Been getting a lot of spammers on the forum of late, which is a pain. But I’ve finally found the thing to click in the forum admin bit that means I can manually approve anyone signing up! Hurrah… I hope it works.
Soundtrack – Daby Toure, ‘Diam’.
'Particularly Recommended'
Nice to see in this morning’s Time Out that tonight’s Recycle Collective gig gets the ‘particularly recommended’ red star of approval. I always feel that what I do operates in some strange realm where audiences love it and the press are never going to be interested, so even getting little things like this cheers me up immensely.
It also means that you really ought to be there. No excuses (except maybe living in another country. unless it’s Wales, that’s near enough)
Soundtrack – The Works, ‘Beware Of the Dog’.
New Music/Recycle Collective tomorrow…
Went into town this morning (town=central London), ostensibly to pick up a copy of Sibelius G7 software. It’s a score-writing package, that I need to be able to a) do my column for Bass Guitar Magazine properly and b) get a load of PDF scores of my stuff up on the web-shop ASAP. I get emails every week from people requesting the sheet music or ‘TAB’ for my tunes. Rest assured, there’ll be precious little TAB going on. Reading music isn’t hard, and is a much more useful skill that interpreting numbers of frets on imaginary fingerboards so that you can learn lots of really simple songs badly.
Anyway, long story short, no-one had G7 in stock. Shit! A wasted trip into town. Well, not entirely – I did get to call into Ray’s Jazz, and picked up a couple of very cheap CDs. One was Daby Toure’s album (something I’ve wanted since seeing him at Greenbelt last year), and the other is ‘Nordic Quartet’ by John Surman, Karin Krog, Terje Rypdal and Vigleik Storaas. It’s a fascinating album, featuring lots of classic Rypdal guitar loveliness, and inspired me to record another idea towards the new album. I don’t think it’ll make it on there, as it was just recorded to stereo, not on separate tracks, but it is a great idea that I’ll definitely revisit. Terje’s stuff always inspires me, please check out some of his CDs. {EDIT – I’ve just compared the recording of this new tune with ‘Not Dancing For Chicken’, and it’s SOOO much better – amazing how clean the sound of the Looperlative is!}
And recording that piece has got me all excited about tomorrow night’s Recycle Collective gig – I’m playing in a duo with Patrick Wood – Patrick and I have recorded together lots over the years, lots of lovely improv stuffs, some of which is in the street-team stash (or was – I’ve no idea what’s currently in the stash!). We’ve also played live together at Greenbelt, both in a duo, and he was a part of my Global Footprint huge improv thingie last year.
So we’re playing, followed by Orphy Robinson and Roger Goula – both of whom are fabulous players I’ve collaborated with in the past.
I really am like a kid in a toy shop with the Recycle Collective – I get to book all my favourite people to come and make lovely noises with me, in a gorgeous venue, to lovely audiences, which you’re more than welcome to come and be a part of. See the RC website for more details.
So that’s tomorrow. I’ve been doing LOADS of teaching of late – schedule is filling up, for sure, I’m almost maxxed out on evening teaching (if you’re wanting any lessons, best book a fair way in advance…) but I’m looking forward to my next lot of gigs – book shows in April with Muriel Anderson in the UK, and some solo stuff in April, as well as some clinics/masterclasses around… watch this space!
Soundtrack – right now, it’s my new tune, before that it was the Franks – Sinatra and Dunnery (not together!)
Juliet Turner and Pierce Pettis, Bush Hall, 17/2/06
As y’all know, I do make a habit of going to gigs by people I know. Well, I know lots of lovely talented marvellous people, and I like to support live music as much as I can anyway, so being able to combine supporting live music, and seeing lovely friends makes for a doubly marvellous night out.
Thus it was last night. ‘Twas also rather nice to do something special with the lovely Gareth and Jane, and we all toddled off to Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush, a rather lovely venue that was clearly at one point a ball-room, and and is now a rather lovely gig venue for about a 2-300 peoples.
