ambient

What's the Ibanez one?

Richard Barbieri is a brilliant synthesist. I’ve seen him a few times, I love his solo work and his work with porcupine tree.

I like dream theatre, but skip past Jordan’s solo spots. It’s sound I love, and that’s definitely missing. Nick was similar to a lot of synth players in pop bands at the time, Richard Barbieri for instance in Japan, they weren’t great musicians, but were any of the members from bands at that time? I was watching a programme recently called ‘synth Britannia’, there was a guy on I think from OMD, he said though that synth players always had this stigma; people assumed quite wrongly that what they were doing was easy, it’s not though, and it takes a lot of imagination and creativity. There is no button on a synth that you press to create the perfect sound, or the perfect part.

I’ve never really listened to them tbh. I have studied the synth players from that era, the majority of them were like him; unschooled as musicians, but very creative, it was the sounds that were important to them. I think with him particularly he tried to be different with the sounds that he used.

I don’t agree that people choose to be offended. People do however choose to offend. I can think of many words that are offensive in their use; it would depend of course on your gender, sexuality, race, religion or appearance whether or not you do find a particular word offensive. Of course if you’re a straight white male without any disability then you probably wouldn’t have encountered a problem.

I think Jacob Collier has had some musical education, I know someone who teaches at the royal college of music, Jacob Collier got a place there, though I’m not sure he took it up. Regardless of his talent he’d still have had to have passed auditions and exams to get it.

I agree with you, I class myself as being a musician that plays bass, though I also play quite a few other instruments including guitar, piano and synth. I spent a couple of hours this evening recording piano one some tracks for a friend. I play music, I don't just limit myself to licks or riffs.

I don’t see anything oppressive in using language that doesn’t offend. Quite the contrary, words like n***** or faggot have been and continue to be used to offend, belittle, oppress and insult. It annoys me when people bring up the freedom of speech thing or decry political correctness, it’s down to having respect for people. The language of respect; which I prefer to the term politically correct, the latter implies that we're choosing terms merely to be politic in order to placate certain interest groups rather than from any interest in actually ridding our language of terminology that reflects bias and prejudice, and choosing language that reflects a certain level of respect for everyone. Like I said earlier, I would always opt to change the words.

The composer might have written them because racism or sexism was fine at the time. There are words that are deemed to be offensive now simply because they are offensive, personally I couldn't care less that they were fine 30 or 40 years ago, it's now that we're living in. If I was playing in a covers band, then yes I would change the lyric.

Ha, this was my last release. 😁

CDs, you’re so 20th century 😊

A lot of the time it's down to training, or lack of. I remember watching the vocalists at uni, they'd spend ages warming up before singing, not just their vocal chords either, many used to do yoga exercises to physically warm up. He looks slightly over-weight there too, you have to be healthy and look after yourself, in my opinion anyway, especially for the sort of singing that he does, or did.

The Comfort Strapp is very good, as is the Duo strap thing. I once saw Michael Manring using two Comfort Strapps; one on each shoulder, achieving a similar result as the Duo. Another idea is to build up your back muscles, maybe look at Yoga classes in your area.

A used MacBook?

You need a DAW, digital audio workshop software. Something like Logic Pro, which is apple only, but that kind of thing. Cubase works with windows.

Vertigo. I had a problem with the m80, it was a little too deep with the front pocket to fit on the overhead luggage rack on some trains.

Don’t play licks. Just listen to what’s going on, feel it and act accordingly. The most important, for me anyway, thing is to know where ‘one’ is. When I’ve had to play in anything other than 4/4, 3/4 or 5/4 I’ve broken it into two, never more than that. So 7/4 would be 4/4 followed by 3/4. It depends though how the drummer is feeling it.

ICMP where I did my BMus run summer schools. https://www.icmp.ac.uk/course/performance-music-summer-school It's an excellent place.