in the audience.

Already feeling a bit homesick to be honest and I am here until the 29th of August... Maybe I am just tired, Edinburgh is a nice city to spend time in.

[Recording] Kill Minus Nine

Another new band!

This is a kind of trip hop band, with my friends Em and Paul, who both sing, Paul also plays bass and is writing a fair bit of material at the moment. We're all pleased with the results, lots of beats, dreamy vocals and pounding bass.

Stay tuned for some recordings online somewhere, sometime soon.

[Live] The Miller Test

Playing live with The Miller Test at:

The Comedy

7 Oxendon Street

London

SW1 4EE

Not sure how much it will cost or what time we are on... as ever, no one has told me ;-)

[EDIT] Hilariously we managed to miss the gig as it was actually booked on the previous Wednesday! WHOOPS!

[Web] Updated

Just spent some time updating my website - I've added some extra information about things I am working on at the moment, the next month's gigs and I've changed the URLs using aliases to much more friendly ones, which seems to make more sense to me.

No new audio yet, but I want to upload either a video or audio from the MAO-A play that I was performing in Bristol recently.

[EDIT] You can see a video of the MAOA "experiment" slideshow on my site here.

[Theatre] MAO-A at Bristol Old Vic FERMENT

Just back from a really enjoyable few days in Bristol working on the sound and images for Tom Bailey's play The Softening of MAO-A. 

FERMENT takes place in the smaller theatre under the Old Vic in Bristol and is a showcase for "new ideas and works in progress".  MAO-A was another Mechanical Animal Corporation production - the last one I worked on was Und in February.

For this play I had to create a slideshow (something like 150 slides) mostly with accompanying sound.  Around 50 of the slides are a kind of humorous "mind experiment" on the audience. They seemed to get a few laughs anyway, which was the intention. Unlike Und, all of the audio and visuals were prepared in advance (in the two days before the performance!) so my second foray into theatre was purely digital this time, rather than purely acoustic as it was last time.

It was really lovely being back in Bristol - particularly as the weather was good and I got to see lots of people from the Und production and work with Tom again, as well as meeting new people - Ed, Vic, Caroline and Kim for starters.

And many thanks to Tom's parents for putting me up this week.

If I am honest I didn't really want to come back to London!

And... Miss Chown, where were you last night?!?

[Live] The Others, 21st July

Had a great gig at The Others on Thursday, playing with Shugoran - me, Will Connor and Dayvid Q. 

Stonking night and Dayvid was excellent, hoping we do more gigs in future - this was only our second or third.

Thanks to Max for putting us on and for his excellent performance of part of the Maldoror by Lautreamont.

[Live] Holloway Arts Festival

I am playing live as part of the Holloway Arts Festival as part of the Nameless and Unexplained quintet on Saturday 11th June 2011 at 1pm. The address is:

The Old Fire Station

84 Mayton Street

N7 6QT

As far as I can see entry is free.

The quintet is 

Me - probably playing found objects and percussion

Sonia Paco-Rochia - Bassoon

Arthur Swindells - Brass (Arthur is the live sound engineer for Faust)

Daniel Thompson - Guitar

Will Connor - Percussion (and my bicycle as ever)

But we may well be performing as a sextet as Anthony from Vultures Quartet should be making it down to London and I imagine will be playing acoustic bass.

This is an ad hoc quintet or sextet (whatever it turns out to be).  It will be a 50 min totally acoustic set, totally improvised. I haven't even played with Arthur, Sonia or Daniel before, although I am familiar with Arthur's playing and I am recording some electro acoustic improvisations with Daniel and Will today.

[Recording] Mutatorator

Just finished a new piece which I have uploaded to my website called "Mutatorator".

It's basically an experiment in using Pd for realtime processing of sound. It's an amalgam of 11 very short  pieces made using the patch to process a classical guitar. 

It uses a looping samplers and weirdly configured random delay lines and even a bit of Karplus Strong magic. 

Go on, have a listen, you know you want to.

[Recording] Millipede

Just uploaded a new track to my site called Millipede. This was made for Classwar Karaoke survey 0014. CK is a quarterly digest of experimental music run by Anthony from Vultures Quartet and friends of his.

