mmd

Not much to report just of late hence infrequent posting. However, it’s apt to share with everyone that my Tascam BR-20T reel to reel tape deck has been completely sorted out ready for pro-level mastering. I hear the geeks of you asking “what was wrong with it?” while everyone else goes “Tape? Yawn!”.

Well, for the geeks who were kind enough to ask: two things were not addressed when I used the deck for remastering Vulcanella Self Destruct a while back. The first was the quality of tape I was using which was mere low grade duplicating tape. I’ve since got my hands some reels of Ampex 456 – which for many studios was one of the standard mastering tapes used in the 80s (just check out the sleeve notes for Mike Oldfield’s Crises record). In this day and age there are better reels out there (like ATR mastering tape; and ATR-102 decks are better than my Tascam as well: but that’s another story) – but the Ampex 456 is the best I can use for my deck seeing that Ampex tape tends to shed coating onto the heads and affects them in a way that prevents you from using any other tape. To prevent this dreaded shedding problem, I baked my tapes in the oven for about 12 hours at about 50C. And then, wha-la: perfectly usable tapes. Nothing like a bit of baking to help out the audio engineering!

The second issue was a matter of deck calibration. Calibration involves a series of technical procedures done with the deck to perfect I/O levels and tone. This required quite a bit of patient fiddling with geeky detail I won’t go into here. I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do without help from Simon. Simon is also currently getting deep into the world of tape, not only with 2 track mastering tape, but with 8 track session tape. So thank you Simon! After some fine tuning I got an excellent standard system using a combo of Reaper and the tape deck to do both standard digital mastering as well as using the ‘magical sound’ tape method. To use Simon’s words, tape is an instrument: you play it. Finely riding the input levels just to get that sweet spot nestled between clarity and punch, it’s just so fabulous to finally get that sound I’ve been after for so long.

This means that my mixing and mastering business is officially back up and ready to go! So if you need any mixing or mastering done on your songs, please visit the site, read the FAQ, and get in touch with me. I’ve already got one client’s project on the boil, and a few more lined up. And hopefully some of my big projects will soon see some tape action as well.

Speaking of which, I’ve been cutting back time from my day job during the quiet winter time so I can spent some more time finishing songs at home. I’ve been doing a lot of structured vocal practice and a lot of vocal recording for Paradox songs (trying to crack ‘First Impressions Always Count’ right now) with improving success. It’s very hard though, and I think I’m still a long way off from what’s in my brain as being the ideal sound. Tomorrow’s another day…

Yet another little trip up to Brisbane over the weekend saw us catch Hunz at The Globe on Friday night. A little tired from traveling all day we found sitting through the support bands a little bit of a challenge – the PA was just way too loud for my fragile ears and the bands were performing music that wasn’t really my sort of thing. It must have been late, possibly quarter to midnight that Hunz with his lappy, mics and keys, plus his bandmates Phil Evans on bass & Richie Young on drums, delivered a shortish set for over 30 minutes.

Playing only songs from the album When Victims Fight the band delivered enhanced versions of the songs with live intensity and genuine emotion, all which came across most enjoyable and beyond expectation. Going off my limited knowledge of their YouTube posted performances, it seems that the band is quite tight and Hunz has embellished the songs with live keyboard, extra melodies and effective ‘tape loop’ style self-sampling of his vocals to perform lovely weaving auto-choruses and builds. There were many moments when I though ‘this is all better than the CD, especially the strength in Hunz’s voice’. It was a slight shame there were only 50+ odd people there to see all this – but I’m reminded of a time I saw Augie March playing beautiful music to a small and totally unresponsive Bistro Audience up at UNE in 2000 before they got very big on Triple J. Somehow, and I know it’s a cliche, I feel it’s the same for Hunz: that wide and appropriately deserving attention will befall this music one way or another. Good gigs leave you with this feeling. There are all too many acts out there that suffer from having too much style and not enough substance – but if you ever catch these guys play live you’ll see that there’s no such issue here. The music left us feeling both entertained as well as inspired.

What a motivator to keep on with my own music.

We met up with him after the set to have a quick chinwag. He told me that the Renoise XRNS files for the new album Thoughts That Move have been released, which you can read more about here. Oh yeah, and of course that means the album has gone fully public and the band will be performing the new songs at future gig dates (lucky for Brisbanites). As stated before, I’m excited for him and think that it’s a good sign of what is yet to emerge.

