Dankology

The version of Lost in Music on 27 Points is a thing of wonder - so much better than it should be...

Joy Divison - Preston 1980: in the midst of an incredibly intense performance fired up by equipment failures, someone grabs the mic: "Anyone from Burnley - the coach leaves in 10 minutes" At another point you hear Barney tell the soundman "everything's fukcing bust so everything's going through the bass amp"... I do like to think about the band's more humourless fans trying to discern the poetry and mystery in all this.

Just remembered a few more... Iggy Pop - TV Eye - one of the few live recordings that actually sound like being at a gig Allman Bros at Fillmore East Bob Marley Live Pink Floyd - the live stuff on Ummagumma Joy Division - Preston - love listening to the synths and other gear gradually failing and the band reverting to a much rawer set Mick Ronson tribute concert - quite a bit of dull stuff but the bit where Joe Elliot fronts the Spiders from Mars is fab Neil Young Unplugged - brilliant flipside to Weld despite being I'll thought of by many Suicide - 23 mins over Brussels Really looking forward to making my way through some of the recommendations posted above. God, I love live albums.

I love live albums. My favourites: Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl - check out the harmonies vs the rudimentary (non-existent?) monitoring Who - Live at Leeds - not a massive fan of the original short album but love the expanded 1995 edition with A Quick One etc John Martyn - Live at Leeds - the original, not the later rerelease that swapped a load of performances out Stones - Get Yer Ya Yas out Neil DIamond - Hot August Night Jane's Addiction's first LP Lou Reed - Rock & Roll Animal and bits of Take No Prisoners Nirvana Unplugged J. RIchman & the Modern Lovers - think it's just called "Live" Doors - the big In Concert compilation, despite multiple edits and overdubs The Fall - Totale's Turns, 27 Points, Live Various Years, Legendary Chaos Tape, Reykjavik... Most of the live ones, to be honest The Meat Puppets are about to release a live album I was involved in recording. Sadly, my mix was rejected and I've been relegated to a photo credit :o(

Yep, that would be sensible but I've now dug this mic out of the "Ebay box" and I'm keen to give it another whirl.

This is the sort of thing I should just know off the top of my head (and probably did once upon a time) but as my plans to record a session for a friend next week unfurl in a terrifying but sadly predictable way I find my brain unable to process even simple queries. I want to plug an external mic into one of my cameras - the mic has a 3.5mm mono tethered plug, the camera a 2.5mm mono input. I, of course, do not have the required adapter (although I do: somewhere, just not anywhere anyone with a brain would store it) but I can get a cheap 3.5mm female to 2.5mm male stereo shorty cable delivered prior to the session. This should work, shouldn't it? The ring elements of the cable should remain disconnected and unable to interfere with the signal - or am I being naive? I can use the camera's internal mic if this doesn't work as it will be being synced up with the multitrack audio afterwards but I remember using this particular mic many years ago and it always meant that at least one camera had decent sound while also looking pretty cool mounted atop the camera. Any help would be much appreciated, not least if this runs to being available in Salford on Thursday afternoon to lend a hand 😀

I rang the shop back this morning and basically told them I wanted a refund. I explained my disappointment with the sequence of events and the salesman had the temerity to suggest that I had only paid a deposit for the piano - a 90% deposit... He got a bit stroppy when I said I just wanted to draw a line under things and re-took my payment details in that clipped, disgusted way that only employees of the most prestigious establishments can muster. It was all a bit Mitchell and Webb. Anyway, Forsyth's of Manchester, I realize that my custom might pale next to that of some of your clientele but I've still got a lot of strings, instruments and amps to buy over the next 30 or so years- and they'll be being bought elsewhere.