It's a really interesting project and more than worth checking out and keeping an eye on.

The track is another using an actual rhythm (!) along with some glassy sounding algorithmically tuned synths and random delays. I don't know what is going on with this current obsession with using rhythm in Pd, but it's a lot of fun. 

[News] Gigs, Recordings, Java

The next Miller Test gig will be at 229 - a club on Great Portland Street - 229 - we'll be on at 8.30pm and we'll be "showcasing" our new backing singers and some songs you haven't heard before. Emma and Ida are great singers and we've been working on harmonies for them, in fact we're doing more this afternoon in  the luxurious environs of The Premises.

I've submitted a track for the forthcoming Classwar Karaoke compilation - a kind of weird, glassy, algorithmic, downtempo electronic thing. So, all three Vultures will be on it as solo artists (Astrometria - ie me, Will Connor and murmurists - Anthony). As I mentioned before there will be some famous names on this one including Fred Frith.

Seth and I have done some more work on the video looping project, well actually, to be fair Seth has digitised a load of old video material ready for looping. I am still trying to work out exactly how to display it and use OpenCV to control the program or patch I write for it. I'm going to forge ahead using Pd/GEM but I also had a look at using Java. I programmed Java professionally for a few years and one of the things I used was QuickTime for Java. Having not used it for a while I was a little saddened to see that it has been deprecated. In fact Apple did that in 2009 - shows it has been a while since I looked at that API!

I had a look at Java Media Framework but I just don't think it will cut the mustard for what I am trying to do which is a shame. I have seen a similar application to the one I am trying to write built with Max/MSP/Jitter - but I can't afford Max so that's a no go. I just need to work out how to display and manipulate several videos with audio in Pd/GEM I think. I could try Processing but the overhead is immense compared to Pd so that choice is a no brainer.

Some people I have mentioned this to have asked why I don't program this thing in Flash - the simple answer is twofold: I can't afford the development tools and more importantly Flash is the only thing that makes my computer so hot that the fans in it are running so quickly it sounds like it might take off... remember the sound of the nine (?) fans in the old G5 Mac Pro things when you booted into single user mode? Very similar... 

[Mixing] Compilations

Vultures Quartet were asked to contribute a track to this compilation (sorry you need to be logged into Facebook to see this). 

I mixed a track from our last recording session in February for this.

We'll also be on the forthcoming Classwar Karaoke compilation due for release later this month, I think.  CK is run by, amongst others, Anthony Donovan from Vultures Quartet. 

The track is from the same recording session.

This should be an interesting compilation and apparently it will include a track by Fred Frith - so definitely worth a listen.

[Live] The Miller Test at Cargo

We're playing at Cargo on Friday 13th May. I don't think we'll be listed as it's a last minute booking (obviously).  We're on at 7.45pm.

We'll be playing a new song amongst the other stuff too.

If you come to see us it's a fiver to get in - the usual price is £20 so if you like the place you can get in for £5 and stay all night. Just think of all the extra beer you can afford...

[Mixing] Mid / Side EQ

This is a really interesting technique that seems to be really useful when trying to master bad mixes where you don't have access to the original mix or project. As ever this one was discovered on a weekly trawl of GearSlutz where I regularly seem to find new (to me) and interesting (to me) ideas and ways of working.

The way I use it is to use two copies of the stereo file in a DAW on separate tracks, then use MSED as an insert switched to "encode" with the "side" muted then a linear phase EQ then another inserted MSED instance switched to "decode" with "side" muted. I do the same on the copy of the stereo track with "mid" muted.

I tried this out on a really old (1998) live recording of a band I was in where we have an old tape recording from the desk in the venue. Like a lot of recordings from then (who knows what happens now, it costs so much to get a recording from the desk nowadays) the mix is pretty extreme - loads of bottom end on the bass but no mids, very trebly hard panned guitars, not a lot of drums (it was a loud drummer so not much needed to go through the PA in such a small venue) and a fairly decent vocal sound.

I am definitely not a mastering engineer but this is a really interesting method of splitting the signal into the mono only and stereo only elements and bringing the bottom end into line and balancing the stereo more than you might think possible - just by using EQ and panning on each of the two copies of the original stereo track. It's fascinating to use.

