well… i made an electronic organ today. I’m so proud of it! (well I was when I finished it and it finally WORKED! but since then i’ve been waiting for camera batteries to charge and the excitement has died down a tad). YOu get a bag full of chips and pins and diodes and resistors, you have to figure out what’s what (resistors are a bitch!) then solder each one onto a blank circuit board.. or two. And for a full hour it DIDN’T WORK! fuckety FUCK fuck…

The only thing I’ve soldered in the past is my guitar leads when they’ve split. doing circuit boards is a whole other experience… this is a kit i bought from an electronics store, and it took at least an hour of tracing what wasn’t working to fix all my crap soldering from the day before. Google helped me find awesome soldering advice making this morning’s work much more reliable. what would I have done pre-google? chuck it in the bin i suspect, with nothing to show for it but the smell of burnt hair which Karen smelt when she came over to visit last night.

So this is part of my latest craze project, I’ve gotten some experts from the UK to circuit bend a new 1980s casio MT-40 I’ve bought, and in the meantime I thought I could try bending some of the electronic toys i have lying around. I just needed to practice soldering a bit first, so I bought a couple of kits.

The idea is to get a more crunchy sound happening with my music which is a bit too acoustic and soft for me at the moment. And while i’ve been sick has been the perfect time to sit and do projects like clean out my hard drive and soldering. Now if only I can get my neighbour to stop banging around like a maniac, so I can get some rest.

This whole thing makes me feel like I should get a teeshirt to show off my geek powers! actually speaking of tee shirts I made a couple for the sci-fi convention next month which I am hitting with ma girls, I’ve always wanted to do a sci fi convention with girls. we’re all convention virgins. We’ve had teeshirts made… mine says K-9 shits ball-bearings which he does. Tom Baker said so. I also made one I used to want to wear till Tennant pissed me off. But Kerri wants it.

Hope you all have a lovely Easter break!

it’s the great war of modern music analog versus digital (or ‘didSHITall’ as dad says). if the idea of me going through a history of how i’ve learnt to make music bores you to tears I apologise, but recently, since I’ve had lots of time I’ve been able to work on my music a lot more and now that things are feeling more flowing, I’m finally reconciling with just how much hard work it’s been just to deal with this bloody modernisation of music (and talkingthese things out always helps me move forward).

More than any other format, music has suffered at the hand of digitisation, you’ll know this from the number of stolen MP3s in your iPod. but i’m not talking about that end, it’s the music-making end I deal with in my time off. Instruments now are more often than not born, raised and recorded within computers, they never breathe the light of day, they live in binary coding. I think this is hardest for guitarists… atleast piano players can pick up a digital synthesiser and it’s a familiar setting, but guitars will always be real living things best made with wood and strings, fed into crunchy amps that blast your ear drums so they ring for hours all the walk home from a gig.

I started out with a little Tascam 244 four track, I got it when I was 16, it has a cassette inside it and can record four things at once, so I’d do guitars, rewind, do vocals, rewind, do casio, rewind, to more vocals… you could quite easily record a song in a day on your own, write it, get out the 4 track and a mic, and record it straight away. VERY satisfying.

Of course there are problems… you have to tune your instruments to each other (easier said than done, have you tuned a synth?), you have to have relative quiet in the house, you have to have physical room to spread out your instruments and the wires between all of them.. you have to bloody FIND all the right wires hat will connect up each of your instruments, and replace the crackly ones that don’t work any more… you also have to know how to sing, and how to play in time to a beat (yeah… i’m not so good at this)… no computers to make you sound like Britney, or fix up your mistakes… it’s all LIVE, one take, beginning to end. which can be a bitch.

I built up an arsenal of instruments I could use for my recordings, Electric guitars, basses, recorders, casios, and big ol’ crunchy vintage synths. My pride and joy, and inspiration for today’s post is my Korg Poly-61. It was the very first digital synthesizer, it’s such a thick chunky bass sound, it’s easy to program but unpredictable in that, well it’s old and not feeling very well, much like most of my instruments and so it burbles and warps and god I love it! Next to my equally ancient casios (most of my instruments are circa 1980) it makes a great sound.

But it’s not MIDI. it can’t play to 120bpm, I can’t even tell it to play to a BPM i just turn a knob and hope for the best… this makes matching it to a drum beat in a computer, or even from my casiotone (which is also controlled by the randomness of a knob twisting) highly challenging and rarely successful… so my instruments don’t play together well unless you keep it real simple.

