This is partly inspired by yesterday’s gig at the O2 Academy in Islington and partly by Svetlana Vassileva’s Facebook post about doing gigs and workshops without earplugs. I’ll try not to rant, but this is of great concern, and not only to me.

Yesterday evening I went to see The Cry Baby at the O2 Academy in Islington. The band on before The Cry Baby were loud. Very loud. Painfully, unpleasantly loud. So loud that I wandered over to the sound desk to see if it was just a localised phenomenon that the sound engineer was unaware of. Imagine my surprise and horror when I realised that the engineer was wearing earplugs! I hung around for a while: I thought at first that he was using them to check individual channels in PFL or solo, or temporarily adjusting the mix buss compression or EQ, but it soon became clear that the earplugs were a permanent fixture. What?????? I mean, What?????????????????????

What bizarre twisted illogical chain of reasoning led the one person who has control over the volume of the band to wear earplugs because the band were too loud? (And no; they weren’t too loud on stage. They were using small amps and the volume was coming from the P.A.) To add ludicrousness to stupidity, the bar staff were supplying earplugs free of charge to anyone who asked for them. What????????????????????????????????????????????????

How in the name of all that’s holy did the so-called “engineer” expect to mix the sound if he couldn’t hear what the sound sounded like because he was wearing earplugs to block out the sound that he was supposed to be mixing? Am I missing something here? Have I finally gone gaga after all these years or is there a perfectly reasonable and logical explanation that some recent advance in sound reinforcement equipment that I don’t know about has made it desirable to push the P.A. system to cataclysmic volume and listen through earplugs for best results?

It was not pleasant. It hurt my head (even through my own earplugs.) Everyone I know who was at the gig complained that it was too loud.

Why?

Then today I read Svetlana Vassileva’s Facebook post about her experience of having done Wednesday night’s No Dice gig at Dingwalls without earplugs followed by two days of workshops at her college: she was complaining that her ears were “a little tender.”

Why?

Is it too loud? THEN TURN IT DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Whoops; said I wouldn’t rant!)

The trouble is, no-one wants to be the one to suggest that it might be a good idea to play quieter. It’s a sort of pan-gender machismo thing amongst the lower-to-middle levels of pop musicians and sound engineers (though I must say that the sound at Dingwalls for my support slot was brilliant!) that makes it impossibly uncool to suggest that we might just try it a little quieter.
Of course, most rock/pop music relies on a certain level of power for its effect, but power does not come from volume: power comes from timing and tone.
I’m starting a campaign to have this engraved on the foreheads of every student that comes through my classes and I hope it spreads to places like the SAE and similar institutions.

The purpose of the P.A. system is NOT to make the music as loud as possible, but to make it as loud as necessary.
Too many engineers see their job as being to show off their system rather than the performers.

There are many reasons why this campaign should be promoted by all right-thinking musicians, not the least of them their ongoing aural health.

Of course, musicians have a responsibility to play their own part in this. Good musicians attune themselves and their sound to the room they are in almost subconsciously: we find what makes the room sing and what makes it go “clang” and then encourage the former while avoiding the latter.
Electric guitarists have a particular problem: the guitar, amp and speakers are actually all one instrument and for most rock guitar sounds the player needs to have the three elements working together. There is a “sweet spot” at which the instrument sings without excessive overdrive. This “sweet spot” can be achieved at a lower volume by standing closer to the amp, raising it off the floor so it is closer to the pick-ups and using compression.
Drums are usually the worst culprit: why do drummers walk into a rehearsal room the size of a living-room and insist on whaling away at the snare? Try learning to tune the drum until it sounds good at lower volume.