As for myself at the moment there is little to report other than I’m continuing with much work where I can as time allows. I’ve recently started using Reaper, which is audio software based on much the same philosophy as Renoise. I’m looking at ways I can get the two joined up with ReWire, or using Renoise to do mixes and Reaper to do masters. More soon…

Images for you!

Out little tent camping at Mt Isa.

Constantly loading and unloading Sluggy.

No room for tall people! Cosy camping in dry climates…

Welcome to Mount Isa, now you’re a REAL Aussie!

Isa views…

Brolga’s spotted on the way to Boulia!

Desert Dork.

The Min Min.

Changing Sluggy’s tire at Middleton. This is where we met the old bloke who told us about the Grey Falcon.

Big Boy Echidna hides…

Gus and new addition to the fluffies: Fez! Waiting for us to get back from the road trip…

A Crimson Rosella hanging about for lunch while we were up at Lamington NP.

Lamginton views.

With Jarrad and Bec…

Ok now some images from the new rental:

Garden Mutt!

Inside…

Note essential equipment: bar heater.

Simon has dubbed my monitors “The Pandas”.

Big help…

My friend Jazzoo did a nice blog post about our recent trip up to Lamington National Park. I’ve never seen such a tourist ridden National Park! Anyway, check it out…

Other images coming soon…

After getting back from 3 weeks off work I find myself thinking the same old cliche when I get back to work: “It would be nice to have some time off to do nothing right now!”. And now being back at the grind, and having the long task ’setting up’ at our new rental home with mountains of junk everywhere, it seems like yet again it’s expected that we’re to run on empty. No rest for the wicked! (-Or some other saying that will help me cope with the denial) However, I have time to relate this adventure to you, in brief:

Heading back about 3 weeks to Easter both R, the animals and I set off for Brisbane to make temporary camp at R’s Mum’s place. Once prepared R and I headed out for a road trip in much the same intention as our Birdsville trip last year to see more of outback Queensland. After three days of driving up through Roma, Emerald, Longreach and Cloncurry we finally make it to Mount Isa. You have to see Mount Isa to truly believe it – it’s like something out of sci-fi movie crossed with suburban Australia plonked on Mars. As we were winding through the rocky semi-desert hills heading west toward the town, we could see plumes of heavy smoke rising. Getting really close to the town we rounded one last set of hill to see it all appear before us: massive chimneys and elaborate mining industry towering over a sprawling busy town, all surrounded by rocky red desert country hills. As we were going into the town the usual billboards were on the side of the road welcoming us. One stood out as humourously unforgettable: “Welcome to Mount Isa – Now you’re a REAL Aussie!”. In this we felt content.

We had a good stay over and enjoyed a few things like the swiming pool and seeing tropical birds we’ve never seen before. The following day we headed south west into more remote country and ended up at Boulia. Seeing that the country had recent rains it all felt abnormally ‘green’, and there were an excess of flies and locusts to add to the discomfort. We also found that the car had a flat tire. In the morning we found a local mechanic to patch it up for us, but later on the road to our surprise we found it flat again. Pulling into a tiny little place called Middleton we got a hand from a friendly old local which basically resulted in us putting the spare on and being done with it. Swealtering in the sun we needed a drink, so we followed the old bloke into the pub and got some icey drinks and had a yarn to young Brittish exchange worker as well as the old fella. Before recent rains they hadn’t seen rain for 8 years. Can you imagine that? I noticed a poster on the wall from Bird’s Australia asking ‘Have you seen this bird?’ showing the ever so rare Gray Falcon. I asked the old guy if he had seen any around. “Yeah, all the time!” He explained that we might see a few up the road a bit further nesting in one of those high thin communications towers. Sure enough he was right. Not only did we see one of these rare birds: we saw three – quite possibly a whole family of Gray Falcons and a nest. Satisfied with our twitch we kept on the road east until we finally rolled into Winton. By this point we were very tired of the whole camping thing and traveling huge distances just to get anywhere – we decided to treat ourselves to an airconditioned motel room and take it easy.

More adventuring had been pre-planned at that point but due to R coming down with a head cold we decided we had enough and to head back to Brisbane to relax. Of course it wasn’t that easy. It took two days of driving just to get there! The first day was epic, a sunrise to sunset slog from Winton all the way down to Roma. R’s cold had hit full on, and we were glad to be back in modernity of suburban Brisbane.