Pierce Pettis was already on when we got there, and sounding marvellous. I hadn’t seen Pierce since the Cheat and I went to stay with him in Alabama, Oct 2004, so it was lovely to see him again, and hear him. The couple of new songs he played were gorgeous – a Narnia one and one where he was joined by Juliet and Brian on BVs called ‘Vera Cruz’ – gorgeous stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bad song by Pierce, even on the three CDRs of unreleased stuff that he gave the Cheat and I when we visited (BTW, I think it’s my turn with the CDs, The Cheat!)
The half time break was almost as much fun as the gig – catching up with many friends that I hadn’t seen for ages. It’s nice with gigs like this, that I can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to know about 20% of the audience.
Then Juliet Turner – most years, I see Juliet play more than just about any other artist that I’m not actually touring with. 4 or 5 times, I guess. And never ever get bored of her songs. She’s a fantastic songwriter, with a unique turn of phrase and way with rhythm. In Ireland she’s a big star, having gone platinum and won reader’s polls in Hot Press (the Irish answer to Q, NME and Mojo all rolled into one) – and she’ll get there over here too, for sure. Cos she’s fab. Apparently she’s got all self-concious about the amount she talks on stage, which is a shame, because her between-song banter was pretty stripped back tonight, and she’s a great story teller. As is Pierce, who was equally subdued. It might just have been one of those venues. I’ve played in those before now, they just don’t lend themselves to getting the kind of feedback from the audience that you need to sustain rambling stories.
Anyway, both Juliet and Pierce, and Juliet’s guitarist Brian Grace, were on top form, a fab night was had by all, and I’m already looking forward to seeing them all again!
As a side note, we got into a discussion last night about the lack of availability of Pierce’s early albums – the ‘big hair’ years. When Pierce was on Windham Hill, he had a hair cut that I also flirted with in the late 80s, the ‘mushroom cloud’, where all your photos look like holiday snaps taken on Bikini Atoll during the h-bomb tests. here’s the best one I could find of Pierce online –
anyone got any others? :o)
Expanding the possibilities of solo bass performing
Obviously, with the way I play solo, technology has a big influence on the direction my music heads in. I feel rather pleased that I got the concept right on my first album (at least, right in the sense that I found a way of performing that let me say what I wanted to say), but the limitations at the time were the technology that I had available to me. even that was part-way along a journey that began when I got my first effects unit (a Korg A4) in 1993. Looping entered the picture in about 95 when I got an ART Nightbass, which has a 2 second sample and hold function, which piqued my interest, and which great hugely when I was sent a Lexicon JamMan to review for Bassist Magazine in 1997 (truth be told, the JamMan was already out of production by then, but having read an interview with Michael Manring in ’95, I’d been wanting one ever since, so managed to get the last one that Lexicon had in the UK, wrote a review of it, and created a demand for a product that was no longer available..!)
Anyway, the JamMan had 8 seconds of loop time when I got it – a huge jump up from the 2 seconds in my Nightbass and that provided me with ample experimentation room (if anyone remembers the very first version of my website, when it was on ‘zetnet’, before I got the steve-lawson.co.uk domain, each page had a soundtrack loop, created with the jamman, a CD player for getting drum loops, and my basses, and none of the loops were more than 8 seconds long, cos that’s all I had.
I saved up my pennies and upped the memory in the JamMan to 32 seconds in 98/99, and by the end of 99, played my first solo gig and wrote the tunes that became And Nothing But The Bass, with one looper and my Lexicon MPX-G2 processor. I managed to do some clever things with manual fadeouts (the middle of Drifting on that album has me fading out the JamMan underneath some ambient stuff, then running the ambient loop down to silence for a split second so that I could start looping again to go into the second half of the tune!)
The possibilities with a second looper soon became apparent and a DL4 was procured for another Bassist magazine article. That gave me a whole load more possibilities with backwards and double speed loops, and was used to great effect on Conversations.