There's much more helpful info here: http://www.about-audio-mastering-software.com/mid-side-eq.html

If you've got dodgy old tapes this could help - the people I was in the aforementioned band with seem to have dug a lot up recently...

[Recordings] New Audio Online

I've uploaded a few new things to my website - at the bottom of the audio page as usual.

There are a couple of no input mixing tracks. Everyone who comes round here seems to be fascinated by this method of making sound and I have to admit I am not entirely sure why or how it works but it's very powerful and expressive. I do wonder how long the mixer will last, but considering it is about 40 years old anyway I suspect it won't be long.

I finally uploaded a track based on the Karplus Strong algorithm which also makes use of some drum synthesis which sounds like the most basic sounds one can achieve with a Roland TR808 which I made mainly using [noise~], [adsr~], [osc~] and [lores~] objects - basically kick, snare and hi hat sounds (sort of).  It's a bit of fun. I also recently made a recording with Seth using a heavily modified version of this patch - more on this soon - it needs some heavy editing and mixing but uses the patch in a more interesting way.

Another new one is Yuri which is created using a fairly complicated Pd patch. It has no "user" controls at all, it just uses various ways of creating random numbers to control the subpatches and how and when they fade in and out. I also used the bowed string and marimba from the PeRColate library (contrary to the Wikipedia article PeRColate has been ported to Pd).  I need to make it more interesting.

The above patch was inspired by listening to the music on PatchWerk Radio which is great. On a Mac I needed to download the ogg stream and play it in VLC.

[Website] Updates

I have finally uploaded the other improvisations from Und to my website. These were performed by me, Seth Guy and Mark Pearce. Mark contributed vocals - some improvised some from texts and some old songs.

Mark also shot a couple of short videos of me and Seth explaining what we were doing and how. I can't say I really like seeing myself talking on film but, it's documentation I suppose.

I've also uploaded two videos of The Miller Test from a recent gig (13/04/11) at Nambucca a brilliant venue on Holloway Road in London. Apparently some of the PA was rescued from the recently demolished Astoria and it really does sound good in there. Turns out it is owned by the same bloke who owns the rehearsal studio we use who very kindly made us a cup of tea when we got there and shouted us a few drinks - not something that happens regularly!

[Acoustic] Und Recordings

I've finally uploaded the Und files to my site - at the moment there is the final performance from 13th February 2011 and a long improvised piece by me and Seth.

Bit disappointed that the Space Bass doesn't really cut through on the handheld Zoom recorder we were using but it's not too bad overall. It was a fairly difficult environment to record in anyway, given the amount of natural reverb.

Personally I thought this was Annette's best performance of the seven we did.

One thing I absolutely love is that you can hear the rain coming down the drainpipes in the building throughout. I don't really like the sound of the bloke going "hmmm" all the way through it.

"Green tin table" indeed. Go for it Mr Barker.

Reviews:

Venue

Aesthetica Magazine

Explanations:

Me and Seth Talking Part I

Me and Seth Talking Part II

[Live] The Miller Test

We're playing at Nambucca on Wednesday night (13th April).

Embarrassingly I have never been there before - even though loads of friends have played there in the past...

[Live] The Miller Test, tonight

The Finsbury

336 Green Lanes, Manor House
London, U.K., N4 1BY UNITED KINGDOM

[Live] Looks like I am in another band

Having a try out for my friend Wayne's new band soon - here - looking forward to having a bash at it. Should be a lot of fun.

Wayne is the other member of renderplant

[Mixing] The Miller Test

We finished and uploaded the best recordings of The Miller Test recordings we did recently. They're on myspace.

Had a few scares doing this stuff, losing files and all sorts of weird things going on but they're as finished as they will ever be. We've got a load of other songs we need to record too.

Note Miller's excellent myspace graphic! Hehe.

[Recording] John Zorn

I am mixing several different recordings of John Zorn's piece Hockey - recorded with Vultures Quartet recently. We used some different instrumentation for these recordings which was fun. I was playing guitar, violin as well as the usual Pd patches and some bits and pieces of percussion. Anthony was on acoustic bass fed through some amazing effects as well as using lots of small percussive stuff and Will used his usual "cymbal tree".