Sound engineers should learn the same lesson. The usual approach of bad sound engineers is to make the bass drum sound as close to a nuclear explosion as they can, get the snare to imitate a military mortar, make the bass so bassy that it loosens the bowels of everyone in the same postal district and then use the guitars to strip the paint off the walls with ultra-sonic frequencies. “Oh yea, and I suppose I’d better try and cram the vocal in there somewhere…”

I’ll get my coat…

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Listening to Aretha Franklin’s recording of “Until You Come Back To Me” today with some students. Glorious groove: so relaxed it’s tough as hell (in stark contrast to the appalling piece of smug L.A. fusion I had to deal with immediately afterwards.)
I couldn’t help noticing that in the first 8 bars of verse 1 the electric piano wanders a bit as though the player is looking for something he wants to do but can’t quite get it, and it occurred to me (not for the first time) that this is the kind of thing we notice more with our modern ears, educated as they are to machine-time and edited immaculacy.
It also occured to me that the reason this take is so great is precisely because of this “mistake”; I remember doing sessions where someone screwed up early on in the tune and everyone immediately relaxed, knowing that this would not be the one that was kept and we’d be doing it again anyway. You can feel this in the band: in verse 3 they’re positively bouncing up and down with glee.
Star of the show? Chuck Rainey on bass. Check it out; it’s a tour-de-force.

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Last gig of the tourette tonight at Dingwalls supporting No Dice on their reformation gig.
The fine art of the support act: the trick is to be as unobtrusive as possible. Accept that your soundcheck is going to be shoehorned in between the end of the main act’s and doors opening. Do it quickly and gracefully.
When it’s showtime, don’t expect to be introduced: just get on stage and do it and then get off and clear your gear away as quickly as possible.
My middle-aged man’s theme song (here’s the clean version: went down a treat tonight because 90% of the audience identified with it. I had a request to add another verse about the prostate gland: I’m working on it! (The verse, not the gland…)
And don’t be better than the headliners. Phil Baxter and I managed all of these things tonight and No Dice were great! A good old-school rock band with a rabble-rouser front man and singalong songs.
On which note….

Rock characters in London. You see them all over this part of town, in Camden and Kentish Town, Islington and Holloway, and Dingwalls was full of them tonight. Faces and haircuts from the 60′s and 70′s, looking older and more worn but still smoking and drinking in Dingwalls and The Forum, The Bull & Gate and The Hope and Anchor; venues whose walls are plastered with posters of rock history… Kilburn and the High Roads (Ian Dury’s first band, google them kids!) and The Clash, Dr Feelgood and Bees Make Honey… The rock faces saw them all first time around and are still going to gigs by “heritage” bands, singing along to the songs of their youth.

For we musicians, it’s easy to forget how much it means to those who can’t play music; the passion is written on the faces of the hardcore fans in front of the stage. They know all the words and even the instrumental breaks, after all these years. Svetla (bassist with No Dice) said to me afterwards that she found it really poignant playing in a band that hadn’t gigged for 30 years, seeing the joy on the faces of the diehards in their faded tour T-shirts and I agree with her; it’s touching and wonderful.

And it doesn’t matter if the heads on stage are balding: so are the heads in the audience. It doesn’t matter if the bodies on stage throw their shapes with less abandon: so do the bodies on the venue floor.

In Dingwalls tonight everyone looks like they were once in a rock band or going out with someone who was. Maybe they were and I just don’t recognise them anymore. Maybe the entire cast of the London rock scene of the 60′s and 70s are here: The Pink Fairies and The Pretty Things, Stackridge and Byzantium, Budgie and BeBop Deluxe, the names I used to read and memorise every week out of the Melody Maker and NME in my sleepy little Kent village.
Kevin Coyne is at the bar reminiscing with Dick Heckstall-Smith whiile Fred Frith swaps road tales with John Lees from Barclay James Harvest,

When the bar closes, they’ll slip away into the night just as they have these last 50 years, back to the Georgian terraced houses they bought for a snip with the last of the royalties when Islington was the badlands where nobody wanted to live except the stoner musicians because it was cheap, and whose property values now guarantee their retirement.

I am a generation too young (and Svet is at least one more generation too young) to have been one of the wild ones: I chose music as a career whereas they did it because it got them out of having to do anything else and the drugs and the sex were plentiful and relatively harmless. Whenever I work with musicians from those generations I am struck by their wonderful innocence: they were the first ones to do it and there were no rules or career paths, no degrees or diplomas, just a wide open road and no speed limit.

Innocent times and innocent people: we will never see their like again.

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Today’s post was meant to be a dispatch from the tour-bus on my tourette of Sarf England, but as the tour-bus is in fact my not-particularly-thrilling-or-glamorous Mondeo Estate and I’ve been too busy driving it to type blog entries, there is another matter I need to get off my chest now that I’m back home after my gig.

