Saturday, 27 June 2009

Gareth Icke - The Maudsley, Coventry



I popped along to Malc Evans Ditch The TV (DTTV) last night at it's new home upstairs at The Maudsley, Coventry.

I often go to gigs to photograph bands and performers but i fancied doing some audio recordings instead so i took along a bag of audio gear to do some basic recordings.

Headlining was the very talented Gareth Icke with support from Malc Evans, Emma McGann and Scott and Matt from Haunted By Humans. It was a great evenings entertainment and i recorded sets from all of the artists.


Selected tracks from the evening (with kind permission from the artists):

Gareth Icke - It Feels Like A Race (5.1MB Stereo MP3, 192kbps, 44.1KHz)

(more to appear soon as i get permission!)


If anybody needs a live recording of their solo acoustic set then please get in touch and i'll see if i can make it - it will of course depend on the venue and the technical spec of the FOH desk! DTTV at The Maudsley would be a good option. See this forum thread for more information !

You can find out more about Gareth Icke and listen to some more of his music on his MySpace page here.

Friday, 19 June 2009

Noise-free recording with a Rode NT1-A


Since playing around with my portable Asus Eee/M-Audio Fast Track Pro DAW setup (see previous blog entry) i've replaced my Behringer B1 microphone with a Rode NT1-A and i'm much happier with the top end reponse - it sounds much more natural then the B1 - which had a kind of metalic sound which always annoyed me. The most stunning thing about the NT1-A is the incredibly low self-noise (quoted at 5dBA)- making recording even very quiet fingerpicking with the mic several few feet away (which i personally like most) no problems noise-wise. I'm not sure what the quoted self-noise figure is for the B1 but the NT1-A is much quiter and a bit more sensitive - it's making my recordings much cleaner and at around £140-150 new i can heartily recommend one if this fits your budget. I think i shall be purchasing another soon!

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Mobile Recording/DAW on a Netbook



I've been recording with Cubase for many years, whether it be in connection with bands I've played in or just home demos. In the mid-nineties i was programming MIDI backing tracks (keyboards and drums mainly) for my bands demo recordings using an Atari ST and recording the final audio tracks onto a 4-track cassette based system (complete with hiss) to sit alongside vocals, bass and guitar - much track bouncing was called for! In recent years PC's have become very powerful, very cheap and very capable of recording and playing back many tracks of digital audio.

My current main home-studio PC (an ageing Athlon XP2400 I think with 1.5GB RAM) running Cubase SL2 can play back many audio tracks, virtual instruments and runs many plugins with no problems. In my last originals band we recorded a full album on a similar spec machine running around 30 or so audio tracks (including 8 tracks for drums), virtual instruments (keyboards mainly) and many many plugins.

However, like many singers/songwriters/musicians, recording in a domestic environment can be a nuisance to neighbours, whether it be recording lead vocals or perhaps loud acoustic guitar strumming - electric guitar is not usually a problem for me because i use amp modelling (and hence can turn the volume down or use headphones) and like-wise for drums (which i program using samples) - recording a full acoustic drumkit or micing up an electric guitar amp at home certainly isn't an option for me!

Anyway, the idea of a portable/location recording setup/DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) using Cubase to record parts at rehearsal studios or fellow musicians houses (certainly lead vocals or loud acoustic guitar parts) to bring them back home and load onto my main home-studio PC has been a goal for a number of years. Even a nice two channel (stereo) recording of a drumkit in a rehearsal room (with me playing them - or perhaps a more capable drummer) and some well placed microphones would sound much better then any MIDI drum programming i'm capable of - you can't beat that human feel... Some years ago i recorded a practice session of my band in a rehearsal studio using just two overheads on drums and they sounded wonderful.

A technique worth investigating for recording drums with two mics is demonstrated here.

Another use for having such a portable setup would for example be popping round to a saxaphone players house and getting him/her to put a solo down on one of your tracks. So, that's where i'm coming from on this...

Now, before i begin i'm in no way suggesting here that a netbook is the best way to go about location recording your music, obviously a high spec laptop with an 8 input (or more) USB2 or firewire audio interface would be much better - but there are many people asking questions about netbooks and recording so if you need to do some location recordings yourself (rather then hiring a recording studio) using a very compact setup here's my report.


I bought an Asus Eee 904HA netbook recently for mobile internet etc.. and to be honest web browsing on the sofa without switching my main PC on but I was also intrigued as to whether or not it would be any good as a portable DAW for my own recordings.

I bought the Windows XP version (boo hiss i hear from the Linux crowd) - a 904HA with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 170GB Hard drive (not a solid state drive like on some other models). Apparently the processor works out to be equivalent to a Celeron 900MHz and the hard-drive is only 5400 rpm - eek, perhaps not great for hard disk recording? Still, i gave it a bash, installed my (legitimate) copy of Cubase (with USB dongle) and hooked up my M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB interface to another one of it's USB ports (it has 3 in total).

