Iain MacKay’s films ‘Loss’ and ‘Armidale Sensory Community Garden’ which feature my songs Sub Conscious and Meteor Shower have been selected to feature at this year’s Northwest Film Festival. For more about the festival visit their website:
http://northwestfilmfestival.com/
‘Loss’ is on YouTube here.
‘Armidale Sensory Community Garden’ is also here.
EDIT: Iain’s film ‘Loss’ has taken out the first prize for the festival! Well done Iain!
MMD Mastering will be temporarily closing up shop by December and as of now will not be accepting any new clients. I’ve four existing clients right now that will take time to finish. Also, I have to think about packing the studio up before December for relocation. After that point I will be without a studio space for an unknown time and therefore unable to do any client work (or even my own mastering!). I foresee that things will be back up and established again sometime in 2010, so if you’re looking for production work I hope to hear from you then.
I’m excited to announce that this year I’ll be making a return to live music, and more to the point: I’ll be playing my own music live. The last time I played my own music live it was 2005 and it was a less than enjoyable experience due to being scantly prepared technologically speaking, as well as being grossly under-rehearsed and under-trained to do all the vocals. I remember it being emotionally excruciating in front of 30 odd people just dying through songs like I Can And I Can Not, which are songs not only technically tricky, but quite naked about my inner feelings and doubts (especially at the time). Despite encouragement after the gig, I really let the live idea die a quiet death and never felt bold enough since to revive the corpse. Until now…
Recent success with recording vocals I’m happy with alongside daily training with vocal stamina and technique has given me the confidence to at least attempt to perform my own songs in front of other people. I know the more I sing and the more I rehearse my songs with the correct technique, the better chance I’ve got of pulling off the performance live, in one take so to speak. I’ve also now got the means technically to do some solo live work: Later this week I’m getting an Apple Mac Book Pro 13″ laptop specifically for this task of playing live, as well as a Presonus Firebox so I can plug in my guitar and run all the guitar sounds via audio plugins playing along to a rendered backing track. I think I’ll process the vocals the same way, but I’m not quite sure of the details yet. I looked into using Ableton Live to host all this, but I found it to be overkill for what I’m attempting to do. So, instead I’m using Reaper, which allows me to do bpm sync and automation on effect parameters for song patches. I guess as I rehearse the songs the sounds will evolve over time.
I went through all my songs and decided which one I could adapt for live performance. A little surprisingly, I’ve come up with 30 songs I can choose from! These may or may not include the following:
Our Blood Is Black
Vegemite
Iced Coffee 2
Stormformer
First Impressions Always Count
Crawling Up That Hill
The Cold
Codec
404 Not Found
No Phone Calls
I Can And I Can Not
The Infant Wish
Berarngutta
I Like You
Add As Friend
Little One
Wattle Bloom
A Forest
Vulcanella Self Destruct
The 4th
Backdropped
Saint Santa
Phoebe
The Objector
Summertime Quiet
Long
Meteor Shower
I Love You And I Love Your Needles
Sleep Is God
Party Line
You may notice that this range of tunes includes some titles that haven’t even been released yet! I’ll be using the experience to ‘road test’ some of these near-finished tunes and will probably help me decide how I want to record them for the final studio versions. I’m also happy that there’s some older tracks in the list like Sleep Is God and I Love You And I Love Your Needles – I’ve already had some fun remixing these older songs to give them a fresh and up to date sound – hopefully I’ll perform them better than ever. Having this many tunes to pick from will be handy in keeping set lists fresh and to play whatever suits my mood.
No dates locked in just yet, but I’ll post here as soon as something is arranged. I’ll probably be playing a few nights at the Armidale Club to get some runs on the board. I’m looking forward to learning from the experience, and getting better because of it. I’m aiming to have some momentum going by next year and may attempt to play some dates up at Brisbane.
Download the new song by myself and Mick Rippon – Our Blood Is Black
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This was composed in seven swaps between Mick and myself over the last few weeks. The style of music is a strange mix of chiptune, breakcore, and a weird dark angry Arabic scale meshed into a pop drama with sung vocals and lead guitar. While on the surface it may appear as another one of my epic dark pop songs, it has got its lion share of Mick’s classic composing styles, with ‘tracker’ style strings, structure and lead synth melodies. The mix work was also 50/50, and Mick played a big part in bringing out the dynamics of the piece.