The mixes are not sounding as good as they could at the moment however - a bit thin - so I need to do more work on them.

Stay tuned as they may well end up online, who knows?

[Acoustic] Und and Fun

Eli's ace pic of the "family" for Und - cast and crew, although the cast only consists of Annette (centre, kneeling down). 

Thanks to everyone involved for a lovely and very fun couple of weeks. Also: a huge thank you to Leila and James who let us stay with them for so long without ever having met us.

[Gear] Alice Preamp

My friend Seth lent me one of these the other day. I've used it for two recordings so far - one using it to record Anthony's (from Vultures Quartet) ambient sounds and another on some cymbals last night, both through an EV N/D 357 mic.

Really nice clear sound and no noise and a huge amount of gain - +35dB to +70dB - compared to the preamps in my MOTU soundcard  (+40dB max) this is a useful piece of kit for recording quiet sounds for me as I can capture them without having to slap really huge compression on them in the mix and even through a female XLR to unbalanced 1/4" jack I am not noticing any noise - although I need to get an XLR to TRS 1/4" to get the best out of it.

Nice piece of kit - thanks Seth!

[Gear] No Input Mixing

I bought a TEAC Model 2A mixer the other day from a local secondhand shop. It's a six channel mixer with four output busses, originally for use with a four track reel to reel tape machine, hence the four output busses - there is no stereo out - but each of the six channels can be assigned to any of the four outs so it is possible to get a six channel to stereo mix. Check out the weirdness of the ins and outs:

No XLR, no phantom power, no balanced ins or outs and all the outputs are RCA, which I am never a real fan of as I seem to be able to break RCA sockets just by looking at them - at least they are easy to replace. From what I have gleaned from various online rants they're cheap, noisy and nasty mixers but I kinda like it and haven't noticed anything really terrible about it.

What it works really well for is no input mixing which you can hear on my site: astrometria. For this I am connecting the line out from busses one and two to the mic inputs on channels 4 and 5 (the mic ins are set on attenuated - MIC ATT on this thing) to create a feedback loop and using the AUX out to send the result to my soundcard. It sounds like an oscillator from hell.

It's controlled by messing around with the master volume control, bass and treble controls and the channel volume controls, but what also works is using the output assign buttons which radically change the sound - fine, but why do the assign buttons for outputs three and four alter the sound too?! I don't really care as it means that I have the ability to change the sound without the sweep of using a pot.

Lots of fun!

BTW the pics on here are not of the mixer I have, but a rather better looked after one I found on the web - so all that gear you see beneath it isn't mine either. And I have the UK version which runs off 240V / 50Hz

[Acoustic] Und - The Space Bass

The space bass. 

The director of Und had specified in his script that he wanted a low drone at the beginning of the play. Seth and I had a bit of a problem with this as we really didn't have anything that we could use to make one. There is no PA in the space so all of the sounds have to be created acoustically.

In the end I came up with this. It's a triangular tube about 8 feet tall with a 3mm wire stretched from end to end with a couple of sound holes cut into the front. 

Not being a luthier (or anything near) this thing is a bit of a nightmare in many ways. The string is tied to a small bar of wood at each end and then runs between two tines of a fork. The other end of the fork is pushed against the bar of wood - this means when the string is tightened the tension actually holds the wood in place - that is as long as there are some other bits and pieces of wood and metal exerting pressure on the fork and the wood and the case of the bass itself.

It's great when it works, but the string attachments generally have to be rebuilt before every performance. All the pieces of wood on the floor are alternative bridges and nuts for it - this is because I never know how tight the string will be after I have fixed it up so I never know how big a bridge or nut I will need.

The sound is quite cool though - very low pitch and has a similar timbre to a cello, although it is not very loud. Having built this thing I am going to look into techniques involved in building real acoustic instruments.

The sound for Und seems to have been received really well by the audiences and as a team we all seem to be getting on and hitting our cues perfectly now. Tonight we have two performances and then one more tomorrow until it is time to pack up and put the space bass in the bin where I found the reinforced plastic to make it from in the first place.

[Pd] Karplus Strong

I am currently staying in Bristol whilst doing the sound for the play Und and it just so happens that one of the people I am staying with is also a Pd programmer. He showed me the Karplus Strong algorithm the other night - I didn't realise it was possible to get such weird sounds from it.

