Lollapalooza 2013

Having missed last year's Lollapalooza I made sure I got tickets for this one, and because practically everyone in the office was going, the 3-day pass seemed like a good idea. After all it's not like a camping festival and apart from the first day there was very little in the way of mud! The venue is Chicago's Grant Park, surrounded on three side by skyscrapers and on the other side by Lake Michigan, which makes for a great city meets festival atmosphere. I arrived earlyish on the Friday with minimal to zero plan, no idea where anyone was and a barely functional phone (someone should find a way to improve cell bandwidth during large gatherings of people). Luckily within thirty seconds I bumped into someone I knew, which given that 160,000 people attend over three days and given the amount of time it took to find people later on, was pretty astounding. Luminous pink headband acquired from random drunk guy, I was ready to begin. Here are some of the highlights...

On the Friday Deap Vally were a really fun female, alternative rock/pop duo with some grungy guitar riffs, and Ghost were a great satanic metal band who everyone should check out if they get a chance to see them live. Queens of the Stone Age rocked pretty hard and then I had to choose between Nine Inch Nails and The Killers for the final act. I went with the former and was not disappointed although everyone said The Killers also put on a spectacular show.

Saturday was a bit more chilled - sitting under the trees listening to The Dunwells (folk rock from Leeds) was particularly good. I then stayed around the main (read "more popular") stage for the finale of The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons. We were pretty far back for the end but it still sounded ok and  there was room to dance manically without accidentally killing someone.

Sunday started with Alex Clare who you may know for certain Internet Explorer ads! Despite this dubious fame, his alternative bluesy rock tinged with electronica and a keytar was fun to listen to. Vampire Weekend was a highlight of the weekend with an energetic set and excitable crowd. Finally I decided to see Phoenix rather than The Cure, which turned out well as Pheonix also put on a really entertaining show and are probably more of a festival band than The Cure.

Overall a successful weekend!

My new electric cello - The NS NXT

I have been thinking about getting an electric cello for a long time (...years definitely!). They are so much more manageable than an acoustic one - no need to annoy the neighbours when practicing and no buying extra plane seats to prevent your musical instrument getting damaged by incompetent airline staff. Of course they will never sound as good as a nice acoustic but given that they are about the same price as a typical "student" cello I could not resist getting one. Also if you want to record music an electric cello that you plug directly into your audio interface/mixing desk is very useful.

The problem is there are not so many choices. Yamaha's Silent Cellos are a popular option but I liked the idea of something more minimal. There are some more "boutique" companies around such as the Bridge Draco cellos, and the Jensen cellos but it is hard to go into a shop to play these. The best option was looking like Ned Steinberger's range of electric instruments. I tried playing their CR model cello when I was in London and enjoyed it a lot however the price was too high for me to just buy it there and then! Luckily they then brought out the NXT model which is basically identical but with passive pickups rather than active, and is about half the price. So I got one.

Here are some pictures...

As you can see I decided on the 4-string version in black. I have played a 5-string cello but it just confused me and would probably have been unnecessary!

So how does it sound? Well it is actually surprisingly volume-ful even when not plugged in, which is a good sign. I hooked it up to my Line 6 TonePort UX2 just as I would with my guitar and opened Gear Box. Using the basic Piezoacoustic 2 amp model on low Drive settings with a bit of compression and reverb sounded really nice. The cello itself has a switch for optimal arco and pizzicato pickup, a simple tone control and a volume knob. Here is a quick (and not very polished!) recording of me playing some stuff. The final clip has some tube screamer distortion to demonstrate some of the fun things you can do when your cello is electric...

Smashing Pumpkins, Chicago

So I'm not even going to apologise for the lack of posts - this is just a sporadic blog. And it has been a while since I have gone to any big gigs. However this has been made up for by going to see the Smashing Pumpkins at the Allstate Arena in Chicago last night.

Firstly let me moan about the venue. Being a public transport aficionado in a country built around cars can be challenging and getting to the arena was no exception. After taking a bus and the L almost to the airport I then still had to wait for one of only four shuttle buses. However, I can see why they only run four since there were a total of six people on the bus. As an aside none of them were wearing Smashing Pumpkins t-shirts which worried me for a second but it turned out to be the correct bus! The Allstate Arena itself is not brilliant in terms of acoustics even after they basically divided it in half - it would have made so much more sense to use a smaller more intimate venue downtown.

Anyway, now the good stuff... The support were Anberlin who had a lot of energy and are well worth checking out; it was a shame that the venue was only half full at this point. The Smashing Pumpkins were of course excellent. The new line-up seems to be working out and Jeff Schroeder has some mad guitar skills. What amazed me was how many songs they got through, the entirety of Oceania made up the first half of the gig and then they went on to play a good selection of classics: XYU, Disarm, Tonight Tonight, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Zero, Cherub Rock... The encore was particularly awesome with their rockier version of Ave Adore and Mayonaise to close.

Also they had a massive sphere above the stage with some sort of crazy projector on the inside - it was good.

Riverside

So I was introduced to the wonders of Polish prog-rock/metal the other day through a friend at work. The band we went to see were Riverside who were playing at the rather good (and suitably alternative) venue Scala. Apparently they have been together for 10 years now and more people should know about them!