The song had a bit of an unusual birth: I was mind numbingly bored at work and decided to open up Renoise and have a play with making hand drawn waveform instruments. After tracking a simple drone I added a little Arabic chiptune melody. Feeling it was pretty one dimensional I posted the file on the #renoise IRC channel and see if anyone wanted to co-op on it. Mick went for it and before long we had some seriously accelerated song development happening. And it was turning out surprisingly dark and angular, especially in contrast to some of Mick’s upbeat music.
The Arabic feel inspired me to think about Dubai and some of the horror stories I’ve heard about that place. I remember once seeing that they had so much money they could afford to build this massive indoor ski field, right in the middle of this desert country. It’s the kind of decadence that seems to have little to do with reality. It made me think of this bizarre love hate relationship the west has Arabic oil power – both a reverence of decadence, but a grudging dependence on this economic and cultural lubricant that is oil. So the lyrics came from that tension, a kind of corrupt fatalism that could really apply to any sort of trade based drama.
The song was mastered in Reaper digitally, and then recorded to my tape setup (the Tascam BR20T calibrated with Ampex 456 tape). We both chose to have a very clear and dynamic sounding mix and master, which during the loud sections are at around K-12 leveling. If it seems a touch quiet to begin with, please turn it up nice and loud and enjoy the dynamics!
Not many updates for all of you over this winter period. Needless to say I’ve been working very hard on a lot things: the usual Paradox album material, mastering other people’s work, and the odd quick collaboration with others. I’ve also been doing large amounts of daily vocal exercises to better improve my strength and sensitivity. I need to do this because some of the songs I will record for have sections that are very very demanding and require near-perfection. So lots of scales, across about a 5 octave range and over and over is all I’ve been working hard at. And the usual winter blues of trying to keep warm – keep the spirits up.
Over a year ago I bought a new electric guitar but didn’t make any mention of it here. I pretty much feel in love with it as soon as I saw it in the store in Brisbane: the Jackson DK2S, coloured blue rippled sunburst. The key ‘coolness’ about this guitar is the Sustaniac which allows for all sorts of expressive, long note weirdness. It’s been featuring on a lot of recordings in the last year or so.
The DK2S comes standard with Seymour Duncan passive humbucker pickups at the bridge. The more I played the guitar with that pickup selected, especially with a clean tone, I grew to dislike the sound. It was hard to describe, but the attack had a fizzed-out feel and it was generally ‘grainey’ sound. I may have been a little unlucky and received a defective pickup, but either way I decided I’d replace it. It was hard to ignore to reputation of EMG’s pickups: so the shopping began.
After reading quite a bit I decided to go for the EMG85’s. This choice is a bit unconventional as the 85’s are designed to go a the neck position and the EMG81’s for the bridge position. I wasn’t quite into the ‘classic shredding’ metal sound the 81’s gave at the bridge, and I heard a sample of the 85’s at the bridge position and liked it a lot. It sounded more rich and warm, yet still ’super-charged’.
Installing the active pickups was much more of a challenge than I bargained for. There was no concrete wiring diagrams to follow given that I was doing something so non-standard on an uncommon guitar. After a few false starts I got some help from Alan at Sustaniac. The correct wiring was tricky and not at all guessable. It also required a special 9-lug jack to be wired in – so I had to order that from the States and wait a while for it. After some frustrated wiring attempts for hours the other day, I think I eventually got it right.
So I plugged the axe in and took it for a thorough test drive. The EMG85’s are as rich, clean and warm as I hoped they would be – but surprisingly too peaky and overdriven for some clean sounds. This is easy enough to curb with rolling the volume off a touch (and with a few re-writes of my patches). For your listening pleasure (or pain) I recorded a quick noodle of the sound of the new pickups. You can hear it warts and all here.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Here’s some shots of the the work on the guitar, with Gus helping out:
Blue!
