spellchecker

7 is not a measely few quid to me. i'd rather have donated a fiver straight to the project than pay 7 to watch those bands.

has anyone else put bets on for the winner? i thought it might be interesting this year if i had something to gain/lose so i put on 3 bets: kemal at 10/1 (for the nadia line of attack) anthony at 10/1 (pretty boy that girls may vote for... regretting this one now) craig at 28/1 (at these odds i don't care, it's got to be worth a shot) safe to say i was glad to see mary go last night, she could have cost me 135 quid, bitch. i put the bets on the first night it started, it's interesting to see the odds swinging around as people become popular/unpopular.

finding myself in the freeness of being, think i might go, and take a tent and hot water bottie

one i love is "alabama song" done by the young gods, just because it's so different and dark.

i slated my brother for buying and using hair straighteners, just as i slated him for wearing a handbag ("it's a fucking record bag, you prick") that carried nothing but cigarettes or rolling tobacco. maybe i'm just from the old school that says, if you need straight hair, use a fucking iron and some newspaper. i felt really sad tonight, i saw a guy that came into moshulu as if he was looking for the old mudd club, where he would have fitted right in. late nineties mudd club != mid naughties mudd club. maybe that's not a bad thing, but trying to carry off old mudd club with prodigy/rage tunes whilst holding oldies, it's never going to work, is it? however, it's got to be said that i've never been in touch with fashion, i just reject any notion of dressing oneself up for another. i mean, when you wake up next to each other in bed the next morning, you still look fucking rough.

yay! so is that oasis booked to be the status quo of our generation? great! i'll tell the promoters!

i think it's more than just age you are thinking about at the moment. i have to say, i enjoy playing live a lot less than i did, say, three years ago. i am far more interested in writing music. maybe as you grow older, you become more critical of your work, strive more for originality, more for the edge in your music that inspired you to write music in the first place. it's critical to enjoy your own music i think. that sounds simple, but if you think about it, how can you put passion into something that you've just thought "that'll do" about? i think it's critical to look in new directions also - i grew up on very much a guitar/heavy rock diet, but these days am rarely found listening to any music like that. personally i always find that my writing habits trail my listening list by quite some time, which is frustrating because you forever think you are doing something old and unoriginal. if you are struggling to be happy with the music you are writing, perhaps you are forcing yourself in the wrong direction with your writing, just because it's what you think you "ought" to do? as for age, it doesn't come into it for me - when i look at the young gods, i don't see a couple of old swiss cronies, i just see people making great thoughtful music.

it's the original pyramid selling scheme!

is it just chris or chris + band?

kruder & dorfmeister - the k&d sessions nine inch nails - with teeth skinny puppy - greater wrong of the right fantomas - suspended animation mulholland drive soundtrack

i don't see what all the fuss is about. i bet that jo is less than concerned about not being asked to participate in go north. aberdeen bands wanting to be in go north and hoping to get record label interest is like princess leia encoding a help message in r2d2 and hoping to be saved. it only actually happens in fiction.

it's a shame about the drum sound. the first thing i'd ever work on is getting the kick and snare sounding good and well into the mix, everything else is a bonus - you have to have a strong kick and snare sound, because it provides half the rhythmic structure of your music. however, first demo and all that, at least you'll know what to concentrate harder on next time. maybe i'm being overly harsh on the drumming comment, it'd be more fair to comment after seeing you live. it's so hard to tell from the tracks what is going on anyway. for example, listen to against the flame at about 3m45s - all i can hear is what sounds like a tambourinist after a couple of wraps of speed and the occassional crash! personally, the style of drumming doesn't really appeal to me. physically and technically, it's perhaps quite a feat to play some of the stuff you are playing, but it concentrates so much on the speed and accuracy of the beats that, in my opinion, there isn't any room for soul or feeling in the playing. that's what i was thinking when i said the drumming was uninspiring.

