Movin' on up!

Good evening blog-friends! Since my ol' pal blogspot isn't very frequently used, I've moved my blog over to Tumblr.


I've backed up all my archive so it should all be there, so you can enjoy the past as well as looking forward to the future! Let's have a look at what's coming up, shall we?


Currently still working on the hQ albums: 'Into The Sun', and the reissue of '1, 2, 3, 4!'. Got my deadlines for that sorted today, in fact, I'm putting a blog up after this one about the weekend's work with the band!

Also, I'm still writing parts of the Worlds Apart album, for the currently anonymous prog band, and still doing a spot of DIY, rebuilding my guitar, and setting up and rewiring a surround sound speaker system.

And I might do a spot of complaining about things. As usual.

And all of this will be accompanies by the usual barrage of amusing pictures.

I'll see you on the other side, Blogspot, I really will miss you, quite a lot. Thanks to all who have followed me on here, and I hope you like my new digs! Please recommend this, my twitter and my youtube channel to anyone who you think might be interested, as I discovered since the start of the blog that I feed like a bat off the love of strangers.

The new blog address is http://drblowthingsup.tumblr.com
My twitter is http://twitter.com/drblowthingsup
And my (currently sparse) youtube channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/DrBlowThingsUp

Bye guys!

The Industrial Evolution

Right, I’m going to do it.

Nonononoo. Don’t try and change my mind, I’m serious.

No I mean it. Honestly.

I’m going to try and set up a record label for the hQ release.

I know, I know.

But, right, here’s why...

Good afternoon/morning/evening! (delete as appropriate)

So, yes. I’m going to try and set up a small record label type thing. Seeing as how I have an album coming out with hQ soon, and another album in the works for the Prog Band Currently With No Name, and also taking into account the fact that I have a year out in the industry next year, and I don’t have any specific plans regarding what to do, I’m going to attempt to be self employed next year, and if I can find a professional studio environment to work in, it will contribute valuable experience, (deep breath) the long and short of it is that the economic, social, and musical society as it is today is very accommodating of self reliant record labels, because of the ‘Indie revolution’, the online downloading trend, and the primarily digitised popular format of music today.

That was quite a hefty paragraph, so I’ll give you a minute.

Want a biscuit?

Mmmm.

To be honest, as I’ve kind of grown up in a generation where the music industry is ‘dying’ I’ve had a really good chance to watch it evolve, and you can visibly see the decline of the overly rigid record labels as they desperately try and claw some money from the drain that physical formats are circling.

I’m not saying CDs will die out. Far from it, but the fact of the matter is, that’s just not how we roll anymore. People are falling out of love with capitalism where they can help it, and when you look at it, it seems a crime for a financially struggling student to be shelling out hundreds of pounds into a multi-million dollar industry when he can safely spend that same amount of money on the equipment to make his own music. I have been in the situation where bands have broken up, or failed to get off the ground due to lack of funds for big enough amps or not having the money to hire a PA everytime they want to gig. And the unfortunate truth is that every penny that they save by ‘illegal’ downloading is another penny in the bank to fuel the next generation of Arctic Monkeys, or the next home studio based band like Tinyfish (or, dare I say it, hQ).

And so,

Inexorably,

Unavoidably,

And ultimately inevitably,

I come to a convenient crossover.

*Ahem*

Metallica suck.

Want another biscuit? This could take a while.

I’ll try and keep this brief and relevant, despite my temptation to blast them for all it’s worth. In the year 2000, a series of co-incidences involving a free download of one of their tracks lead Metallica to sue Napster (a p2p music downloading network) for approximately all that they were worth and as a result of their blind panic the company essentially declared bankruptcy in 2002.

Sorry, that was pretty childish.

Now, Napster was a company set up by one lone university student called Shawn Fanning, in an attempt to try and make the music industry less financially intimidating, and his company was even featured in Time magazine as one of the most successful modern business ventures for the younger generation. After this massive success he was cut down by a band, who already had millions more dollars than they could have possible needed, who felt it necessary to destroy a small business helping the public as it was causing them a small loss of capital. Fortunately, the story ends happily, as Shawn went on to develop several other programs, and has recently set up a new company called Path, which has attracted the attention of some of the people who work with Facebook.

Unfortunately, they didn’t stop there.

They then named 3 universities that they blamed for the online downloading boom, and threatened them with heavy lawsuits, and 2 of these universities were let off the hook, by blocking the Napster website from their campuses. However the one that did not was victimised, in a BIG way. The ‘most influential metal band of all time’ then hired an internet company to watch Napster over a period of 2 days and compiled a list of over 300,000 Napster users found downloading their songs and pressed to have them banned from the site.

Now, take a second to actually think about that thoroughly...

Metallica found out about the site and banned *only their own* fans.

That, to me, sounds like a pretty bad idea.

They alienated close to half a million fans. Word of that has spread and alienated half a million more. But in my opinion, it’s still not enough.

Nevertheless, this shows the blind unfaltering desperation that some record companies and certain worlds-worst-bands will be capable of in the near future as the industry continues to decline, it will get worse before it gets better.