So recently I bought a little Microkorg, well, actually about 5 years ago. I promised I’d chuck out the big ol’ Poly-61, but I couldn’t, the sound just wasn’t the same, the Microkorg can at least play to a BPM, I can tell it, you will play at 130bpm and it obediently responds, it even sounds like my Poly-61, but it isn’t as beastly…

Living in this wiry jungle, of analog versus digital, might be messy and contrary, and professional muso’s scoff at me because really I should only need a laptop and a little MIDI keyboard and i’d be laughing. There’s a world of amazing sounds if I choose to learn all the software, but it’s just never been the same for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a nerd, I love sequencing out a beat step by step, but I prefer doing that for a drum beat, not for a whole song. Basically if going digital means leaving behind my casio’s, my korgs, my guitar, the sound of the room i’m in, the cricket playing quietly from the room next door, the bird chirruping outside… well I don’t want it. If going digital is all about being clever and looping rather than playing a whole song, editing out all the mistakes, having perfectly clean channels that sound like nowhere… i don’t want it.

So i continue to struggle, I spend most of my time trying to find a happy middle ground, depending on the song, depending on the instruments I want to play today. I may have left behind my cassette four track, for my iphone four track, and I may not be producing studio quality sound, but I’ve never been more productive musically. Today I woke up and without even thinking, I turned on the two Korgs and started playing and FINALLY recorded a song with the two of them together, I recorded it on my iphone’s tiny mic which sat in my lap pointing at my half dead BassKing valve amp which had both my Korg Beasties plugged into it. The mastering is terrible, the song is average, the hiss is incredible, and everything sounds like it’s dying a little bit. But the pure achievement of finding a way to work with both instruments at once is something i’ve been struggled toward for forever.

So listen to my happy struggle in synths of vintage [3mb download]

so I downloaded an iphone 4 track recorder, which apparently some band called the 88s made a rather good song with and put the making of on YouTube. I’ve just recorded a riff I had in my head, it turned out alright.

Hear my new song 7-11.

I think I prefer working this way it’s so quick! I only needed the computer to filter some noise and trim the end of the tracks. I have some much better, old riffs that I haven’t had the heart to record til now, now I’m all excited!

♪♫i’m alone, i’m aaa-lone, i’m alone.♪♫

So i’ve mostly made my life pretty comfortable and day to day stuff is kind of easier. i’ve even organised a housewarming tea party in a couple of weeks (which cost me a fortune in paper cups and things.. yikes!) Now when I get home from work, which I do pretty early, I kind of stare at the tv (off) thinking “i’m bored, what to I do now?” and i (reluctantly) turn the tv on and half watch it guiltily. make some dinner. check my email. i’m always feeling guilty that i’m not vacuuming the house, or writing new song lyrics, or calling a friend to go out. basically, now that I don’t have the excuse of living with family, I feel like i’m ALWAYS procrastinating. i’m told this is just the next phase of living by myself which is a relief, i want it over NOW!

However my sunday has been epic! I vacuumed, mopped, cleaned bathroom, did the dishes, did two loads of washing, got the groceries AND went out to see a gig! AND wrote song lyrics while at the gig!

I finally got to see Flying Scribble and Royalchord and Bachelorette all in one night! it made me sad I had to go on my own, I’m okay when the music is on, but between bands I just want to curl up and die. Sarah says I should feel like the “mysterious lady” . but really I feel like I am wearing the wrong clothes, unattractive and not drinking enough to look like a local. I did chat to the label owner i just thought he was a guy but he had sat next to me and he was interesting. and i chatted with the bar lady she was nice.

the nice thing about the night was that NOONE got out their phones, everyone was too cool to be texting and blah. except me, i felt peer pressured to go outside and check my twitter. and i did take just ONE photo (for you). to prove I was out-of-the-house. Actually the PA system wasn’t insulated properly so poor Royal Chord got the fright of their lives when one of their phones made that ‘clicking’ noise when phones change towers, and it went REALLY loud over the whole PA, it was doing it all night much more quietly from audience phones because people refused to turn them off. FYI i put mine in airplane mode for the photo… and accidentally started playing bachelorette (during her set) on my phone (which was muted dammit!) while I tried to figure out the name of the album I had and whether to buy her new album.

so it was an all girl, all electro pop night! i’m really glad I went. Bachelorette uses the same two casios I use. makes me happy. Her music is much warmer live than on cd, I find some of these types of bands’ recordings are very ‘perfect’, particularly the vocals, and they just don’t sound as endearing and ‘real’ as they do on stage… the opposite of Sarah Blasko who I saw the other week, I expected her to be all acoustic guitar, shy and sweet, like Missy Higgins or something. but she was a fucking marionette play-dancing in front of the microphone unable to banter with the audience at all. Meanwhile Bachelorette a lovely girl from NZ played the whole set herself from a laptop an acoustic guitar and three keyboards, with the sweetest voice and lots of jokes about the ‘bossy new zealand bitch’ that was telling people to turn off their phones.

Flying Scribble are a must-see two piece and they are releasing their ‘album’ as separate singles bit by bit, which is my idea but they beat me to it dammit. and their sound on recording is as effervescent on disc as it is live. which is the best compliment I can give.