We spent the following week around the city, doing a lot of things but not enough ‘nothing’. One highligh was meeting none other than Hunz in the flesh for the first time, and had a good chin wag with him at Fundies in Paddington. It’s always good to put a ‘person’ to the ‘artist’ – very nice guy. If all goes to plan I might head up that way again on the 22nd and catch him live in The Valley. We also got to catch up with Jarrad and Bec for dinner and a day of bird watching up at Lamington NP. But by the time the end of the week was coming around my version of R’s cold was starting to manifest…

Heading back to freezing Armidale didn’t feel like fun. As soon as we got there we had to begin the ardous task of moving house. As I’ve explained before in this blog, we had to move due to the landlord wanting to move back into Galloway Street – so we found a new rental at Dorothy Avenue. With some great help from Dad and Simon (who also helped with my tape machine, more on that later) it took us the whole week to move just 3 blocks away. You can now probably see why I need a holiday. Moving sucks. Moving is worse when you have cold. There’s nothing nice about it and I won’t write about all the little problems and remaing issues. One thing I will say is that I’ve already set up the core parts of my new studio space – I’m already coming into some nasty RF interference problems with the power lines, and I have very ugly sounding bass response (probably due to the ceiling being lower). I’m not sure how to approach these problems just yet as we’ve barely started living in there, but I will speak of them again soon…

Ok now for some musical style updates:

A few posts back I said that Hunz’s new album Thoughts That Move (which I now have a lovely physical copy, ta Hunz) was up online for audio streaming at the RPM website. Well RPM took it down for some reason, so the link I provided would have seemed wrong. He’s since put it up at bandcamp and you can listen to the whole thing here! I’m really happy for him and I think the music deserves wide appreciation. The launch of the record will be on the 28th of May, so keep an eye on his website.

Another tid bit that has surfaced is some noisy guitar work I did for the artist Vivace (formally known as BotB) – he’s just release a new album called Polderdub which you can get here. You can hear some of my ‘off the rails guitar’ in the song Test Results. Not for the faint hearted…

A little update for you all on all things mmd. Previous posts told of our housing drama, so it is expressed with relief that we have finally arranged a new place to rent! As of late April Galloway Street Studio will be no more and a short move 3 blocks away will see the beginning of Dorothy Avenue Studio. Preventing the homeless problem and having a nice cosy house to be in will certainly help R and I think about what the next move is and how to do it. In the meantime, I’ll have to spend the next few months trying to figure out how to best set up all my equipment…

We are also very happy that as of the end of this week we’ll be off on a much desired holiday from work! For a few weeks we’ll be out driving around western Queensland like we did last year – more desert adventure that will hopefully lead us to Mount Isa. It’ll be food for the soul and good thinking time. We’ll also be spending some time in Brisbane catching up with some folks and items of culture. For now, it’s adieu to computers, and adieu to the web (said with much joy).

By the way, Hunz’s finished album is now up online for streaming listening here. I had a listen to it today and did some reflecting on the mix work I did on the project back in the flurry of activity during Feburary. With the benefit of hindsight I can detect one or two micro-moments where I think “gosh that should be 5% more THIS way”, but otherwise I’ve happy with what is there. It was a great opportunity to help Hunz get to that final point, and to have a hands on experience with his fantastic music. I’ll keep you posted if he does a physical release.

Last Friday the 13th Iain and I played at Uralla’s Top Pub for the Get Off Your Arts Dance Party, in support for Tijuana Cartel and playing after The Knobs. At the peak there must have been over 50 people there. It’s hard to focus back to this event as already my mind is deliberately erasing the memory of it. Some things went really well – we got to set up early and make sure all everything was running perfectly for the PA; and some moments during the performance had a nice spark to it. But the usual drawbacks and mad surprises were present: no payment for playing; no certainty with food arrangements; stunned unresponsive audience; storm water leaking heavily onto the playing area threatening electrocution and causing flooding of the floor during Ed and James’ set; bumping and damaging equipment; and of course people getting roped into running the PA when there should have been someone formally taking that role all along. I found it very hard to get into the performance, and only felt the magic once during “Life This Free”. But otherwise I just couldn’t keep up with Iain and where he was going, nor did I feel emotionally committed to the whole operation. Earlier in the evening I had a mild panic attack from feeling claustraphobia and noisy indecision inside the pub and had to run outside just to breathe. To tell you the truth I probably would have been happier at home in bed with a Stephen Donaldson book!

