BigRedX

One final one from me.

Track 9 on this page is by my third band. This time I'm playing synth. 

This is yet another song originally written and recorded by my first band and repurposed as an oriental sounding piece of synth-pop. IIRC it only uses black notes on the keyboard. This version was recorded at the end of 1983 using our newly acquired Yamaha DX7 (we had one of the first in the UK), in our practice space/recording studio located in the tiny cellar of one of the band members. Recorded on 4-track with numerous overdubs including one that had to be added live during the final mix. As well as the DX7 the other instruments on the track were Roland 808 drum machine, Korg MS20 and Roland SH101 synths.

The Bright Lights cassette compilation was organised by myself and a friend who at the time was running the Square Dance Studio in Derby (which subsequently moved to Nottingham and became the Square Centre). It was supposed to be a representation of the current state of the Nottingham music scene like the Bomb Party cassette that my pervious band had been on. Unfortunately at the time we didn't have the same clout as BBC Radio Nottingham so a few of the bands we wanted to feature weren't interested, and some of the bands are included simply because they recorded a demo at Square Dance.

I think 100 copies of the cassette were produced and sold through local record shops and at gigs. The cover was screen printed by me and the cassettes duplicated in real time by the studio.

Another track recorded at the same as this had William Orbit interested in working with the band, but we weren't that impressed with his band at the time (Torch Song), and another member of the band had been involved in a similar situation with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics which had promised lots but ultimately delivered very little, and so we turned him down.

It really depends what you play and how important image is to you. 

If you favour 34" scale 4-string basses there are hundreds of options under £1500, especially if you also take second hand instruments into consideration, that you would need to have a very specific set of non-standard additional requirements not to be able to find something suitable at that price.

If you play something less conventional it's not quite so clear cut. I currently play Bass VI and the only suitable instrument I have found costs just under £1500 new. There is nothing else available off the shelf that has a comparable specification for my needs, and to improve what I already have would involve having something custom-made by my favourite luthier and would cost four times as much.

13 hours ago, fretmeister said:

This is why there are different expectations of playing ability linked to the grade the player has achieved.

 

For example, a grade 6 player ought to be able to play grade 6 pieces with practice and that includes memorising / being familiar with them. It’s the difficulty of the piece that makes it grade 6. A grade 6 player would not be expected to sight read a grade 6 piece to performance standard the very first time they see it but they would be expected to be able to do that with a grade 3 or four piece.

 

There is always memory involved. Just like when you are reading a book you are not reading individual letters or even phonetics anymore because you have a memory of how the word looks as a single piece of information. That happens in Music as well.

 

As for the question, how do you know if you are playing it correctly? If there is no access to a teacher, there are some apps available that will scan standard notation and play it back to you. They are not always the most accurate things in the world but certainly for simple pieces they do very well.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the implication I get from people advocating being able to read (meaning sight read) is that you can play any score, so long as it is within your technical ability, on first look and not make any glaring errors. AFAICS the only way you can get up that standard of reading is by practicing using pieces that you don't already know. Otherwise the music is just a memory aid.

The other thing about reading I never understand is those people who play multiple instruments, but can't read for all of them. How does that come about?

As someone who understands the various musical notation symbols but can't actually sight read, when you are practicing how do you know if you are doing it right?

If you have even a passing familiarity with the music your are trying to read then it could be argued that you're not always actually reading but relying on previous knowledge of the piece along with some musical conventions that you have picked up along the way in regard to key etc.

And when you have a new piece of music to practice your reading from how many times can you use this before much of it becomes playing from memory rather than playing from the score?

Tiny photos. What's up with that?

I really can't why anyone would want to use 2.4 when 5.8 is an option.

5 minutes ago, pineweasel said:

FWIW I had a Waza Air for a while and didn’t like the bulky headphones, large, non-folding transmitter, and expense.

Unfortunately that's the price you pay for latency low enough to allow real-time wireless audio transmission.

8 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Yes, but it still gives a good starting point. Our vocalist operates the desk from a tablet and fine tunes it wandering around the venue.