I’ve spent most of the day rejoicing at the news that Rebekah Brooks is to be charged with perverting the course of justice, and the rest of the day fuming at her appalling hypocrisy in complaining that innocent people have “unfairly been dragged into this.” She might care to contact the innocent parents of Milly Dowler or Charlotte Church’s mother and ask for their sympathy. Vile cow.
Of course, one way of making sure that innocent bystanders are not dragged into criminal proceedings is to avoid committing criminal acts in the first place, but the culture of the Murdoch empire has long been that they feel themselves to be above the law because of the grip of fear in which they held the entire establishment.

“What’s that, Chief Constable? You want to investigate our journalistic practices? Well now, let’s see: we have that nice little story about your affair with your personal assistant that we’ve been sitting on for these last ten months… we could always run that this Sunday. yes, we know it’s not true, but the public don’t and everyone knows there’s no smoke without fire… Sorry; what was that? You’ve decided to drop all charges? There; we knew you’d see reason…”

“Sorry, Prime Minister; did you say that you were going to set up a new Press Complaints Commission with real powers run by someone other than the press it’s supposed to regulate? With an election on the horizon? Hmmm. Well, of course, as Prime Minister, it’s your duty to do whatever you feel is in the best interests of the country.
Oh, by the way: can we just run this story past your press officer? We’re planning to run it on Sunday: it’s about offshore tax havens set up by politicians’ accountants under the guise of removing their investment portfolios from their immediate control while in public office. Yes, of course we know it’s perfectly legitimate, but as we all know, it’s about the spin you put on a story, isn’t it? What’s that? No new Press Complaints Commission? Well, coincidentally, I’ve just been informed that our Sunday edition is full this week, so we’ll put the story on the spike for a few more months. On another matter; as you know, we are planning to buy a controlling share in a major satellite broadcaster. Would you be able to give us an indication as to what your position on that might be?”

I am proud of having been an early adopter of Vince Cable’s “war on Murdoch:” so early in fact, that I was waging it decades before Mr Cable. Some 20 years ago the Sunday Times, a newly-purchased addition to the Digger’s stable of foul comics, ran a story on the Sunday before the General Election suggesting that Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock (senior figures in the Labour Party at the time, kids!) were KGB agents. The story ran in the paper’s “Insight” section, which had been up till then their flagship heavyweight politics section, and trailed on the front pages under the banner headline “Kinnock and Foot KGB link.” Further reading revealed that the only basis for the story was that both men had visited Moscow in the previous decade and it was thus theoretically possible that they might have been approached by KGB agents seeking to recruit them to the Soviet cause.
I wrote to several journalists on the staff of the paper asking if they felt comfortable about having their names alongside such a travesty of serious journalism but received no reply.

Since then, the Murdoch press has presided over (and been a major cause and contributor to) the degradation of our cultural life, its reduction to lowest-common-denominator comic-book caricature political journalism and the staggering hypocrisy of publishing pictures of girls as close to the age of consent as they can get away with while whipping up lynch-mob fury against paedophiles. (No, I’m not defending child-abusers, but rule of law and proper legal process are the correct weapons to use here, not string-em-up-even-if-they-are-paediatricians-same-thing-innit council estate hysteria.)
In all those years I have never bought a Murdoch paper or subscribed to Sky TV in any form.

Notice that earlier I used the word “held” when referring to the Digger’s grip of fear over the Establishment: I believe this is weakening and is in fact fatally wounded: the smell of revenge being taken is overpowering and I welcome it.
With any luck the Americans will have a fit of self-righteousness, conveniently ignore the crimes perpetrated by their own FBI, and discover a “smoking gun” that points to the Murdochs’ guilt in some illegal tapping of 9/11 victims’ phones and it will all be over.
On that day I will get a Sky TV subscription.

Evening all.

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The word “sick” now appears to have two contradictory meanings, rather like the word “bad” which was so laughably hi-jacked by Michael Jackson in the ‘Eighties: as well as meaning “infirm, unwell, suffering from disease or debilitating affliction” it is also used to express approval and indicate high quality. To describe something as “bear sick” is not to refer to the appearance of ursine vomit, but to offer a compliment of the highest order.

