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...

Hot Chip

Saw Hot Chip at the Brixton Academy on Friday along with Grovesnor and Casiokids in support. As always a lot of fun was to be had at the Academy and Hot Chip demonstrated how to rock with electronic stuffs... and a steel drum or two. Also the support was far from terrible particularly Grovesnor who played some kind of blues-tinged electronic rock.

The one amusing thing was that I spent quite a while before the gig seeing who else was going on the Friday. Probably one of the few musicy people in my office who I didn't ask was actually there. Typical. And he couldn't have been standing too far from me either. Hmm, someone should work out what radius of people in a club/gig it is possible to recognise a friend in.

What those crazy engineers do at gigs

Back to the music, I thought I'd post a simple explanation of how to make your music sound good live (at least on a small scale since this is all I have experience of!) Firstly, a diagram...

This typical of what you might want for a pub-sized gig although it is based on Noctula's setup hence the drum machine. The equipment should cover a whole range of situations though and is a good starting point for describing sound reinforcement. Firstly let's decide what the point of all this stuff is... (i) it is needed to reinforce the sound of your instruments and vocals to an appropriate volume for the venue, and (ii) once you start to amplify instruments it becomes increasingly hard to hear what you are playing since the sound is directed towards the audience rather than the performer hence monitor speakers.

So with that in mind what needs to go into your mixing desk? Well most guitar amps are actually loud enough to not need any reinforcement, however, if you mic everything then you can control how much of each instrument goes to the monitors. This is pretty vital since most vocalists only want to hear themselves whereas a bassist may want some guitar and lots of drums in their monitor. You can also plug some instruments directly into the mixing desk via a DI box which is useful since it reduces the problems of feedback from dozens of mics and amps. However, I find it is always nice to have the sound of your amp in the mix apart from the fact that it looks cooler! Drums are probably the hardest thing to deal with (as always) so for a small gig it is best to keep it simple - really only the bass drum should need a mic since drums are loud, very loud.

Now the key bit. Set all your faders to 0dB and get the basic levels right using the channel's gain controls NOT the fader. This gives you maximum control with the faders later on and prevents you damaging your mixing desk by having too hot a signal. A compressor is useful as an insert to any vocal channel since it can help to smooth out the sound and prevents vocals getting lost in the mix. Remember to keep checking the individual channels through headphones to ensure they sound good with no clipping etc. The overall sound can be adjusted by fine tuning the faders for each channel, the EQ on each channel and the multi-band EQ on the main output. It is often wise to roll-off the bass with the latter to reduce booming and feedback. EQing correctly will also help (again) to prevent you losing vocals in a muddy mess of sound BUT remember don't overdo the main EQ by cutting out too much otherwise you will lose overall volume as well.

The next thing that happens is you crank up the Aux outputs that go to the monitors (because no-one can hear what they are playing) and suddenly there is a deafening screech as you feedback. So you need to carry out a process called "ringing out". This is not an ideal way to reduce feedback but for small gigs in badly designed rooms (i.e. pubs) where mics are close to monitors it is the only real solution. There are plenty of good descriptions of the process on the internets so I will keep it brief. Essentially turn up the gain on the your main vocal SM58 until it feeds-back, find the frequency of this sound and cut it out using the multi-band EQ for your monitors. Repeat until multiple frequencies start to feedback. Then back off the gain a bit and this is the maximum volume.

There we go, the basics of live audio. And it gets a whole lot more complicated than that so go easy on the dude behind the mixing desk when you go to a gig and it sounds dodgy. Actually... it is their job so what the hell, have a good moan.

For those bored of science based posts...

I was pondering why I have an aversion to a lot of modern art. This was partly prompted by a talk at college by Roger Hiorns the Turner Prize nominated artist who filled an old council flat with copper sulphate solution leaving some stunning blue crystals on all the surfaces. How we managed to get a relatively well know artist to talk at one of the organic electronics group meetings is another story! I was also reminded of a pub conversation some months ago, which is normally the only time I have to think about such things.

Art in my opinion has to achieve two things. Firstly it has to be something that appeals to you emotionally through its beauty, ability to inspire awe or simply juxtaposition with its surroundings to give a few examples. Secondly it should have some deeper level of meaning that goes beyond the purely technical skills used in its creation that makes the viewer think, such as what the person in a portrait is contemplating or what a particular object might represent metaphorically. The problem arises (in my mind anyway) when the explanation of the artist's motives and the piece's meaning must be spelt out on a card next to the artwork. I have no objection to reading about the art to find out more but if I get nothing from just looking at it then it defeats the point. Often these explanations are very interesting and certainly thought-provoking which satisfies my second criterion, but it should be able to stand on its own. Let's take two of Roger Hiorns works as examples: Seizure (the copper sulphate flat) and Atomised Passenger Aircraft Engine (a pile a metal dust on the floor of the Tate). The first I liked a lot the second less so. For a start Seizure was truly beautiful and it needed no explanation to make you look at an old dilapidated flat in a completely different way, especially given the unattractiveness and blandness of the surroundings. Atomised Passenger Aircraft Engine on the other hand was just some dust that could well have been created by some careless workmen in the Tate for all the viewer knows. Until of course you are informed of its title and you find out how it was created. Once this is known it becomes interesting and satisfies criterion (ii) and maybe even (i), but since there are no clues to this in the actual piece I would go so far as to say it should not be classified as art.

So there we go, maybe a problem in definitions but then I enjoy art as I have stated it above - emotionally and mentally engaging and importantly self-contained. I appreciate that one can create an interesting work that says something on several levels but if it evokes no emotional or mental response without some further understanding of the creator's emotions and thoughts then it needs to be called something other than art.

(Photo of Seizure by aliceson)

I Hate Line6

So Line6 have basically revolutionised the way people can record guitars with their Pod and TonePort technologies. It is however only for that reason that I have not chucked my TonePort UX2 out the window. I am pretty annoyed because it has been 5 months since Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard was released and since then it seems like Line6 have done nothing to provide its users with updated driver software. They currently have a crap beta version that is no use if you actually want to use the hardware on a day-to-day basis. Given the number of Macs in audio and that all new ones ship with Snow Leopard, I would not be surprised if Line6 have essentially lost half their market! And its not just a Mac problem, they have also been having difficulties with the new Windows 7 drivers. I cannot quite understand how they can be taking so long to solve this, is their software engineering department made up of a bunch of stupid, lay-about interns? Because that is the only explanation I can see. I rely upon two audio interfaces: an M-AUDIO Firewire 410 and my UX2. Now M-AUDIO don't have the best reputation for drivers but they managed to create a fully 64-bit, stable, 10.6 compatible driver update months ago! So it is clearly not a problem with Apple not releasing details of its new software early enough. I don't mind waiting a month or two for drivers, but soon it'll be half a year and no news.

Argh I am getting very pissed off - Line6, what the f*ck are you doing?

A Mass of Cables

Quick Crunchie Boost update. I went into the lab today to do some work since all week it's been impossible to get my hands on the apparatus. Then I find that someone has left an experiment running all weekend on the very piece of kit I needed, grrrr. The only option was therefore to curse for about 3 min and then do some more work on my effects pedal. After a couple of hours of soldering it is getting very close to completion (in terms of the electronics anyway), however it is also a highly confusing mass of green cable (as I couldn't be bothered to buy multiple colours)...