They seemed to have a Tool-like vibe going on at times and the songs were certainly not short, but I would say they are more musical than Tool. Also they managed to bring along some electronic sounds and classic rock guitar to keep us entertained. This kind of stuff is not always easy to pull off in a live venue but Scala was suitably small and the songs energetic enough to do it.

Short post to get me back into the swing, though now I've run out of gigs. Maybe the Crunchy Boost will be put into its box soon...

Apocalyptica

So it has been rather a long time - mainly due to the fact the writing a thesis uses up all your ability to write leaving none for recreation. However, I've now submitted and gig season has begun! There are actually far too many bands I want to see in the next few month and I had to limit myself due a lack of being paid at the moment.


But first - Apocalyptica at the HMV Forum. We rolled up stylishly late to only catch the second half of the support, Pain of Salvation, which I now regret because from what I heard they are awesome. They also got one of the best receptions I've heard from the crowd for a support act. Moving from Sweden to Finland we get to Apocalyptica. These guys play metal on three cellos and if you have not heard them then you are definitely missing out. The cello is a pretty versatile instrument (I may be biased as I play one) and is surprisingly good for playing metal. Its large range probably makes it one of the best classical instruments for the job since both bassy rhythm and cutting leads are possible - with the addition of a few effects of course.


They started out with a couple of crazy instrumentals which were fairly energetic, but only once they got onto "Grace" did they really start to sound impressive. From then on it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to with "I'm Not Jesus" followed by their cover of "Master of Puppets" really getting the crowd going. Mid way through they played a couple of more chillaxed songs which sounded really beautiful even given the less than ideal acoustic conditions! They finished with "Worlds Collide" and then some hilarious/brilliant covers... the national anthem and their trademark "Hall of the Mountain King". All in all a very entertaining gig. Next stop on the gig bus - Jimmy Eat World.

(Thanks to Markus for the photos!)

AFI at Brixton

Finally found some time to describe AFI at the Brixton Academy last month. After stocking up on some tasty Nando's free chicken and watching all the über-keen teens queuing far too early we headed in to what ended up as quite a packed gig. The support were The Dear And Departed followed by Sick Of It All, the former were quite fun and, having listened to some of their songs afterwards, seem not too shabby. The latter were completely insane and slightly on the heavy side for my taste but they did a pretty good job of getting the crowd bouncing. And watching the guitarist run from one mic to the other every 5 seconds was hilarious.

AFI themselves put on their usual energetic and extremely well performed set. I can't decide if it was better than their December Underground tour, maybe not, but they still know how to do a good live show compared to many bands. They also managed to please both old and new fans with a good mix of songs. There were in fact fewer Crash Love songs than I expected (5 out of a set of 18 and all in the first half) but it worked. Opening with 'Medicate', 'Girl's Not Grey', 'The Leaving Song Part II' and 'I Am Trying Very Hard To Be Here' was was a good way to rock out. They threw in 'File 13' and 'Love Is A Many Splendored Thing' for a bit of old-school punk-based fun and ended with 'Miss Murder' before the encore of 'Days Of The Phoenix', 'Love Like Winter' and 'Silver And Cold'. For some reason the sound seemed a little bit off on some songs but that could have been due to standing too far back and didn't diminish what was an awesome gig.

(Thanks to Terri for these photos!)

More geeky effects pedal shizzle

Having popped into the lab yesterday I decided to attach the Crunchie Boost to a signal generator and see what sort of waveform it produces. I used a 200 mV peak-to-peak sine wave input with frequencies of 800 Hz and 8 kHz, kept the volume potentiometer at max and the tone at its mid position. The results are fairly interesting and seem to be the sort of thing one requires of a tube overdrive/boost...

800 Hz:

8 kHz:

From left the right the graphs are Low Crunch, Mid Crunch and High Crunch. Red curve is the input, green is Low Boost, blue is Mid Boost and pink is High Boost.

So there is not quite the separation of Boost and Crunch effect that would be ideal since obviously the Boost also overdrives the tube stage leading to some clipping. However, the two controls do seem to be able to produce a wide range of sounds from warm tube boost through to nice overdrive. At low Crunch there seems to be clipping of the negative part of the cycle which is slightly annoying. Also there is still more noise than I would like but once it is in a box the latter may improve. I'm not to sure about the tone control either - there is quite a lot of low frequency attenuation and some distinct shifting of the phase evident at 800 Hz. Otherwise it's looking cool. Finally out of interest the complete circuit draws around 0.318 A.

Overall it is pretty pleasing and fairly incredible that it worked at all first time!

Finally I have managed to assemble all the electronics for the Crunchie Boost and try it out with my guitar. It certainly sounds tube-like and pretty much does all I planned, however, there is some distinctly annoying hum. I think it just needs shielding better but also I have decided I will need to get a +9V power supply rather than using my -9V one "in reverse" since there are definitely some grounding issues. This is a shame as it means I can't run it off the same supply as all my other pedals but meh, could be worse.

I will post some recordings of how it sounds as well as some geeky waveform analysis at some point. But for now here's a picture and the complete circuit diagram...