I downloaded an example patch from the Pd tutorial website and added a metronome and a [lores~] filter to the original and added a very simple drum machine (ie [lores~] filtered [noise~] for snare and a blend of [noise~] and [osc~] through another [lores~] filter for kick. There's also a reverb in there for fun. There's also a random, string-ish [phasor~] based sound in there too.

Sounds like very minimalist techno, albeit randomised.

[Acoustic] Und

Here's the space before we did anything to it. After a week of building various instruments, mainly constructed from stuff we found in the area and lots of bits and pieces from charity shops along with a lot of very long days rehearsing, we're finally performing the play.

Opening night was last night and was well attended and went well. We're using the whole space, the audience are guided around various parts of the set and stand where the action takes place. The performances take place and night only the place where the action is taking place is lit, mostly by torchlight - quite creepy.

Pics of our home made instruments to follow, when I get some.

[Blender] A First Look at Blender

I was looking for OSS video editing software and came across Blender. This isn't the sort of thing I would normally use and I've never done any 3D modelling before but I thought I would have a look at this app as it looked interesting.

I spent hours going through a very dry tutorial about how to create various 3D models, then happened across a tutorial explaining animation. Above is the result of playing around with the default cube object - nothing amazing at all, about as basic an animation as you can make in Blender but I was impressed by how quickly I was able to create it, even though I find the GUI quite confusing (mainly because there are so many different options and menus). 

I might well be revisiting Blender as a friend of mine wants some video back drops for his band's live shows. That said I think the bulk of this material will be made in Processing as it is possible to take audio input and create images / drawings that react to sound. That said it is obviously easy to create very sophisticated looking animations in Blender so I think I will be spending more time with it.

[Pd] ADSR "Random" Synth

This patch came about as a sort of rewrite of a Max/MSP patch I wrote about a year ago, intended as a backing track for some live improvisation using contact mics. The Pd version is actually a less complicated patch but actually works better than the Max version.

It uses three oscillators the pitch of which is determined by randomly choosing from a set of midi note messages. The ADSR values are different for each synth (although I should experiment randomising the values for these envelopes). The speed of the [metro] can be changed and delay and reverb can be added.

In the end the synth was used as a backing track to a spoken word piece by me and Seth Guy, which will be released as a very limited edition together with doctored earbud headphones.

There are a couple of pieces made with an earlier version of the patch and also some short pieces using the original Max version here.

[Acoutstic] Und

Well, this is interesting - my first foray into the world of theatre as a sound artist. Not only that as there is no PA in the venue the sound will be created entirely acoustically. I am working with a more recent collaborator on this - Seth Guy - who was a member of London Concrete. Like me, Seth studied visual art but ended up playing music. We're collaborating on other projects at the moment with a far more visual bent but for this one, it's all sound.

The play is called Und and will be performed in Bristol at the Paintworks.

We went through the script and the musical direction and it looks like we're going to have a lot of fun. The space is something like 160 x 100 x 10m so must have amazing natural reverb. The audience will be moving around following the one actor who is performing a monologue and the whole thing will be lit with torchlight.

Expect lots of scraping metal, bowed objects, breaking glass and who knows what else - depends what we can find in the local scrapyards and charity shops.

[Pd] Max/MSP/Jitter or Pd/GEM?

I've been using Pd for about three or four years and at times I've used Max/MSP/Jitter as well. I've looked around the internet for people's thoughts on each of these audio / video programming environments. I like them both, but...

I prefer the sound of Pd - this is mainly because of the kind of music I make with it - have a listen - because I can push it to the point of clipping and it won't cut out the way that Max will. That's not a big deal but I like the fact that it will go over the "edge" and sound really gritty and dirty.

Obviously I like the fact that Pd is Open Source and free to download and use. And I've never had it crash on me during a gig.

I like Max because I can create really simple, easy to use interfaces (in Presentation Mode - in Max 5) that are simple to build - Pd requires a little more thought in order to create a clear interface for live playing, but it's absolutely possible, it just takes me longer.

