Acid rain from neon grey clouds
Just re-discovered this video I did in my old apartment in Malmö, where I play a song that I’ve been working on for a while now….. well, anyway, the kitty said she liked it…. the bits she wasn’t snoozing through.
Don’t forget to DIY: Spring reverb Epiphone semi-acoustic
Recently I swapped my Rode NT-1 mic for a friends Epiphone hollow body electric (thx Leo). It’s particularly nice for bowing, since the bridge is raised and the soundboard is a little arched.
Been wanting to try out a modification similar to this acoustic reverb for an electric. (dig the ‘80 french ad style)
What I’m gonna do is shove lots of springs inside the Epiphone guitar, in order to create the same acoustic reverb effect. Acoustic reverb on an electric guitar… love the mismatch!
I still got a couple of piezo pickups, which will be wired to be the tone controls. So they will control the ‘wet’ balance of the spring reverb. The aim is of course the massivly, glacially soaked Sigur Ros sound. Alas, I think that just requires more talent (or an AMS-16, either one is good).
Will post pics of mod, whenever I get to it 
Knock knock knocking on heavens bass
I once had a bass with active pickups. A Washburn. One of those with that Buzz Feiten tuning system. Sold it to Haukur for cheap,… so that he’d join my band and play bass.
But I digress. The nice thing about this bass was the fact that you could play it by simply knocking on the wood. That would activate the strings enough to produce a rather pleasant overtone harmonic pad type sound. This was probably due in large part to the active pickups.
I miss that sound…. and I can’t get it on my new Squier vintage modified J-bass (strangely enough, coz it’s only half the price of the warwick). So I went swimming round the intertubes for a good active replacement for the J-bass. Of course that quickly became a no go, since sticking a battery compartment and preamp into a J-bass involves work on a router,… something which I have zero experience with.
Instead I found these pickups…. q-tuners based on neodymium magnets, which are quite powerful magnets. They have a much higher output and they reproduce a much fuller range of audio frequencies from the strings. Hopefully I’ll be making chordal sub pads in no time.
Yes, I kept the old duncan neck pickup… coz I’m pervese that way. I like to combine the new with the old, shiney with the crusty, crap with the crystal. (and yes, the duncan now subjectively makes as much noise as an ancient neon filament!)
Assembly of my new Intel i7 DAW
I have recieved the PAQ case, gigabyte mobo, cosair DDR3 ram and of course the Intel i7 cpu. Assembly has begun.
Funny thing to note, is the fact that my stationary pc is getting bigger and my portable is getting smaller. See pictures:
old blackbox vs. new monolith
macbook vs. iphone.
Chickens and Ableton Live
People who just sit on an idea are dumber than chickens, because at least when a chicken sits on something, it hatches…
Following this poultry based advice, I’ve shared the Amblin Track from the previous post on Ableton Lives Share site.
Yet another amblin track
Got the new Ableton Live… version 8. And it’s very nicely done. The Suite is great, and the best feature for me is the zoomable interface, since it makes using my touchscreen mucho mucho easier.
Some volume automation things that are a bit wonky, but they’ll sort that out in short order.
So I spent the afternoon combining and mixing odd bits and bobs from my personal sample library. This is what popped out.
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The new efx and Collision are very nice and musical. Used them all on the track.
Glacial melt for aerophany choice
Another stream of conciousness piece using software, based on some tones from a… well, you can hear it at the end.
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Done entirely in GleetchPlug 3, a nice piece of software that falls in the ‘play as an instrument’ category rather than ‘play as a cd’
Just a few presets
Here’s a quick improvised jam using only Audio Damage plugins. It starts with presets and then I muck about with settings.
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Plugins used are (in order)- BigSeq2, Automaton and Replicant.
I’m not a vegetarian
Farmer Bob – victim 1 of the green revolution
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Farmer bob is such a son of a bitch
we’d like to stick him in a fridge for the fun of it
but first we’ll take him out and cut him to mince
or maybe milk him half to death, so he’ll see how it is
sure it’s Bob who feeds us
and puts a roof over our heads
but the pig pen is a pig sty
and the battery for the hens
is as run down as the cow shed
well we’re just tired of this bullshit
and the final straw was when we saw that
he’s been stealing our kids
the hens were hatching plans
and the cow were mulling them over
the pigs were at first skeptical
but then they came in closer
it started in barn
and continued in the yard
they trapped Bob in his car
but then came his friend Rover
after that Bob wasn’t just mad
put the pigs in a pot
and the chickens in a vat
Daisy’s fate was not much better than this
Bob put her in a cage
and hooked machines up to her tits
So that days revolution didn’t quite stick
But at least the Rooster wound up as MacNuggets
that made everyone sick
