We’re nearing the end of Holy Week in the church Calendar. Starting with Palm Sunday, running through Maundy Thursday (today) to Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday.
My thoughts on all this are the same this year as they were last year, so click here to read last year’s blog post about Good Friday.
The process of naming tracks is always a tricky one. A lot of tracks start of with descriptive names… it’d be fun to actually release it with those – ‘the bluesy one’ ‘the miserable sounding one’ ‘harmoniser and delay thingie’ etc.
I usually have a list of possible track titles, cribbed from books I’ve been reading and ideas that have come to me, and sometimes the songs just have their own title that has to be there… Other times, people suggest titles that work. i always ask for people’s title suggestions after improvs on gigs, and occasionally get them. I haven’t used any yet, but it’s really interesting to see how certain tracks connect with people…
Right, back to the process of recording the music… slightly higher up the priority list than the names…
This story in The Guardian highlights a whole load of ways that the UK government are fundamentally reshaping our relationship with the state. The reminder that ‘they work for us’ is sounding increasingly hollow, given the way that they are removing all the restraints on the goverment to intrude into our lives, indulge in surveillance on any level they see fit and even prevent us from saying we’re not happy about it.
This chunk from the article, as quoted on the lovely Andy’s blog is indicative of the scariness –
“The government is briskly and fundamentally reshaping the relationship of the individual to the state, of the Lords to the Commons, and of MPs to ministers. The ID cards bill will allow the authorities unprecedented surveillance of our lives, and the power to curtail our ordinary activities by withdrawing that card. The legislative and regulatory reform bill, now entering its final stages, will let ministers alter laws by order, rather than having to argue their case in parliament.”
What are we going to do? Mass protest does seem the only route. Civil disobedience seems logical and ethical… What the hell is Blair up to? The distance between the new-labour police state that he’s building at the moment and the lovely utopian ideals put forward when labour won the election back in 97 is a gulf of unimaginable proportions. Was this the plan all along? Is he as much of a lying conniving bastard as it seems, or just one of those politicians who make really stupid assumptions about the importance of civil liberties when faced with some kind of supposed ‘challenge to national security’. Surely this kind of draconianism is a bigger challenge, no?
Anyway, back to recording for me – maybe I’ll just call the new album fuck blair, and list the names of the dead British soldiers on the sleeve, and post copies to MPs, thereby causing them to break the law just by reading the sleeve-notes – can’t have mention of the catastrophic consequences of Blair’s disastrous military cock-up in the gulf actually read in parliament, can we now?
Doing more recording for the new album today – Since tuesday, my days have been too full of teaching to get any recording done! It’s great to have the teaching work, but I do wonder whether I’m going to need to empty my diary for a couple of weeks at some point before the middle of May to get this finished… Maybe I’ll be able to do it in the few hours here and there that I’m able to grab to work on it. I can’t remember if I was blocking out whole days for doing Grace And Gratitude…
Got a couple more fun things recorded today. Another slice of melancholic optimism just now, that sounds lovely. There are a few string squeaks and scrapes through the piece that I need to decide about – are they characterful or undesirable?? It’s a tough call…
Anyway, back to it – while I’m doing this, those of you using Mac OSX can check out check out this rather fantastic addition to iTunes…
I’m currently watching a web chat on the channel 4 website with Steve Easterbrook, the managing director of McDonalds in the UK. It’s in response to channel 4 having just shown Supersize Me again. I watched bits of it again, and it’s a fantastic bit of film making.
Clearly, McTurdBoy is going to be a shitbag – you don’t take a job like that in the first place without being McScum – and the webchat is being filtered so it’s all the questions that look really edgy but allow him to recite the McShit party line.
I’ve submitted three questions so far – one of about the Judge’s conclusions in the McLibel trial, one about the McDonald’s statement that none of their meals are guaranteed free from meat contamination and one about whether or not the film has an impact on the ‘diminished consumer confidence’ that McShit listed as one of the reasons for them closing 25 of their hellholes last month… – perhaps not surprisingly, McSatan hasn’t bothered to trouble me with a McAnswer.
It’s true, I’ve done 500 miles in the last couple of days. Yesterday after a daytime of teaching and listening through the newly recorded tracks from Monday and Tuesday, I headed off down to Brighton to see Imogen Heap play again, accompanied this time just by Zoe Keating on cello. I’m really glad I got to see the duo version of the gig, as well as the full band version last week. Imogen really is one of the most engaging live performers I’ve ever seen. Fantastic stuff.
Bumped into Steve – Cathy Burton’s keyboard player – at the gig, with his fiance, and offered to give them a lift home, as their last train was only just after Imogen had started. Ended up being a v. v. long diversion, and I got home at nearly 3.
Had to be out of the house again before 9, to drive to Nottingham for a day’s teaching stuff at Broxtowe College – a load of other pro musicians and I were brought in to critique the bands, help them with arranging, rehearsing, performing etc. It was a lot of fun, and I was paired up with Kieran Pepper from The Prodigy to work with these bands together. I then finished up the day giving a quick masterclass/Q & A sesh to a group of bassists. Much enjoyment all round.
However, I very nearly didn’t make it to Nottingham. On the way up, my brakes started to make some strange grinding noises – that nasty metal-on-metal noise that means your break pads are going. By the time I’d got to Nottingham the break pads had gone completely, and the grinding noise was hanging around beyond the pedal being held down, indicating that the brakes were beginning to stick. I got the car as far as a garage (Hi-Q in Beeston, if you’re interested), and they got it up on a ramp straight away. Weirdly though, the adaptor thingie needed to undo the locking nuts on the wheels was totally threaded, and useless (a call to the lovely Rev. G revealed that this wasn’t the case last time he changed a wheel… much strangeness). A resourceful young chap in the garage was able to hammer a socket-set thingie onto the nut and remove it, so we were off again, but with the 15 minute walk from there to the college I got there about half an hour after I was intending to.
