Category: Music Tech

Guitar Apps

gapp
Hello everybody. This is my first blog, and I’ve never actually read a blog so apologies if the text is somewhat inappropriate for this genre but my basic understanding is there aren’t any specific rules or mores. Doubtless there are schools of thought in terms of style and delivery but my ignorance of these will sadly prevent any adherence.
However I will aim to be coherent and deliver an enjoyable experience for the audience. I’m not quite sure who the audience is, but our main aim is to get an audience for our band and our music – which is actually pretty good and worth absorbing, so please have a sonic scoop. I cant believe I just said sonic scoop – but I’m resisting deleting it because I understand you’re meant to go with it when blogging, to avoid aggressive editing and generally live for the moment – carpe blogam.
But hang on I thought there were no rules. This is a bit stressful – I think I’ll listen to our music for a bit because it’s quite good and pretty relaxing.
However, I also wish to include some content within this blog and as such I have selected to talk about some guitar apps which may add a little something to your life. If you don’t play guitar then I would not bother reading any more today, but please come back again as I don’t think we will always just talk about guitar stuff.
Anyway the apps I was going to mention are by this person called David Mead – he seems to have done a few, some are called “Chord Coach”, “CAGED” and “Guitar Gym”. I have been testing out a bunch of guitar apps, most of which are quite rubbish but these are definitely well put together and logical.
I tend to look at them sometimes for say 10 mins or so when I’m on a train or if there’s a queue at Marks and Spencer’s. I expect I would still look at them if I had a more interesting life and was perhaps a dancer having a break from rehearsal or waiting for my drug dealer.
The apps are good for learning / refreshing on how scales, chords are constructed, and you can also use the stuff as a pretty good reference tool. Have a good weekend!
Sam
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by Categories: Music Reviews, Music TechTags: , , ,

Devi Ever Console

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In The Lightness Of Being, we like our guitar pedals.

So Devi Ever’s Console project is pretty exciting news. If you didn’t know, Devi Ever makes pretty cool fuzz pedals and this open-source cartridge guitar fx (reminds me a little of the Atari games) sounds like a wicked project. Unfortunately, we just only found out about this (after the fundraising ended). But the good news is that the goal has been reached and we’ll be looking forward to this possibly in 2013!!

Visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deviever/console-ii-cartridge-based-multi-fx-guitar-pedal

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So about that drum riser…

A few readers have asked us about what we used to make the drum platform.
So here’s what we used:
Rockwool RS 45 1200mm x 600mm x 50mm
2 sheets of MDF 1200mm x 1200mm
Thin sheets of wood to cover the sides of drum riser
Screw Nails
First we laid the 2 sheets of rockwool side by side to cover an area of 1200mm x 1200mm
We then screwed the 2 sheet of MDF together and laid it on top of the rockwool.
To prevent Rockwool fibres from being kicked up and floating in the air, we nailed in thin sheets of wood to cover the sides of the drum riser.
This is done with the drum kit and drummer on the platform as Rockwool will compress a little when weight is applied, so it ensures that all the weight is supported on the Rockwool, not on the side sheets of wood.
We then bought some carpet from Ikea and cut it to size to cover the platform. Viola!
by Categories: Band News, Music TechTags: ,

Studio Report- Drums – 19-20 March 2011


We recently completed the first part of drum recording for a new batch of songs
Instead of heading into the recording studio we decided to be adventurous and did
it guerrilla-style.
We found a nice warehouse in North London:
The ceiling was high, as it is a furniture warehouse it was filled with carton
boxes and old furniture displays but it had a fantastic sound.
It was a little cold during the night and on Sunday morning... but nothing a few
cups of coffee and cigarettes can't fix.

    

On Saturday morning we moved into the warehouse a DDrum Dominion Maple kit,
loaded with Evans heads on the toms and Aquarian on the snare and Zildjian Zxt
cymbals.
As we did not have the pressure of studio time ticking away, there was ample time
to tune up the drums, find a good spot to set up the drums and to experiment with mic
placements.
We used a matched pair of RODE NT-1As as overheads, tom and snare were miked up
with SM 57/58s, and the kick was miked up with AKG D112.
Placement-wise we used the Glyns Johns method with extra mics on toms
(as toms were crucial in some of the tracks), and the spaced pair technique.

 

In all, we are pretty excited about the unmixed result and look forward to laying down
the guitars and vocals next.

In the meantime, you can enjoy some of Sergio's drumming here.
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Our Studio

Here’s a look into our studio, where we’ve been readying our compositions for our recording sessions starting next week!

We’re running Logic 9. The Alesis USB Pro drum kit is run through Toontrack EZdrummer and the midi keyboard utilizes Logic’s awesome sound library and several other plug-ins.

Audio instruments goes into the very nice Focusrite Saffire Pro 40.

Put all this together and we’ve got close to the jamming equivalent of silent disco. We say close as electronic drums still makes some noise. The volume is equivalent to hitting your drum sticks on an office chair and the kick drum can still send vibrations down to the ceiling of the neighbour downstairs. We’ve fixed that by building a drum riser and adding extra under-carpet. With the materials we’ve also put to together some DIY-acoustic panel! We’ll talk about that in another post…

Thanks Greg K for the photos!

by Categories: Music Tech