Max isn't Open Source and is pretty expensive. It also doesn't run on Linux - this isn't a huge problem at the moment as I currently use a Mac more often than not when I play live, but when it dies (which it is doing, slowly after only 18 months) I will probably move to Linux for audio stuff when playing live - I can't for recording and mixing at home as my soundcard (a MOTU 828mkII) has no driver support on Linux (for that matter it doesn't really work with Windows either).

As an aside, don't think I am an Apple fanboy - OK, I have two Macs here but that's it (I don't own any of their little toys beginning with "i"). I like OS X but that's because I used to have a programming job where I used OS X Server a lot, but that was alongside Solaris and Linux - all three are good in my eyes (Solaris being rock solid in my opinion). And OS X only got good around version 10.4. I'd been using Linux for years before I even contemplated looking OS X in the eye. And a lot of stuff I use on my Macs is OSS - via Mac Ports and Fink.

Back to Max and Pd.

I find Max 5 a real resource hog compared to Pd, ok it doesn't freeze my computer but it can get a bit rattly at times.

Jitter and GEM? Well they're very different. I managed to write an FM synth patch that is controlled using Jitter by taking the feed from my webcam and translating the luminosity of a point in the image via [random] objects to control the pitch and harmonic index of the operators in the synth (which is a very simple 4-OP affair). I've got to say it took me ages to work out how to do it. I managed to write a Pd/GEM patch using OpenCV to control a timestretched sample in about quarter of the time. I suspect Jitter probably offers much more sophisticated video manipulation than GEM as it seems more complex but I haven't really done enough programming in either to really find out yet.

As to which I prefer, well in terms of use it would be Pd by a long chalk - I don't have a license for Max on my laptop which is where I do 90% of my audio programming. I know I can use the Max/MSP Runtime to run patches that I have compiled on my desktop computer but in practice this doesn't work too well for me as I often edit patches during soundchecks to align my sounds more to the situation I am in - something that is really important when playing improvised music.

I like them both though, but Pd is winning me over at the moment.

[Pd] Video Looping

I recently met a friend of a friend who had some ideas for a project using looped videos. He'd been trying to find a way of doing it with hardware and despite asking around all over London he couldn't find anyone who knew a way of doing it. I reckoned it could be done somehow using software although I'd never worked with video clips before (I tend to work the other way around - using data from my webcam to control patches using OpenCV).

I downloaded a couple of clips from archive.org and cranked up Pd. [pix_film] could play the clip and I could scrub through it easily just using a [number] and I could use a [metro] and [mod] to play back any number of frames at any point in the clip at any speed. Great, but no sound. One of the major goals is to take four clips that can be played at variable rates which will create "music" - the main criterium for choosing a clip is that the sound should be interesting and loop well.

After a bit of research it seemed that the audio from the clip I was using had to be extracted from the .mov file and then synchronised to the video in the Pd patch. I came up with the patch at the top of this post in the end. There are some redundant parts of the patch not relevant to the goal but it works. The clip can be slowed down and speeded up, the section of the clip that we want to loop can be chosen by selecting start and stop points (currently these relate to audio frames). This is fed into a [snapshot~] which has to be banged repeatedly - a bit of bad maths later and the video will loop. As the loops are going to be very short (around a second or two) they stay in sync even though the maths is out by 0.5 of a frame per second (in this case).

One problem is that the clip will not play backwards without stuttering, which is a bit of a pain as it would be great to be able to play the clips in reverse at any speed as well as doing the same thing forwards. Further experimentation is needed.

Another problem is that I would really like to be able to play four clips in the same [gemwin]. If that wasn't enough there needs to be a library of different clips that can be changed on the fly; not only that, the patch needs to be interactive in a way that makes sense to an audience unfamiliar with Pd - at the moment it's looking like I will use OpenCV to achieve this but I am not entirely sure how...

Ooooh. First post...

This blog is intended to work / be read / used in conjunction with my website http://astrometria.co.uk. Whether it is of any use or interest to anyone remains to be seen!

It will be mainly about using OSS to create audio and video. I have to be honest and admit I use most of the software in question on a Mac, but I do use Fedora and Planet CCRMA from time to time, but my PC is not all that great for live performances, so the Mac tends to be in use most of the time.