I know a great number of musicians who have more then enough talent to do this thing for a living – and would dearly love to be doing just that – yet they’re languishing away in boring day jobs, working in cover bands playing music they don’t like to punters who don’t care. My mate Brett (with whom I’ve just recently started playing again) writes amazing, complex, clever music, but his bills get paid from singing Cold Chisel and Bryan Adams songs to inebriated North-Westerners. More exciting than collating TPS reports I suppose, but perhaps not so much once you get to the three hundredth rendition of Summer of 69 for the financial year.

So is it just a matter of tenacity? Being in the right place at the right time? That’s long been a bit of an albatross for us Taswegians. I’m not sure how long it’s been since we saw the last Tasmanian music star, but I suspect it’s been a good while. But then, I’m not talking “stardom” neccessarily – I’m talking about making a living, getting by, being comfortable, and not having to rent your soul to the corporate world or the government for 38 hours a week to achieve it.

I couldn’t even begin to speculate on a remedy. Just keep plugging away I guess – the problem is it’s a great big Catch-22. If you tie yourself to a “real job” (and you pretty much have to if you want to enjoy those little luxuries like a car, somewhere to live, or nutritionally adequate food) then the majority of your productive hours are lost in the name of, oh I don’t know, calculating some other fellow’s tax returns, or taking pictures of people shaking hands with suits on, or explaining to supposedly intelligent people over the phone where the on-button is. It’s unlikely that you’ll be in the right place at the right time for that big musical break when the majority of your time is spent at work. Unless of course the right place happens to be where you work, which (let’s face it) is unlikely.

If I were of a mind to make a real world simile, I’d say it’s somewhat like turning on the hot tap and having to wait for the cold water to run through before the hot arrives. You can get frustrated and angry at the time it’s taking, but that’s not going to make the hot come through any faster. Of course if that were the best analogy I could come up with, I’d probably skip it altogether.

Anyway, it’s with this phenomenon in mind that I’ve been working on some side project music whilst waiting for the flashes of lightning required to complete the outstanding T3E material. And because I’m an incurable narcissist & Jem Godfrey fanboy, I took some video. So here it is:

Hey hey… apparently I’m about to be released again. Venezuelan progsters Echoes were kind enough to invite me to contribute some melodies & a vocal performance to a song on their CD. Well it’s all done, it’s called Nature|Existence, and it’s about to come out come out on ProgRock Records.

You can hear it in glorious bit-decimated, dynamics-less myspace-o-vision, and then pre-order the CD from PRR, or buy the download in OGG or FLAC format from Mindawn and have it right now! NOW, I tell you! What black-magic technological madness is this?!

I’m getting a free copy apparently, which will be nice. But if I wasn’t, I’d totally buy one. I might even buy one anyway, I’m crazy and edgy like that.

Not quite this crazy, mind you...

I’m just having a listen again, and I must say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I wasn’t so much at the time, it was a fairly twisty time signature and I felt like I was having trouble getting the lyrics to sit, but with the advantage of some perspective (I would estimate that I recorded this close to 2 years ago) I think it’s not too bad. Hurrah!

I’d like to dedicate the adlib at 3:59 to Andy Kuntz of Vanden Plas – a band so self confident that they named themselves after a 19th century coachbuilding company.

This totally says "prog rock" to me.

Clare & I jetted off to Melbourne this weekend to see the delightful miss Kate Miller-Heidke play at the Forum. It was a lot better than I expected. I knew she was talented and had a great band, plus I’m automatically predisposed to like anyone who sings a song called “ducks don’t need satellites”, but I didn’t realise quite how seasoned the whole group were as performers and entertainers. A pleasant surprise, and at only $50 for the ticket, a very reasonably priced one (plane trip notwithstanding).

Line-up wise, it was a pretty standard rock-show. Drums, bass, two guitars, piano, every one but the drummer sang, and not a hint of a backing track so far as I could tell. Stylistically, it was harder to pin down. I suppose you could broadly describe it as “pop”, but only if you’re comfortable with that definition encompassing liberal doses of operatic singing and shades of live theatre alongside moments of head banging, all executed with a healthy sense of humour, but not the the extent of undermining its sincerity.

OK, so I sound a bit like that old advertisement with the art critics (“an existentialist hurdy gurdy spinning around and around in a double negative reinversion”) but my point is that it wasn’t trying to be anything in particular. It was just being – very convincingly and unabashedly – itself.

