[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.