I’ve experienced sick bassists in both senses of the word “sick” today. Read on…

Tonight (Monday 14th May) was the second gig on my tourette of Sarf England at The Bulls Head, Barnes, a legendary London Jazz venue (though I’ve been a musician for over 35 years without ever catching Jazz, but they don’t appear to have noticed.) At 9.30 this morning, I got a text from my grate frend Steve Pearce (who is uterly wet and a weed) saing he hav the floo and will probably spend the da in bed with the assistant Under-matron coo-ur-gosh and watching the foopball while she feed him graypes chiz chiz I diskard him.

Hmm. Like all Artists who sometimes do gigs that pay so little money that they rely on the good will and availability of fellow musicians to play them, I have at least two of each chair in my band: two bassists, two drummers, etc., who know the set. Trouble is, the other bassist who knows my gig is also busy tonight. What to do?

Here’s where the power of charts comes in. Good charts are an art form in themselves: too much notation and the band play like an orchestra with their heads buried in the charts and no communication going on. Too little detail and you hang the poor musicians out to dry, but a combination of good charts and well-developed eyebrow muscles can get you through a gig with surprisingly good results. I know: I’ve done it many times!

The minimum requirement for a good chart is:

Chart-writing is a whole subject in itself. If there is a demand for it, I’ll do some videos and post them here. Let me know.

So anyway: I bump into Alan Mian (google him, kids!) in the corridor at the ICMP.
“Al! How you doing?”
“Great. You?”
“Fab. Listen; don’t suppose you’re free and could do my gig at The Bulls Head?”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Hmmmmmmm……”
He’s been in this appalling situation before but handles it like a pro. After a couple of unsuccessful calls to see if anyone could get him out of this mess by remembering a last-minute rehearsal or dinner-party he bites the bullet and accepts the gig. What a star.

We turn up at the gig (my nephew Richard Baker is drumming tonight and knows my gig well, thank God!) and set up. I’ve done a few gigs at this venue and am gratified to note that I am not the only musician to complain bitterly and vehemantly about their ludicrous placement of the monitors and a couple of wedges are now permanently on the stage where they belong instead of flying from the ceiling where they are no bloody use to anybody…

I hand Alan a sheaf of charts and we top-and-tail the tunes. (Top-and-tailing means playing the beginning, any sticky bits, and the end.)
Gig starts, Alan plays a blinder, assisted by much eyebrow action from Richard and a little from myself, all well.

Thanks, Alan! Great player, all-round good egg and thoroughly nice man.

An audience member said afterwards: “If you hadn’t told us about the last-minute change of bassist I’d never have known!”

Also mentioned in despatches: Bobby Good who filled two guest slots tonight: “Guitarists who do stuff I can’t” and “Songs I wish I’d written.” Beautiful!

And thanks to David Gale: let’s pursue that conversation!

One more beer and I’m off to bed.

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Nothing musical today. Slightly miffed at going to West Mersea for the first sail of the season and finding my boat still on blocks in the yard…

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Great gig today at The Hobbit Pub in Southampton with Pat Davey (bass) and Richard Baker (drums) as part of the Environmental Rock Festival. Great venue: from the outside it looks like a small rockers’ pub, but once inside it starts to resemble the dwelling of the eponymous fictional species (that’s Hobbits, folks!)
Level upon level, rooms tucked away in every nook and cranny, and a massive auditorium-like garden with craft stalls, drum workshops, organic veggie curry stall, and a bouncy castle.

Once I’d persuaded Richard that the bouncy castle was not open to our age group we did a short set in the music room.
I love having a rehearsed band with a few gigs under its belt: we breeze into town like gunfighters, rock the joint, blow the smoke from our machine-heads, and are gone before they can ask “Who was that masked band?” (Stretched-metaphors-r-us.) The three-piece format has its pros and cons: I love the freedom but miss having another soloist/lead instrument/foil on longer gigs. That’ll be you, Phil Baxter, at the next gig on my mini-tour at The Bulls Head, Barnes on Monday May the 14th (that’s the day after tomorrow, folks!) with Steve Pearce (bass) and Richard Baker (drums) plus guest Bobby Good in the “Guitarists Who Do Stuff I Can’t” slot.
That gig is followed by a duo on Tuesday 15th in Horsell, near Woking at Elaine McGinty’s Lovely Music Night with Phil on guitar, and then Dingwalls on Wednesday 16th supporting No Dice (again with Phil on guitar.)