I’m feeling a little burnt our from a few things, playing live and rehearsing is part of that. I feel I need to “heal”. Perhaps a break is in order, but I’m not sure. There are other things to organise first:

Late last week R and I received notice from the rental agents that our landlord wished to move back into the Galloway Street residence where we are living. We have been given 6 weeks. This news came as a bit of an emotional blow at first, but I’ve since taken it on the chin and starting to figure out the daunting puzzle of how to pack up everything. This means we’ll have to find a new rental, at least for a short time like 6-12 moths, while we plan and initiate building our OWN house somewhere else in Armidale. It’s all a little bit of a case of bad timing. This means I will have to put any studio production work on hold at least for the next month or so while we move, and who knows if the new rental we have to settle with will have an acoustic space I can use for work. I’ll update you all of what will happen here, if I can: my internet access may be little more restricted for a while. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Your massive simple spheres
All red, green, blue and yellow
Roll across the land
Sponging everything up
No secret is safe, not one part of nature unscanned
And you return this to your masters
Without even knowing why
And they tell you how to hold it
How to show it, and what to withhold
And slowly your mouth speaks lies
That keeps us all watching, feeding, sucking
Until we have no lives unless we buy
Buy into endless slices of cake
That keeps us simple and keeps us slow
And there’s no time for thinking
Or causing things to improve
Because sooner or later those balls
Will come and roll over us and keep us small
And while we buy mute
Greed burns all the remaining green
We fall asleep, thirsty, hungry and blank
With the vague thought that sometime before
We must have created you
We must be getting what we deserve
The stars come out, look down upon us
And that last connection… It just hangs there…
It just hangs…

Ghost Inputs (Iain MacKay and myself live) will be playing at the Get Off Your Arts Black Friday Dance Party, which is this coming Friday. We have a few more practices to go to make sure we’re playing up to the same level of energy we had last year. This is straight off the back of a ‘warm up gig’ we did last Friday at a private party in Armidale…

With every gig I come away thinking “now I’ve seen it all” but I keep getting surprised with new random insanities. This last gig hosted all the usual madness of having no run-order, no sound check, and random people everywhere on all sorts of substances. But the cheery on top was undeniably the stage set-up: “erected” in a back yard on uneven ground causing the whole thing to slope forward in differing degrees. To add to the odd situation there was a tarp above the stage which was so low that when you stood up your head disappeared up into it, meaning that the audience couldn’t see who you were! The combination of a sloping stage and the low hanging tarp meant that I had to stoop over to play, which ended up making my back a bit sore. The whole PA and lighting was run off just one power point and there were weird glitches and blips causing the whole thing to feel like it was going to fall over at any second. Iain had no power to his laptop so that decided to make a problem of itself mid set – nothing like a recalcitrant computer to make you feel helpless on stage. Despite all the above we had some ok moments where things came together. I couldn’t help but feel a little numb to everything, perhaps out of self preservation. Yet again I’m scratching my head thinking is it worth it at all, but I have hopes that the gig we have next Friday will be a little better. I’m kinda missing time to work on my own albums…

I’ve been running on empty a little bit lately, hence not much posting here.

Hunz’s RPM Challenge mixing was a lot of time consuming work but also a lot of fun: it’s now all finished and shall be released soon! The album is called “Thoughts That Move”. I will let everyone know when it goes public – you have a good one to look forward to!

Other than that, work has been insanely busy and time consuming due to the teaching semester starting (meaning I’m running around again recording all these lectures). To top it all off R and I have been doing a lot of ‘house hunting’ and ‘property hunting’ in the last couple of weeks. That can be enough to totally do your head in with all the options and possibilities. At this point we’re leaning toward buying land and getting something build for us (not by us), possibly using new green technology and ideas. And of course, we must include somehow a new space for my studio! I’d miss the old roomy acoustics at Galloway Street, but our time here is now limited, and it’s now the moment to commit the ghastly act of conformity and join the property investment game. Part of me feel icky about this, but part of me accepts the inevitability of it all, perhaps looking forward to the quiet modest commitment. I’ll let you know when the decision has been made.

Other parts of me yearn for travel. Sometimes I get cabin fever from being locked in studios all the time, and the cooling crisp air of an approaching autumn beckons me to be on the road. Some new ideas are entering my head either way, but all I have to do is reclaim my time to enact them…

A quick update from the busy avalanche of stuff I’m stuck in at the moment: Remixta 5 is now up! It features the mmd_as track Saint Santa, please a heap of good Renoise musics.

Still working hard on Hunz mixes and the final results will be out next month.