Thanks for the replies. To answer the points raised above: the price was advertised online so I sent an email, the shop replied to say that it could be pre ordered at the listed price over the phone. I did so that day and tried to play by credit card, as I always do in order to gain extra protection. Unfortunately (and oddly), the payment would not go through so I used my debit card instead. No receipt was sent. The piano is now listed on their website for something like £950 - ie more than they are currently trying to charge me. The other shop has had the exact same model for sale for £750 during recent weeks so I don't think anyone could argue that the price was clearly an error. Ta for all the advice - I'm going to phone tomorrow and give them the choice of honouring the original price or refunding me. Will report back...

I pre-ordered a digital piano from a local independent store just over two months ago for £750 and the money was debited from my account there and then. Twice I've rung them to follow-up on the order as no updates were forthcoming but I remained patient, knowing that there has been something of a rush on these instruments in the last year or so. Another local store has had the same model in stock for the same price for the last few weeks but I decided to stay loyal and wait for the original shop to get hold of stock. They phoned this afternoon to say that it was ready to pick up. Hurrah. But they phoned back literally two minutes later to say that they'd charged me the wrong price back in May and that I needed to pony up something like another £120. So I'm feeling like a bit of a chump now. I've told them to hang fire while I consider my options - the other retailer now has it for sale for £780 so I reckon my options are: 1) insist that they stick to my original price (a quick Google suggests that I might be entitled to do this) 2) ask them to price-match the other store 3) Cancel the order and buy from the other place in the hope that their "in stock, guaranteed immediate delivery" promise is indeed true. Anyone know where I stand legally/morally/practically?

In the kid's defence, I've never met a single guitarist who could do that...

I think about this a lot. I think the concept of "growing" bands over the course of a multi-album deal was dying a death by the early 90s - I can name a decent number of personal favourites from that time who only managed an LP or two and may well have gone onto even greater things if they'd have been given more time. I heard Guy Garvey talk about the recording of (I think) The Seldom Seen Kid a while back: hit the studio in the morning, food and family time at teatime and then back to the studio again in the evening - was very jealous of the idea of having the financial backing to create music as your full time job and the creativity that it might allow. But then I thought about Joy Division, the Fall, Manic Street Preachers and countless others who held down day jobs while creating great music and building audiences - and we have it so much easier now: home recording technology is remarkable (I "needed" a mellotron last week - downloaded a VST one for free within a couple of seconds - it sounded just like I wanted it to!) and we're spoilt for choice in terms of channels of communication and sales. Let's be honest, if the music industry was still geared up to nurturing a realtively small number of huge bands, most of us would find reason to feel we were being sidelined due to genre, age, location, politics or whatever. Now you can put your money where your mouth is: cheap home recording set-up, Bandcamp/Facebook/Youtube output, gigs at the small venues that have sprung up across most cities - do we really need a large advance and access to professional studios to develop our craft? That's only a half-rhetorical question - I'd be interested to hear the other side of this.

This. 100%. I'm sure I've said it here before but what a world we live in in which you can potentially reach every single member of your potential audience throughout the world - without having to tour, sort out distribution deals or play some horrible corporate game. And let's not forget that the price of having a select group of acts elevated to arena level was countless bands being screwed over in punitive deals or silly tax-loss arrangements. Not to mention that the ability to attract 16,000 people to a gig in a given area almost certainly involves being able to attract a lot of people who arguably have very little interest in music whatsoever. And why would they - a quarter of a mile away from the band, listening (or not) to the music bouncing back at them from the concrete sides of a sports venue?

Over lockdown we tried doing some online writing that involved playing to a click and sharing the files. I found it incredibly difficult to keep time with a plain click but programming it as a simple bass drum and snare beat really helped. I'm sure a bit more practice would have helped too but it was a good workaround.

A fundamental.

John Martyn doung Johnny Too Bad? But, if anything, his cover is skankier than the original...

Elvana - the Elvis fronted Nirvana covers band? Their version of Aneurysm is a thing of genius but I'm not certain I could stick a full gig

Apologies if I'm stating the obvious but have you checked that turntable has a built-in preamp or that the interface has a phono input?