Still, they fixed the brakes, I picked up the car afterwards and paid them £128.00
So now I’m knackered, too much driving. Wanted to go and see
Soundtrack – Lola Perrin, ‘Fragile Light’ (gorgeous solo piano from possible future collaborator… watch this space…)
A few of you loopsters are on the Looperlative forum anyway, but for those of you with a loopacious predilection who aren’t on there, Bob’s now taking orders for the second run of Looperlatives. $1499 + shipping. For UK peoples that works out to about a grand inc. shipping and import duty. Pretty damn good, if you ask me.
Meanwhile, I’m recording tracks here with mine for the new album – mine’s only a prototype (should be getting a production model soon enough), and even that is streets ahead of anything else I’ve ever used.
Yay for Bob!
I’ve been on MySpace now for about 8 months. It seems to be going well for me in terms of finding people who dig what I do. I’m selling a few CDs as a result, and we’ll see if it does well for me when the new album comes out, and in the upcoming run of gigs.
Here are a few tips for musicians on there, to maximise your exposure.
Let’s start with your page – make sure it’s readable. Don’t put loads of video clips and preloading audio nonsense in the rest of the page. The format is confusing enough as it is without you making the page take hours to load. And ditch the background images – they nearly always make all or part of the text impossible to read.
Influences – yes, I know it’s really cool to claim not to have any, and I can see why trying to narrow a lifetime of musical listening down to a short list is tough, but really, it’s worth it. A lot of people search for bands by influence and sounds like. They’ll find you if you have loads of artists listed in those boxes (and you spell their names right!) – put down everyone who has ever influenced you in the influence box. If that means you’ve got 500 names in there, that’s fine, honest. Just go with it. For sounds like, just put all those crazy things that people email to you – you remind me of such and such etc. Stick them in there. Go on, more people will hear you if you do.
Genre – make sure you pick three! Don’t put ‘jazz/jazz/jazz’ or whatever – you don’t get listed three times, you just miss out on more directory places. For people searching by style they aren’t going to find you. Put three that are close enough to what you do.
Bio – make sure you’ve got one! Update it, put a picture in there, format it so that it’s split up into paragraphs, use bold text and hyperlinks to highlight what’s going on. If you don’t know how to do that, ask someone! find out, it’ll make the whole thing work much better for you.
Blog – USE THE BLOG – it’s a great opportunity to communicate with people who dig what you do, even if it’s just to say how excited you are about the upcoming gig dates that are listed. Talk about anything, I don’t mind, just use it, it’ll keep people coming back to your page. (and on the subject of upcoming gigs, I don’t need to remind you that you really need to put your dates in there, and make sure you get the information right, as it’s listed by region and searchable by postcode.
Right, that’s the stuff to do with your own page. Now, the active stuff –
rule no. 1 – don’t use one of those automatic ‘bot’ programs that does it all for you. Apparently MySpace can work out who’s using them and deletes your profile… you’ve been warned.
However, it is great to invite people to listen to your music. So, go into music search (that’s the red search bar, not the general one) and search for other bands that are similar to what you’re doing, search by influence or sounds like, narrow it down to the region where you’re gigging, and invite them. Have a listen while you’re there, and post a comment if you like what you hear. It all works out well for everyone. You’ll get clicked across to from other people’s comments section. (oh, and while we’re on comments, don’t put images or music in your comments, and it’s probably best to disable HTML in your comments – I think it’s in the privacy option in the edit screen on your home page).
Oh, and make sure if you do contact anyone that it’s clear that’s not just a form response – everyone on myspace is obsesssed with the possibility that they are being spammed. No-one likes getting anonymous messages, so at least stick their name at the top! ‘Hey, thanks for the add, check out my band’ is no way to hold a conversation.
Go to it, it works great – most of the time, I’m the most viewed british jazz artist on an indie label on the entire site. That’s not bad going, is it? :o)
It’s only lunchtime, and I’ve already recorded two things I really like for the new album. Who knows whether they’ll make it on, but my fretless intonation is a lot better than it was yesterday, and I’ll be having another crack at Eric’s tunes later on, to see if I can get them in the can today…
Also, on reflection, some of yesterday’s stuff was a lot better than I remembered it, so I might have some things from that session too… Seems like we’ve finally got this ship under-sail.
Yay for me!
As usual, most of the new album will probably end up being improv stuff – things that just happen, are lovely, and I’ll then go back and learn them for playing live. However, I have got a couple of things written, as well as the cover tunes, and they bring with them certain er ‘problems’. The big one at the moment is recording the song for Eric – it’s a chord melody piece on a fretless bass, in AbMajor (so I can’t fall back on my usual collection of open strings and natural harmonics to bail me out when it gets tough) – and I’m really struggling with the intonation and phrasing on it. I’m sure I’ll get there eventually, and it’ll certainly be worth the struggle, as it is, in my ever so biased and rose-tinted opinion, one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was certainly the favourite with the audience at Edinburgh last year, and will be the centre-piece to the record (I’m thinking of possibly recording a sister piece to go with it, a big ambient tune dedicated to Eric too – with the recording of Deep Deep Down as well, if that makes it to the record, it’ll be a nice big tribute to a very wonderful and much missed friend).
I’m having the same problem with Deep Deep Down – I’m going to try a version of that now on the fretted bass and see how it comes out. It sounds great on fretless, but it’s just SO hard! I’m not cut out for this actually-having-to-work-at-it way of making an album. They’re usually a breeze, aren’t they? (time to go back and read blog posts from June 2004 to check)