The along came the Echoplex – I’d seen Andre LaFosse using one in California, and while not wanting to sound like him, saw what the possibilities were for all those fantastic multiply/undo/substitute and feedback functions. So I got one, and recorded Not Dancing For Chicken with an Echoplex and a DL4 (I think the JamMan was still in the rack at this point, but I didn’t use it). Then I got a second Echoplex, just in time cos my DL4 died… and eventually ended up with four, though I rarely had more than two hooked up at a time. Open Spaces was done with two Echoplexes and the Lexicon (and Theo using a DL4).
The next development stage was an important one – post-processing. With the way I’d been looping all along, the signal chain went fingers-bass-processor-looper-amp. the problem with that was that once it was in the looper, I couldn’t re-process it. I could do some fairly major restructuring of it with the Echoplex, but couldn’t put more reverb on, or delay, or whatever. So I got a second Lexicon unit, and started to be able to route my loop signal, or the signal from the first Lexicon, into it. And that’s how Grace And Gratitude was done – that string pad-like sound that comes in on the title track is me running the loop through a huge reverb and two delays (the Lexicon with my Kaoss Pad in its FX loop).
And that’s how my setup stayed until the end of last year. I started work on a new album towards the end of September, but soon stopped again, when the marvellous Bob told me about his new invention, the Looperlative – Bob had been talking about building a looper for a long time, but now he had the parts and was building his first prototype, and had a feature list, that made it clear that it would completely change the way I was able to perform. the biggest change simply being that it was stereo, so all those lovely ping-pong delays and high-res reverbs would stay intact when I looped them. Oh yes.
The story since then is fairly well documented elsewhere on this blog (just do a search on Looperlative), but the latest developments have been a string of software updates over the last four or five days, that have sent the Looperlative into overdrive. It already has 8 stereo channels, over four minutes of loop time, zero latency and an ethernet port for all those lovely updates, but now Bob has implemented a load of new features, the two best ones being the ability to program up to 8 (EIGHT!) functions to any one midi pedal to happen simultaneously (which means you can have it so that you’re in record, end the loop, reverse it, switch to the next loop, sync it, switch to half time and start recording all with one button push, for example!). The possibilities are enormous. The other great new function is ‘cue’ which arms a track for record, to start recording as soon as any other track is stopped, so if you use the synced stop, you can have it so that you start recording the moment the previous track stops playing, and you can then switch backwards and forwards between them as verse and chorus (or up to 8 different sections to switch between).
So the process of writing and arranging solo music just got way harder in one way, and way easier in another. suddenly the technology is there to do much more complex arrangements that I’ve ever done before, in stereo, with minimal button pushing, but I’ve got to conceive of what’s possible, program the box and experiment before the ideas can evolve… I’m guessing that each track will start the way they always did with me – a single loop which I start layering, and eventually realise needs another loop. And I now have a whole other range of options to start imagining as I go on. I’m rather excited about what this means for the next album!
If you’re into looping, you owe it to yourself to check out the Looperlative – there really is nothing like in on the hardware market (and if you’re like me, the temperamental nature of laptops means that hardware is the only way to go. All hail Bob of the Looperlative, granter of wishes and builder of dreams.
Lovely houseguests
We’ve got visitors for the weekend – Lovely Gareth and the equally lovely Jane are here for a break, a rest and many laughs, no doubt. It’s so lovely getting to see them again after the time we spent at their house during the edinburgh festival last year, and they get to see their old car which TSP and I adopted last autumn. A fun few days ahead…
Five words
Pip BHP asked for five words to describe your life just now –
Expectant
progressing
happy
experimental
transitional.
there’s my five? what are yours?
Soundtrack – Sam Philips, ‘Fan Dance’.
Vanity Fair parties like it's 1975…
From Feministe, a critique of the current Vanity Fair magazine, their ‘Hollywood Issue’.
