[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?!?