not my sort of music, though certain parts of it piqued my interest, mainly in guilty spark. the drum recording is shocking. that's shockingly bad. in all of the tracks the kick and snare seem to sometimes almost completely disappear, when guitars, vocals and drum overheads/cymbals come in. the snare sounds god awful, it sounds like a snare drum with one metal strand left that you might have found in the salvation army shop or something. in terms of performance, i thought the drumming was pretty uninspiring. there were definite fuck ups, but if it was done all in one take, then granted mistakes can happen. nothing really attention grabbing though, with this style of music i think it would have been a good place to have some impressive drumming. i found the vocals mostly quite bland and dreary, though not always. it's hard to explain, but the vocals often sound "tired" - maybe it's the key you are singing in against the guitar melodies that does this, i'm not sure. i found the start of against the flame particularly cringeworthy. yet it sounds like the vocalist can actually sing - perhaps worth working out some decent vocal melodies to sit alongside the guitar work, instead of somewhere in the background. bruce dickinson came to mind sometimes when you were singing. i quite liked the guitar sounds you had, and thought the playing was pretty good. i'm not a techy guitarist so i'm not really that qualified to judge it anyway, but it seems to do the job. with the two guitars panned so hard left and right, you might have been better to get slightly different tones out of them - doing this can really fatten up a track - for example, just drop the gain on one guitar by about half and it'll contrast wonderfully with one of your really overdriven guitars (this is just ideas for recording, not live stuff). you do obviously lose some of the sustain, but one of your guitars seems more "lead" than the other if that makes any sense. how did you record the drums? did you record the tracks live, i.e. everyone playing at once?

i find it hard to mic up an acoustic, because i have to record things first to tell if i have a good sound (cos the acoustic by itself colours what you hear through monitors/headphones!!). normally though, i have my condenser mic placed about six inches away from the glory hole, though it depends where the player is strumming. i then put the sm58 pretty close to the first / second fret area. it picks up some of the nice fingery sounds, and is usually a lot more trebley. both mics go into my wee spirit folio desk; i pan one hard left and one hard right, and then take the left out and right out from the desk as inputs into my soundcard's breakout box. individually the mics sound rather strange, but mixed together they sound really full and tasty. the variation in the sound each gives probably is the reason for that. i find the condenser close to the glory hole gives a great bassy muffled sound, that is the real beef of the guitar sound, while the sm58 near the 1st fret gives a lovely shine on the sound. to be honest though, experimentation is the key. if you only have one microphone, and it's something like a computer microphone, then i'd just place it as close to the sound hole as possible, the more uncoloured sound you get the better in that case.

i have lots of dreams about aeroplanes crashing. they're not always fatal though. i remember this one dream about 9 or 10 years ago where i was in this office building with glass fronted windows, and i could see an aeroplane coming towards the building, closer and closer, until it ploughed right through where we were standing. sounds a lot like 9/11 now, but at the time i think it was more based on that urban aeroplane crash in the netherlands where the pilot crashed into a block of flats (or did the second captain say "flock of bats"). http://www.airdisaster.com great night time reading

is this anything to do with karl's impending death in neighbours?

i am surprised no-one has mentioned bludgeoning courtney love with a metal pipe

you just need a tv tuner card, hauppage make loads of them. they are usually PCI cards, though you can get ones that are integrated with an AGP graphics card (i think ATI makes them, the all in wonder cards or something). the cards are ok, and it's fun to capture bits from TV to mess about with in video editors, etc. it is important to have a good reception feed though, otherwise you'll get pissed off with it pretty quick. check out ebay, you can usually pick up an old hauppage wintv card for around 15-20 quid.

ah yeah, i saw bad dancer supporting rico last year at king tut's. they were a lot better than the other support band, that's for sure.

blue planet sounds like a super-rocked up version of the waterboys, i like it a lot. love the vocals on it, the singing on the verse is great especially. me vs. you is quite interesting, feel like sometimes the vocals get lost in it a bit especially when the guitars are cranked up, which is a shame, cos they sound nice. could just be myspace though. on the slow tear, i think the vocal comes across a lot more strongly. lots of interesting sounds in there, for example i like the contrast between the slow melancholy vocal with the subtle synth sound, against the plain (almost straight DI'd sounding) bass sound with the clean guitar strikes. song builds up to a great climax. i like the variation in songs, some really quite different ideas in here, not your average song structures either. who are the vocalists? the woman has a great voice, sounds almost kirsty maccoll like in her lower ranges.

yeah, i thought the freeness was a killer feature too. will try to drag my brother & missus along to this one.

also, what sort of mics would you be using to record kits with?

i stand quite corrected! that's some clever stuff!