However, this ‘decline’ is not a decline in the sales of music, simply a shift in the paradigm of acquiring it. As the sales of CDs have dwindled the numbers of people downloading have shot up in hugely disproportionate amounts. Overall then, the acquisition of music has far from suffered.

I’m deliberately avoiding publishing any kind of graph, by the way, so as to avoid this sounding and looking like an essay. I have this one, though...

Essentially what I’m saying is that the internet is quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to music since les paul hooked an acoustic guitar up to a telephone microphone and played the first ever notes of electric rock and roll. And here’s why:

In the old days, being signed as a band was the biggest thing that could possibly happen to you, and that was difficult because it had very little to do with how good you were. Granted, if you were amazing someone would have noticed and hunted you down, but the point is that it was more about who you knew, and luck, as to whether you got seen by the right people. Now, thankfully for the real talent in the industry, record companies have access to all bands through Myspace and Soundcloud and other such websites and therefore they don’t have to rely on bands they have been able to find, and can track down true musical talent. Arctic Monkeys were the first band to be internet poached, and it’s unlikely they would have been hailed as they were if it wasn’t for the internet. As well as scouting, it plays a huge part in distribution. iTunes is one of the best ways to get new music ‘out there’ as it were and it’s relatively easy to get a song or album on there.

It’s because of this boom that modern signed bands are arguably better than the bands of a previous generation, but I’ll leave that debate for another day. It also means that hQ will never get famous. We’re simply not good enough. But the day I see one of our albums in a shop, on a physical CD in HMV then I will know that we’re good enough to make me truly, genuinely happy.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if we fight evolution, we’re no better than the creationists.

The Story of Spring Street Studios

Hello, internet!

Good lord it has been a while, how are you all? I hope you had a fantastic Easter

Yes, this shows you how long ago I started writing this blog. I’ve had to change some bits from future to past tense. And so, with a whole new introductory paragraph, let me tell you the wonderful story of the birth of ProgPit Studios.

After a series of grandiose plans for my studio I eventually boiled all my needs down to:

A: A room

B: A Badass Computer

C: Auxilliary studio materials.

‘A’ was dealt with rather easily, as I also inhabit the room, so I can claim it as general living expenses.

The computer, however, was a much more interesting task. Since the majority of my university work is conducted on a Mac, I thought it would be a good investment in terms of labour saving and the ability to do more work at home to get one for myself. So now my computer desires have at least a very basic form.

Here’s what I was thinking at this point:

Now the problem with those 2 statements is that they directly contradicted each other. Apple products, by their very nature, are expensive. And I hoped that this computer would last me a while, and so therefore I had to buy a reasonably powerful one, or one that I could upgrade as and when I needed to. The latter sounded rather tempting, and I had heard about people building their own computers, and I have recently got into a habit of taking things apart and looking at how they work.

However, as a naive computer building virgin it had not struck me that one does not simply build a Mac, but in what can only be described as a flight of infinitely stubborn fancy, after being told that one does not simply build a Mac, my brain proceeded to ask...

Why not?

To which the reply I got was: ‘You just can’t’.

Hohohoo. ‘You just don’t’ might have made me question further, but the use of the word ‘can’t’ pricked up my attention summat fierce! I therefore directed the rest of my questions towards the internet and various computer knowledgy friends, and after a month of searching, I found a solution.

Basically, what a Hackintosh is (aside from a rather terrible pun) is a home built PC, which, through a long and labourious procedure can be made to run on Snow Leopard OSX, by installing the Mac operating system on the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) of a computer shortly after it is built. It then runs through the rest of its life using the Snow Leopard operating system, and to all intents and purposes, is a Macintosh computer. The appeal of this is twofold, firstly, having a home built computer makes upgrades both easier and quite possibly cheaper and secondly, because the price gap is just beautiful.

Building a Hackintosh gave me the ability to be very specific about the specs of my computer, and once I decided on the power and memory capacity of my desired unit, it turned out that an iMac with the specs that I wanted would have cost more or less £2500.

I do not have that money. I am a student.

£2500 is the price of 1000 beers.

One...

Thousand...

Beers.

Or a reasonably good car.

I will come back to this figure later...

So I made up my mind to build a Hackintosh. It would have 4-8Gb of RAM, at least 250Gb of internal memory a nice 1080p screen. Or two. This however, meant that I had to learn about computers and the building thereof. Luckily I have friends like Harry and Harry, who taught me about this whole computer building business, and how to get me a thoroughly preposterous amount of proverbial bang for my proverbial buck. So here is the shopping list that I ended up with...