Great thread! I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Lennon's very loose bass playing on The Long and Winding Road yet. As an aside, many many years ago I told my brother that the laugh at the start of Roxanne had been prompted by Sting whipping his member out at the start of the take. It was only very recently that I found out that he'd assumed I was serious and had spent the intervening two decades believing that was exactly what had happened.

I think there is a difference between recognizing having to wait for inspiration to strike -fed by whatever conscious and subconsious influences are around- vs believing songs are being mystically beamed in by some higher power. It's one of the reasons I try to expose myself to a constant soundtrack of new and old stuff as well as music I don't necessarily enjoy - you never know what good bits might filter through, or what misheard bits can be appropriated. Anyway, I'd have hoped the ether, being infinite and all that, would manage something a bit more inspiring than that same two chord hook we were constantly having to rework...

I seem to remember reading that Madness had a system whereby the originator of the song got 50% with the remaining 50% being split equally between all of the band (so the main songwriter would get 50% + 1/7 of the other 50%) - I quite like this as an idea although I'm sure it's not something that would work for every band.

Thanks for all the nice comments. I'm a little bit shocked by how common this situation is - but then again, perhaps the confidence to front a band (and do so with your own lyrics too) might well come hand in hand with some complex ego/confidence issues 😉 It looks like quite a few of us are coming out of lockdown with new and hopefully happier projects - the very best of luck to all of us! In terms of the slight detour into copyright issues - I'm not sure that the "song = top line and lyrics" policy still stands, if ever it did. I think the definition in law is something very vague like "a substantial element", which is probably why things like Andy Summers' arpeggiated part from Every Breath You Take isn't up for grabs. Rigidly sticking to the melody and lyrics angle leads to bizarre situations such as the period in which Jagger & Richards received royalties for Bittersweet Symphony due to that song featuring a sample of a melodic motif that they hadn't even written themselves.