I was struck by the contrast with some of the lyrics and music I’ve been trying to write lately, and realising how contrived I’m driving myself to be. Philosophical and overly wordy, and “deep and sensitive”, and it’s all just, frankly, a bit pants. Earnest and insightful lyrics are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all too easy to pick a topic which has the patina of “meaningfulness” (politics, war, addiction, mental illness) and then find yourself writing unbelievably trite, sophomoric, codpiece wearing “one foot on the foldback wedge” lyrics about it. Do I really have to rail on in painfully forced verse about the estranging denouement that our reliance on media and technology are conveying us toward, when I could just say “ducks don’t need satellites”? It’s the same message, but that song is pretty, whimsical, and makes me smile a little bit, at the same time as gently suggesting that it’s possible to be content without the trappings of modern life. Yeah yeah, ducks are silly and boring and not worthy metaphors for our lofty subject matters, but… you know what… arseholes to all that. I think I’d rather aim to be authentic – perhaps even insightful – about the mundane, than to end up like this guy:

"Hey guys, I think I just figured out a rhyme for 'disaffectation'. Can you get me a pen?"

I certainly don’t mean to say that weighty lyrics are always bad, or that irreverent, personal writing is prima-facie good. But I do know that I’ve been censoring myself without even realising it. And I’m going to stop. Because I don’t much care about being cool, or about fitting into  a specific and arbitrary sub-category of a genre. Bring on the real

Oh, and two little fluffy white dogs were just sort of wandering around. It was a bit like our place actually, only our dogs are a little bigger, and one of them is a different colour, and we don’t smoke dope, or conduct fireworks displays. We are occasionally vague though, so the comparison holds some water.

Behold the fearsome power

Oh, and we also don’t own a pair of armchairs that look like they’re out of Lewis Carrol.

Orf with his head! Oh, and get me a scotch. And another scotch. Make it a double.

I also installed Windows 7 x64 on the music PC Sunday, but it was all behaving rather flaky so I’ve reverted back to the old x86 flavour for the moment. Most things worked OK, but Pro Tools wouldn’t play ball, and I sort of need it for the odd file exchange. Seeing as I’m only running 2GB of RAM at the moment anyway, I didn’t really have much to gain from the switch, so I’m not too fussed right now. I’m sure Avid will release a 64 bit version just as we’re all transitioning to 128…

Oh, and I picked up Wusik V5.8.6, and EVE, so I’ve lots of new samples to play with. Fun and games.

After the new-job ridiculousness, and with the assurance that bills can be met for a bit longer, things are starting to settle back into some sort of music-allowing pace. I’ve been simmering on some brain-ideas for T3E album #2, and I’ll be getting them down on tape/disk/flash in the near future. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

I’ve been participating in CAPE again this year. If you’re not aware, it’s a really cool online collaborative recording/songwriting/performance “competition”. I put “competition” in the golden squirrels because it’s not really competitive in any serious sense – rather we all get together virtually at the end of the process, listen to each other’s work, comment, and gain a bunch of cool new tracks for our iTunes playlists. It’s a great social activity as well – I’ve “met” some great musos, producers, and engineers through the event, and projects are in the works (for a given value of “in the works” which have grown out of CAPE collaborations.

Anyway, after a few stints in a row as just a vocalist, I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring as a songwriter for the first time. Also doing lead vocals, harmony vocals, and apparently (fake) mellotron and (fake) string quartet. And possibly mixing, and editing some of the parts for cohesiveness.

But I’m not a control freak. If you find anyone who says I’m a control freak, send them my way so I can tell them what they should be thinking instead.

Ah, mirthfulness….

The editing of takes is a funny thing.I’m normally a bit of a stickler for authenticity of performance and all that jazz. Actually that’s not entirely true – in the right genre I’m all for some judicious DAWsomeness being applied (see Frost‘s “Black Light Machine” at about 7:50 for a good example of some Command-D and grid mode Pro-Toolery). But the song I’ve written for CAPE is a pretty straightforward Beatles-y ballad-y kind of thing, and while yes, it does have two mellotrons and a string quartet and an everything-including-three-kitchen-sinks crescendo, the core instrumentation should sound something like a drum kit, piano, bass and guitar playing in a room, just like John, Paul, George and Ringo used to do.

"Paul, stop sniffing my chest"

Of course playing in a room you have all sorts of cues to work with. You can see each other, you’re all listening to each other play at the same time, and so on. On the other hand, the nature of an online collaboration means everyone’s laying down parts individually to a click and a guide track, and they’re all being shoehorned into a timeline at the end. Even with good players and a good click, it’s challenging to get things to “lock”. “The whirligig of time brings in his revenges”, as Shakespeare once said. Granted, he was basically talking about Karma, Vis-à-vis having people locked up for grinning like idiots whilst wearing yellow stockings and cross-garters, but the quote still holds some relevance I think. At the very least it gives me an excuse to post this picture:

Hey baby - how you doing?