And of course the sound will change again a soon as the venue fills up with audience.

IMO there are two important things:

1. You need to practice your reading on things you actually want to play. IME nothing puts people off learning quicker than having to do something they don't like.

2. You also need to practice your reading on tunes that you don't already know how to play and ideally are not familiar with. If you know or have some idea of what you are supposed to be playing you'll find that you are by-passing the actual reading.

Also if I found that I need to be able to sight read I'd learn both the bass and treble clef.

8 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

The desk sends white noise to each and then both sides of the PA with a special high quality microphone positioned in the 'audience'. It works out the frequency response of the pa + room and any resonances automatically eqs them out. That means you can use the same settings in different venues, even using their pa, and get pretty much the same sound. Obviously tweaks may be needed and in venues where guitars and bass are backline only we need to do our own adjustments (for example on Saturday I was near a corner and had to cut my bass control, which I normally have slightly boosted).

Since room problems are a mix of frequency and time domain problems and EQ is a frequency domain solution this method only works for audience members who are stood at the point where the microphone was. 

The heaviest piece of kit my band take to gigs is the 3U rack case that holds the computer and associated devices that supply our backing.

Since this case essentially replaces a drummer plus their drum kit and another keyboard player, synthesiser and stand, and means that we can get the whole band with our instruments and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car I can put up with the 17kg weight.

Track 11 on this page is the only publicly released recording of my second band The Perfect Party. Contrary to what it says on the page the compilation was released in early 1982. The song was written a year earlier by my previous band and a very embryonic version of it appears on our third cassette album "Do Modern Atoms Wear Fashionable Clothes?"

This time I'm actually playing bass although most of the bass part is played on G-string and it never goes lower than bottom E on the guitar.

Believe it or not this recording had CBS records interested in signing the band until they heard our second more polished and less quirky demo and decided that Wham! would be a better choice.

Lost In Music by Giles Smith

9 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

For some reason I'm reminded of 'In the Land of Grey and Pink' but I doubt that was your inspiration...

Musically? Probably very subliminally. Much of our early music (including these two songs which were composed several years before we committed them to vinyl) stemmed from both our inability to play well enough to be considered prog rock as well as the fact that we had very few conventional rock band instruments. I didn't have the album in my record collection, but it was definitely to sort of thing that at least one us would have been listening to in the 70s; we tended to favour the less well known bands.

The band name comes from The Pretty Things song "Cries From The Midnight Circus".

Here's my first band The Midnight Circus with our only appearance on vinyl as part of the "Angst In My Pants" various artists double EP.

This was recorded in 1980 at a 4-track studio behind one of the musical instrument shops in Leicester.

Multiple warnings:

Weedy sound, no bass guitar on the first track, dodgy lyrical subject matter (we justified it at the time by claiming to be sarcastic).

However John Peel liked it enough to play on his Radio One show... 

And Johan Kugelberg rated the EP 34 in his Top 100 DIY Singles in Ugly Things magazine saying: "...and extremely do it yourself DIY frenzy from the Midnight Circus. Who in "Silicone Baby" and "Hedonist Jive" have out-poignanted a tow-truck full of Aimee Mann's and Michelle Shocked's edgy humanity and funny as shit to boot..."

There are older recordings out there in the public domain. We were asked to contribute to Angst In My Pants as a result of our first album "The Bland Craze" which was released on free cassette (you sent us a C-60 cassette and a SAE and we returned the cassette with our album recorded on to it alone with a cover made from a folded A4 photocopy. We distributed about 150 of these so I am sure some still survive.

If I had a bit lotto win I wouldn't buy any musical gear.

What I would do is buy a comfortable band transport and employ someone to drive it for us.

I'd also book us a couple of months in a top-class studio with Trevor Horn producing.

TBH there was so little to choose between the 4 versions that for a stand-alone single release any of them would have done the job admirably and picking one in that case would have been almost entirely subjective. It was only because we wanted our original mix of the song to stand up along side the dance remix that we eventually chose the one that had a slightly higher average loudness. 