I've been meaning to post my own tale of woe for some time now - so I was about to post to Jakester's thread but ended up venting at too much length... Didn't want to thread-jack so please forgive the possibly unnecessary new topic. I joined an originals band about three or four years ago which until that point had been a keys/gtr/vocal doing a small number of originals and classy covers that were facilitated by the singer's excellent voice. Things were going really well - I knew a few low level promoters and local radio folks so we managed to get some ok gigs and coverage and we had lots of new songs coming through, turning us into a 99% originals band. A couple of us worked tirelessly to get radio play, social media traction and gigs despite an ever changing mission statement from the singer: "I'm sick of doing sh!tty support gigs" one week but then "I want to do a load of pub gigs locally" the next... a period of "I just want to go out and do some solo slots at open mics"... followed by "I don't want to do gigs at all" the next month. We booked some studio time and put down five songs, although it took two years to actually get three of them "released" on Spotify etc - which should have been a warning sign in itself, in retrospect. In the year prior to lockdown the singer's output dropped considerably and so we went from her bringing in chords, lyrics and melodies for each song to band members working up sketches which she would put words and melodies on top of. We got some great songs out of this process and did some more recording. We're lucky to have access to a nice sounding room and I've got loads of recording gear so we took over the drummer's house for a weekend and got another clutch of recordings in the bag. I ended up doing endless mixes of two of these tracks - interminable back and forth finessing things until we eventually put one of them out. Within days, the singer sent a message out to say that she didn't really like this song and that she "couldn't really get behind it" - you can imagine how this sat with me after the hours of work I'd put in, similarly the guitarist, who'd put a video together for it and who had worked with me submitting it to all the usual radio shows, blogs and other places your average, bottom-of-the-ladder indie band has to plumb. Of note, this song was the first of our releases to have a joint writing credit. We, at length, managed to get over this blip and started working up songs in rehearsal. After spending a few sessions on a new one and having it ready to record, we were again told "I can't really get behind this one" - again, a song that had begun as band composition. This caused major ructions and as we were already into lockdown at this point most communication was taking place via texts and group chats. I had my suspicions about this being related to the singer perceiving a loss of her status as sole songwriter and indeed she sent us some messages about being uncomfortable with our creative process and with collaboration being difficult for her as she "received her songs from the ether" - seemingly unaware of the masses of work we all put into crafting her contributions into finished songs. But at the same time she was at pains to point out that we were not just a backing band - without being able to clarify how this curious creative relationship could go forward. The drummer managed to get us all to agree to a meeting to get things straightened out. Within hours, the singer sent a message "dissolving this iteration of the band" and explaining that she wanted to keep the band name for herself and that she expected to be able to use all the songs and material recorded thus far on her Spotify and social media accounts. I balked at this latter point and made it clear that any songs or recordings I'd contributed to were off-limits. I felt quite bad about this at the time but over the following 6 months it has proven to be a shrewd move. The three of us immediately decided to continue as a new band and in looking at the contributions that we'd had rejected and even some of the finished songs, realized that we had a decent clutch of music that we'd actually written without the singer's input and have been going about re-purposing them with new lyrics and melodies. The eye-opener has been how much more productive and positive the band has been. For someone who endlessly posted on social media about positivity and the need to exclude negative people from one's life, it seems that our original singer was an astonishingly negative and stymieing presence. We all live close to each other and the band members, spouses and children all remain in contact which makes it even harder when the singer is heard to say that she regards the preceding four years as an entirely negative experience and a waste of time - although I wonder if she'd feel this way if she'd walked away with all twenty-odd songs as she'd intended... I've glossed over many, many minor and not-so-minor niggles here: the hours put into researching, sourcing and incorporating -and subsequently discarding- flavours of the month such as loopers, Ableton, IEMs etc; trying to maintain relationships with promoters and presenters when it was belatedly decided that a particular gig or session was not going to happen; the endless hours dedicated to promoting the band and hustling gigs; the irritation of spending entire rehearsals teasing a song out of a tiny half-idea while having more fully-realized contributions summarily dismissed - in truth, all the sorts of mundane things that eat away at most bands in the end. I do find it amusing that our potentially excellent band was preemptively derailed by the sorts of issues that seem to destroy bands *after* they've achieved some degree of success - one wonders how much social media played into this: that sad sort of non-fame that comes from having an instantly contactable audience of friends and fans. Friends who never seemed able to get to the gigs, I might add 🤐 If you've read this far, thank you - I've been meaning to vent for some time and I think there is something to be gained by sharing these tales of misery. Not that I'm miserable now - the new band is far more creative and fun and the future looks pretty bright. I do enjoy reading stories about unreasonable band members though so I hope others here have something to moan about too...

Marking the thread as this is literally something we started experimenting with this week. We're currently toying with the idea of using VST instruments in Ableton and an Akai Mini or MPK 225. Ableton won't play nice with my favourite plugins so the current set up is a bit of a lash up: crappy old Roland controller keys triggering vst sounds in Reaper. It was great fun - guitarist and me had already swapped instruments and were jabbing at the keys whenever either of us had a hand free. Will be reading with interest to see how we can finesse things.

I am stupidly tempted by this, despite the likelihood of having exactly the same issue as you. Is this at Chase, going off the tags?

Some random thoughts occur: if it's a headline gig would want to play through someone else's gear? Would it be practical to have a complete teardown and set up between each set? Would you trust the promoter to hire in appropriate gear? Would a small charity gig be able to stretch to the hire costs? Is there enough room in the venue to store multiple drum kits and amps throughout the evening? I've never minded sharing gear but the stuff I take to gigs is deliberately bulletproof. I've also got to play through equipment I otherwise wouldn't have done and have subsequently added to my ever-growing shopping list. It's a double-edged sword. To be honest I'm that jealous of the gigging opportunity, I'm not sure my judgement is to be trusted.