Is a mini-tour a tourette?
I will send dispatches from the tour-bus (my car.)

I’m also constantly amazed and delighted that good old-fashioned guitar-wank in the blues-rock idiom is still so popular. It’s sometimes a little nerve-racking to go on stage in front of an audience most of whom are the same age as my kids, but it always goes down well, and not just with the boys!
One young lady said after the set “I’m in the middle of exams and it’s a stress-fest, but you’ve just given me twenty minutes of sheer happiness!” Ok, I know that’s an open goal: supply your own punch-line…

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I’m up to my ears in it today, so a quick question to set you thinking: what’s your favourite first line of a song?
Please feel free to post answers as comments here as well as on FB!
Thanks

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OK, following on from yesterday’s finger-cramping entry typed on my iPhone, I’m seated at the desktop computer with a full-size keyboard and a fresh cup of coffee…. onwards and upwards.

Today I’ll describe the technical challenges of the process, but first I was asked by Paul Bessell on a Facebook thread related to this “Why would you want to record voice and acoustic guitar together?”
My short answer was “Because that’s what the artist wanted,” which is not as flippant as it sounds.
Some artists and some songs only work this way. Check out this fine young man George Frakes who’s a great example of this. His fluidity of tempo and the close connection between his singing and playing make it impossible to record the guitar and voice separately: I know, I’ve tried!
I recorded this EP using the technique described below.
This of course relies on the artist being capable of delivering consistently good performances, (which George certainly is,) and yesterday’s artist Marcus Valance is equally capable of this.

Here’s the track:

Here’s how I recorded it (experienced engineers, you’ll know all this: please feel free to add comments and suggestions!)
The mic on the guitar is an AKG valve mic pointed straight at the soundhole and about 6 inches away. This mic is pretty directional, and as long as the top is pointing directly at the singer it doesn’t pick up too much of the vocal. I rolled off a little low end and added a hint of 12k, but otherwise it’s as heard by the mic.
That’s the easy bit: the tricky bit is getting the voice as separate as possible so that I have some control when it comes to final mixing. I need to be able to EQ and compress the voice as required without screwing up the guitar sound and vice-versa.
The voice is recorded with an AKG 414 set to a figure-eight pattern and placed side-on to the guitar. The figure-eight pattern means that the mic listens to what is in front or behind it, but rejects sound to either side of the capsule. Bingo: clean vocal track with the tiniest hint of spill from the guitar, but not enough to be troublesome.
I’ve even done pitch-correction on the vocal using this method (though not on this track: no artificial additives at all!)

Look out for Marcus Valance: go and see him if he’s gigging near you, he writes wonderful songs and is a relaxed and entertaining performer.

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Had the wonderful Marcus Valance in the studio today recording extra acoustic tracks for his forthcoming album.
I’ll post more tomorrow on the technical details (along with a soundcloud link to one of the tracks) but there are artistic considerations too.

What are the artistic challenges of recording voice and acoustic guitar at the same time?
The obvious one is tht if you make a mistake on either “instrument” you can’t really fix it (unless your performances are so consistent both in terms of dynamics and tempo that you can drop in or use a section from another take.)
My preferred solution to this is to make a pair of tracks (one for the guitar mic, one for the voice) and duplicate them several times. Each new take goes on its own pair of tracks. When we’ve got a few takes we’re happy with I can line them all up on the screen and immediately see which ones are longer/shorter, louder/quieter. This makes comping easier: choose your “master” take and use te closest matches as spare parts.

The other (and less obvious) challenge is that most people who try to do this are used to performing their material in this way in a live situation and find it hard to achieve the same intensity in the studio. This raises the question of musicality itself and what the artist’s “motivation” is.

More tomorrow: typing on an iPhone is no fun and a good band has just started.

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