I’m not particularly well-versed in Vanity Fair’s usual output – I’ve picked it up in airports before now, only to put it down due to there being nothing in it worth reading, like almost every other magazine out there (if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to turn me into a tree loving tearful EcoMonkey of the most extreme variety, it’s magazine stands in newsagents – trees being chopped down in their millions to publish page after page of unreadable horseshit… but I digress…)
Anyway, the critique of the gender politics at work in the current issue of Vanity Fair is pretty incisive, though oddly enough it only seems to be shocking because Vanity Fair is less crass most of the time, otherwise they’d be critiquing Loaded/FHM/Maxim and all the other porn-lite that peddles the notion that a clothed woman is unworthy of being interviewed or photographed.
It’s not a new problem, it’s indicative of the relationship between women and print media for half a century, but it just seems to be so stark in that particular issue of Vanity Fair, and the critique is particularly clear (as with about half the stuff on Feministe – the other half being patchy…), worth a read.
Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’.
Jyoti on downloading and the majors…
more great stuff from Jyoti Mishra on downloading. If the BPI starts getting trigger-happy with legal action against people for downloading music, we could end up in a v. bad place.
What they don’t seem to get at all is that more people will pay for music by artists they feel some connection with. Faceless corporate no-marks who happen to make nice music don’t engender any fan loyalty, so people will happily download their stuff. Why not, they’re rich enough already goes the argument. Whereas a band like Nizlopi allow free access to their video of The JCB Song for months, and instead of people just downloading it and then ignoring the record, they get a number one record out of it, totally outside of the music industry machine. It was a glorious success, not to mention a fabulous song, and shows what happens if enough effort is made to connect with an audience, to give them something of value.
The same thing has happened with a host of indie bands that launched this year- Jyoti talks about them with far more insight than I have, cos everything I’ve heard by the Arctic Monkeys sounds like shite, so I’ve not really taken much notice of them musically, but the story is one that fills me with hope, and the quotes I’ve heard from their fans suggest that they engender fierce loyalty.
And there are corporate rock monoliths that still do it. Iron Maiden, Queen and a few others have fans that will buy multiple copies of every single, on as many formats get released, even after they are well out of fashion. Marillion managed to raise the cost of making an album from their fan-base in advanced sales, for a record that wasn’t even written. Loyalty, trust, value. If people feel positively disposed towards an act, they are happy to part with cash. And those who never part with cash for music are going to get hold of it anyway – if you cripple software copying of music, people will just write software that records the audio – it means the copying will be slightly slower, but it’ll still happen, and the file-sharers will have the added buzz of getting one over on the wankers who want to fill their computers with spy-ware to stop them copying CDs to their iPods.
Meanwhile the indies keep providing MP3s, writing blogs to stay in touch with their audience, answering emails, playing gigs and selling merch, and it’s rolling along quite nicely thanks. Balls to the Sony share-holders.
Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’ (Michael has spent 20 years on various record labels, putting out great music. This time he makes the album of his life, puts it out himself, and is no doubt doing better from it than any previous album. It’s better packaged than any of his other albums, it’s beautifully recorded and is almost without doubt the most complete musical statement I’ve ever heard from a solo bass guitarist.)
Great news for people who like their own lungs…
MPs have voted in favour of a total smoking ban in public places – fantastic! I’m so glad they didn’t bow to pressure to make it OK for pubs that don’t serve food to avoid the ruling – that would’ve just meant that posh pubs protected people’s health and pubs in poorer areas left them all to choke to death.
The one group that will suffer from this, sadly, are people with mental illness, whose medication is set based on the fact that they smoke, and need to smoke for the delicate balance of their mental wellbeing. There are already a lot of people who can’t travel on public transport because the need to smoke more frequently, and they are people for whom giving up smoking is a way more difficult proposition that it is for the rest of the population. I’m not sure what needs to happen for them, but I hope due consideration is given.
But for the majority of people, this will be a huge step forward. I might even start going to pubs again. It’ll certainly make going to gigs in venues that currently allow smoking much more enjoyable – no more coming home from the Borderline smelling like Guy Fawkes.
And for those of you that smoke, you’ve got until next summer to give up, then you can be grateful like the rest of us. Hey, if the Shark can quit, anyone can.
Hurrah!