Clare & I went down to The Venue last night, met up with Knotty & Cornel and thoroughly enjoyed an acoustic set by Jeff Martin. I had missed the last couple of Tea Party tours down here, and was a little miffed when they split up, so it was good to at least get to see Jeff play & sing. He did a goodly portion of Tea Party material (with which I was reasonably familiar) as well as some solo stuff (which I don’t know as well, but enjoyed nevertheless). He sang a little medley of Jeff Buckley tunes, and also a song he wrote for another late friend… It was great to see such an honest, no bullshit performance by someone I’ve been a fan of for some time. Clare loved it, despite having heard virtually none of his music before. Belated new years resolution – see more live music. I was actually hemming & hawing about whether or not to go last night, which seems utterly ridiculous in hindsight. We don’t get a huge number of notable acts down here, but I can hardly gripe about it when I often don’t even catch the ones who do make the effort. We got to bed around 2 (ooeer, aren’t we the party animals) and I was up around 8, my body clock apparently having decided that 6 hours sleep was plenty. Clare is still in bed, and I probably should be…
Not much has been happening music-wise since the last update (yes yes, over a month ago, I’m sorry). We’re in a bit of a holding pattern with The Third Ending album stuff – Prog Rock Records have sold out of the first run of discs we sent them, and we’re currently waiting (and waiting) on the printers down here to come up with the booklets and inlays so we can send them over the pond and get them distributed. Hopefully we won’t have lost momentum by the time it all gets sorted out.
We have been writing quite a bit for album numero deux, and it’s going quite well. Mostly riffs and progressions, not a lot of melodic lines or lyrics as yet, although I plan to spend some time on such things over the next few weeks. With a bit of luck, the gestation period on this disc will be considerably shorter than the last.
Oh, I jumped on the Pro Tools bandwagon last week, and picked up an mbox 2 mini. For better or worse, the software is something of a defacto industry standard, and I thought it would be worth my learning. On top of that, I was looking to get some “real” audio hardware (I’ve been using my motherboard audio for demos up til now), a DAW program, and a good set of solid “workhorse” sounds to play, and the bundled Xpand! module rounded out the package very nicely for my purposes. Runner up was the EMU 0404, but that would have cost me a similar amount, and left me with no DAW program (other than a host of “LE” versions, which weren’t really going to cut the mustard). All told, very happy so far with the Pro Tools experience.
Right – more coffee.