[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!

[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