To my surprise (and relief) it's very capable of multitrack recording. So far i've only recorded a few test tracks, all at 24bit 44.1KHz which is good enough for me. The timing (with the ASIO drivers) is rock solid, latency is 8ms and i've been able to record 1 or 2 tracks (a vocal and an acoustic guitar for example) whilst playing back others with no problems. The maximum number of tracks i've had playing back simultaneously is 8 (a kind of Queen style harmony vocal test dittie) and it coped no problems. This means that for a solo singer songwriter (acoustic guitar and vocals for example)putting down whole songs would be no problems and certainly location recording lead and backing vocals (or other instruments) to an already recorded backing track (perhaps mixed down if the song comprised of many tracks) would be no problems too - cracking !

I haven't experimented with any mixing but i suspect that once i load a few plugins the system would start having CPU issues but this isn't what i'm attempting to do, location recording is my goal.

Anyway, I'll continue mucking around and report back on my experiences.... in the meantime here are some more photos of my Asus Eee/Fast Track Pro portable DAW setup.




Friday, 5 June 2009

The Allskas at The Coventry Mint




Continuing to work through a back-log of photos that have built up over the last month or so here's a gig I went to back on the 23rd of May. It was The Allskas at The Coventry Mint (that's upstairs at the Golden Cross) - featuring ex-members of legendry 2-Tone band The Selecter Arthur 'Gaps' Hendrickson (vocals), Charles 'H' Bembridge (Aitch) on drums and Charley Anderson (Bass guitar) - I hope I've got all that right !

I don't know much about 2-Tone and I only have a few "best of" albums but knew about the 2-Tone@30 celebrations so I decided to pop along. I really enjoyed the music and even recognised the odd song or two (Too Much Pressure for example).

Pete Chambers (Coventry music aficionado/local music historian and writer of many great books) was present and DJ Cardboard got the audience in a fine mood for what was a top evenings entertainment. I decided to purchase a copy of Petes book "2-Tone-2 Dispatches from the 2-Tone City - 30 Years On" and can vouch that it's an interesting read and has some stunning photography from John Coles in it too.

Anyway it was a top night - well done all !

My photos from the evening can be seen here

Thursday, 4 June 2009

Matt Lakey & The Whatever - The Tin Angel, Coventry



Surprisingly I haven't been to The Tin Angel for a few years now but I sneaked in a quick midweek gig down there. The place is as cool as i remember, friendly staff and they now have a shop at the back selling CDs on Tin Angel records - cool ! (So I bought a copy of Al Brittens new album "Blinded By Silence").

Anyway, it was only the second time I'd seen them but Matt Lakey & The Whatever were excellent. A top night with a great atmosphere for a midweek gig.

Photos are here

You can listen to some of Matts tracks on his MySpace website here

It mentions on Matts MySpace site that they're not sure if "Matt Lakey & The Whatever" should stay as the name for the band - i think it should, i rather like it.

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Godiva Unsigned 2009

What a fanatastic last couple of weeks the Godiva Unsigned competition has been! Congratulations to Just Morale, Echo Empire, Haunted By Humans and Satin Dolls for getting through to play on the main stage at this years Godiva Festival. (The final comprised of 8 bands from the 4 heats competing for 4 winning places.)

Photos !

I've still go the mammoth job of going through all my photos from the heats - apologies i've been a bit busy lately. Anyway, keep an eye on this blog (which i'll be updating) to see my progress over the next weeks or so:

Photos from the heats are going up here as i process them.

The list below will indicate progress!

Heat1

Echo Empire
Fortune Tellers
Filthy Cake - Photos Done !
Cafe Racer

Heat2

Satin Dolls
Reubens Cane
Akeal
Barkerhound
Dreamphase

Heat3

Just Morale
Mommas In The Kitchen
7.20s
The Treehorns
This Beautiful Noise

Heat4

Haunted By Humans
The Pockets
LP45
Manpoints
The Strikes

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

Covfest 3 - Escape Bar/Dogma Coventry



On Saturday 4th April I attended Covfest 3 at Escape Bar (Band stage) and Dogma (Acoustic stage) in Coventry. "An all-day music event, raising funds for the Coventry Telegraph's Snowball Appeal and the Alexandra Emery Fund. Covfest 3 is a showcase of Coventry's finest musicians offering their amazing talents to raise money for two great causes...."

Without waffling, what a cracking day, over £4000 raised for charity and some stunning performances at both Escape and Dogma!

I missed a lot of the bands who played later on in the evening partially due to helping on the door, the low stage lighting at both venues and the fact that it got so packed that photography was nearly impossible - and to be brutally honest i started to just enjoy the evening myself!

Photos from Covfest 3 can be seen here

Pictured: Singer/Songwriter and Acoustic Promoter Justine Watson (Host/Organiser of the Covfest 3 Acoustic Venue, Dogma)

Visit the Covfest website by clicking here