Where were we? Oh yes, editing.

So with my nifty portable copy of REAPER on a USB drive, I’ve spent a rainy lunch-hour at work applying nip here and a tuck there, and our kicks, pianos and basses are all lining up nicely.

I should give an example.

Here’s a bass, piano and drum track in their raw, pre-edited state:

I’m not inclined to say that any of the parts were “wrong” by any objective measure – it can be great to have parts which push and pull against the click. These ones are just pushing and pulling in different ways, by virtue of the fact that they were performed without the performers being able to hear each other. It all contributes to make the total result less than the sum of the parts played.

Chop and slide the parts around a bit, and you end up with something more like this:

I haven’t done any sort of cynical audio-quantise malarkey (and definitely NOT any pitch correction), and I think it still sounds like humans playing instruments. But now they’re playing in slightly better time. A bit more like they would if they were in the same room together, rather than continents apart.

Ideal? Probably not. Cheating? Ahhh, well, that’s more of your philosophical sorta question. Is it cheating if you’re in another state, it doesn’t really mean anything, and you do it standing up? Well, yes actually. But as far as editing, I’m inclined to think not so much – at least no more than the whole recording process itself is a cheat.

For my money, the more pertinent question is “does it do a better job of presenting the song?” And I think the answer is undoubtedly a resounding “yes”.

And as Shakespeare might well have said, had be been a composer rather than a playright, “the song’s the thing”.

A very small cover image indeed

It is with great pleasure that I unveil my debut as a kinda-sorta music tech journalist. Sort of

Yes, the good folks at Sound on Sound were silly enough to publish my article on VST plugin authoring environments. They’re even going to pay me for it. I’m almost a little disappointed to be honest – I’ve read SOS for years, and I always saw them as a reasonable source of knowledge and authority on recording equipment and techniques. Now they’ve let me put something in their hallowed pages, they don’t seem quite so infallible as they once did.

Anyway, it’s in the September issue, or you can read the first coupe of paragraphs here. You need an Esub to go any further at this point, but I believe it becomes free after a few months, so depending on when you’re reading this, it might let you read the whole thing, you lucky devils. I tried to pick up a copy of the mag, but we’re only up to July down here, so I’m in something of a holding pattern.

I’d also like to mark that it was my first wedding anniversary this weekend just gone. Clare and I went away up the east coast for a very pleasant weekend, the specifics of which are none of your business

Ah-ahhhhh!!

I’ve been messing around with some flash-based media tools (toys?) so that I can get the site up and running in its full Web 2.0, ADHD inducing glory, as is the trend today.

I’m not going to host absolutely everything here – youtube is just too convenient to ignore for video, and I’m thinking of using either BandCamp or ReverbNation to host actual complete musical works as they get to that stage. But for works in progress, some means to throw a file up and embed a little player inline is going to be useful.

So I’ve found this nice little wordpress plugin called Audio Player. I’m not sure how they came up with the name, it’s pretty far out there. But basically you throw an MP3 in a pre-defined folder, then put in a little audio tag, and et voilà:

Of course I realise that the relentless march of broadband internet hasn’t yet reached all the nooks and crannies of the world, so I’ll be putting up good old hyperlinks as well so those with slower connections can download if they’re not able to stream. Like this:

Paper Heart

And with that, I must away, lots to do. Sunday won’t fritter itself away.

But such is life… I hope the other fellas find someone good for the position, and there are no hard feelings over the long-term.

Musically there has been a bit of a trickle of progress on T3E#2, but mainly Knotty, Cornel and I have been working on this new groovy laid back (*cough*coverband*ahem*) thing we’ve been toying with. That, and preparing for Knotty’s impending rehearsal-themed 30th birthday bash on the weekend.

It’s been bitterly cold the last few days, after a brief mild spell. I actually love cold weather, but I’m about done with this winter to be honest. We’re very nearly out of firewood, and I am a little worried about the power bill which should be in the mail any day now.

Also, less that 4 weeks until W-day! I think everything is pretty much in-hand, although I have yet to buy a suit, which I think will be fairly much mandatory. I was considering suggesting a jeans & T-shirts affair, but somehow I suspect not all parties would be on board with that one.

Son et Lumiere, according to their myspace, sound like “Supertramp in a three car collision with Phish and Spock’s Beard, with Joe Jackson directing traffic and (we would like to think) Kevin Gilbert smiling down from above”.

I’ve been chatting to the ringleader on various online fora for a while (fora for a… see what I did there?) and I’m finally getting around to listening to his myspace clips.

It’s pretty damn good.

I want to buy it, but I can’t yet – it’s not available. Curses.

So anyway, go and listen to it. Then buy it. Except you can’t.