We'd all heard the master that our synth player had done before this competition but neither myself or our singer correctly identified it when listening to all 4 versions. I was expecting our master to sound slightly weedy compared with the ones that we had paid for but this was not the case at all. 

It was one of those situations when you can't help but wonder if a professional could be doing a better job, and in this case the answer turned out to be that what we were doing was equally as good.

The single will be available to download and stream on Friday 25th April and on CD at our gigs.

11 minutes ago, Terry M. said:

Would you consider funk to be riff-based out of interest? I play funk. 

Depends...

My interest in "funk" begins and ends with the post-punk/industrial crossover bands of the early 80s, so artists like early ACR, The Contortions, Medium Medium and 23 Skidoo. 

However I could see the technique being used in slap bass lines for the thumbed part.

5 minutes ago, Terry M. said:

Does this apply to certain genres more commonly?

It will turn up fairly frequently in any riff-based music.

I've used the technique in songs I have written in the post-punk, goth, pschobilly, and dance-rock/pop genres. 

1 hour ago, Terry M. said:

I genuinely don't understand what this means. If every note in the bassline features on the fretboard (of a 5 string in standard tuning) how is it impossible? I'm not being deliberately obtuse here,in fact I might learn something. 

Lots of riffs are essentially played on one string with alternating fretted and open notes with many of the fretted notes at the 12th fret and higher.

I'm sure they could be played without using any open strings but you'll need to work twice as hard at plucking over multiple strings and muting the pedal note string and it will be much harder to maintain the rhythmic feel especially if the riff uses hammer-ons and pull-offs.

On 09/10/2024 at 08:07, Andy_L said:

I love the thought of a psychobilly band using a theremin!

Here you go!

I think that the rigidity of construction that normally goes hand in hand with a high-mass design is more likely to have an effect on tone than the actual increase in weight over the BBOT.

19 minutes ago, markbunney said:

What FRFR can are you using?
 

One  of my bands puts everything through the PA and I’m considering getting the Headrush 112 for on stage monitoring and not taking an amp & cab anymore.  The guitarist has the 108 version for his monitor.

I've got an RCF745 and TBH it's been complete overkill for what I need most of the time.

In the 7 years that I have owned it, I've needed it twice to supply bass to the audience when the PA has been vocals only and in this respect it has preformed far better than my previous traditional bass rigs. However, the rest of the time, for rehearsals and smaller gigs with PA support, I could have definitely got away with something smaller, lighter and cheaper. 

I personally wouldn't go for the Headrest as IMO it's overpriced for what it is. Have a look at the FRFR thread in the amps section for other options. I think you get better VfM when looking at PA type cabs. It will depend what you want from a personal monitor. For me all I need is to be able to hear that I am in time and in tune with the rest of the band. I don't need "heft" or a perfect representation of my bass tone on stage in order to play well, I'm happy to assume that that is being taken care of FoH by the PA for the audience who are far more important.

It would depend on what I needed to play and how many of the songs were challenging to play in E or Eb without being able to use open strings.

After all the recommendations I thought that you might be interested in the final outcome. Based on feedback here and from another forum we chose two different people to do masters for us one of whom supplied us with two versions with differing amounts of compression.

So along with our original master, we had 4 different versions to consider. Our synth player per got one of his kids to randomly rename the tracks so that only they knew which was which and then sent them out as versions A to D.

Listening to each in turn I thought they were all, good which little to choose between the four. Version C had a bit more "air" and separation of the instruments but the other three sounded very similar. I then stuck all four masters in Logic and used the solo function to switch between them on the fly. At this point it was noticeable that Version A sounded a bit "louder" than the others, although none sounded excessively compressed. 

It's always tempting to just pick the loudest and most impressive sounding one, but in this case our mix has to also stand up next to a dance-floor friendly remix that we have had done, and the "louder" version did this better than the others. So that will be the one that goes on the single. It was also the one that we all picked as our first or second choice.

And the winner is...

The version done by our synth player which I believe was created using Ozone. 

The single will be out on April 25th to coincide with our gig at WGW.