Now, as I understand computers there are certain things I should be spending a bit more money on, despite my relative attitude of cheapness towards the studio at the moment. One of these things is the PSU, or power supply unit, which I have on good authority is a bad thing to suddenly go wrong. It essentially breaks up the big electricity from the mains socket into little baby electricities that run around inside your computer feeding all the other components. So it’s breaking would effectively melt the insides of the poor ol’ thing, and I can’t record Worlds Apart on a smoking pile of molten plastic and metal. So as a result, I shelled out for this badboy:

Secondly, I was told that for audio recording I needed to cram as much RAM as I could get into the computer to make it run fast and smooth even with massive amounts of audio, and due to my habit of double and triple tracking vocals and guitars, combined with my love of massive harmonies, it sounded like I was going to need a LOT. Buying RAM is an odd task, as it seems to fluctuate in price based on seasons, and for those who don’t know, RAM comes in sticks which are inserted into the motherboard of the computer. I ended up buying two 2Gb sticks of tasty, tasty RAM, making a thoroughly respectable 4Gb.

Next, I needed a graphics card. And because I don’t really have any intention of pushing the boundaries of HD gaming, I opted for a reasonably cheap low end Zotac one which will provide my eyes with ample entertainment as I record my number one debut album that makes me famous...

Hopefully.

Also, as all computers, It needed a CD/DVD drive so I bought this one!

I can't remember what type it is, but as far as I know a DVD drive is a DVD drive is a DVD drive.

Now, one of the few things I know about computers is that you need to see what you’re doing on them, so to this end, I decided to buy a nice 22” 1080p full HD screen off ebay, and somehow it only cost me £80. I have a small TV in my room which was given to me by a friend last year, and to this day I’m still working out how to connect the two together. But that is another story for another blog.

Finally, at the centre of operations, A motherboard and CPU. These were perhaps the most important choices, as I needed not only high spec components, but also components that would be compatible with running a Mac operating system. However, budget was still pressing, so I bought a mid range motherboard: and an absolutely effing beautiful i7 CPU. Originally I had a problem in that the first CPU I bought was a newer model and therefore incompatible with the motherboard, but as I got it for reasonably cheap off ebay, I might even be able to make some money by selling it on!

Oh, and I got a nice, cheap, cool looking case which is ‘Tool-free’ meaning I don’t have to break out the spanners every time I want to change something, which is handy.

So with it all ordered I bought my copy of Snow Leopard off the internet and waited for all my things to arrive...

I don’t know if you’ve ever waited for so many things to come in the mail, but seriously, the excitement was actually nearly killing me. My room is right next to the front door, so I’m really the only one who hears when the postman knocks, and that’s usually when I’m still in bed. Day after day I was woken up by the door, got dressed as fast and clumsily as possible and ran to answer the door, more often than not to be greeted with a small letter for the previous owners, but eventually I got everything.

It. Was. Well confusing.

Had I not had Harry on hand to help with the putting together of things I would have almost certainly cocked everything up. But due to a small amount of expertise on his part and a large amount of nagging on mine, everything ended up plugged together and working.

And that is Harry on the right. The girl in the chair is Sophie, a housemate who has had to put up with me gushing about this whole process since about march.

Now came the hard part.

(Hehee. Hard part.)

Because of repression of bad memories and some blind following of instructions, I can’t recall the exact procedure with which I installed Snow Leopard. Suffice to say, it was surprisingly simple and easy in the beginning, and then ironing out all the little niggles at the end made up one of the most frustrating days of my life.

If anyone is interested in Hackintoshes then I strongly recommend you look at the blogs of Tonymacx86 which is where I received all the info I needed for this project, and it explains the process by which you can turn the right computer into a Mac. However when I had finished all this, I was left with a Mac with no sound, no internet, and no applications. This is where I had to use MultiBeast.

MultiBeast is another creation of Tonymacx86 which sorts out all the little bits of your Hackintosh to make it run like a normal computer, without personalised help, however, it gets VERY confusing. Fortunately, I found personalised help in the form of a different Harry, who showed me how to get everything working.

One of the biggest shocks I had when the Hackintosh was built was the lack of internet. Looking back, I hadn’t bought any kind of wireless card or WLAN receiver thing, when building the computer, but just expected it to have wireless capability. I was WELL gutted when I found out it hadn’t. But 1 10m Ethernet cable later, I was online, and hopefully, the cable internet will prove to be more stable than wireless anyway.

In terms of audio hardware and software, I bought an Alesis io2 Audio Interface off ebay for £60, and that has catered to all of my input needs. It allows me to independently connect 2 inputs (Jack or XLR) to my computer via a USB port and control the input gain of each. It has phantom power for condenser microphones in input 1 and digital and MIDI input and output ports so everything is catered for.

The MIDI controllers are my beloved Axiom pro 61 MIDI keyboard and a roland DD55 MIDI drum kit I have had lying around for a while. It needs fixing, and parts are currently on their way via some internet transactions, so that should be working before long. The computer’s main audio is patched into my old stereo with some nice speakers on which give me good sound quality and a nice big bass sound.

All the software I use so far has been downloaded, and cracked by various sources, because after spending the money on the computer, I decided to treat myself by saving on it. I record on Logic Pro 9 and use Absynth, Massive, and Battery for most of my synth sounds. Guitar Rig 4 and Superior Drummer have already featured on my vlog, which if you haven’t already seen, you should give it a quick look over.

http://www.youtube.com/user/DrBlowThingsUp

Overall, the full price of the studio was around £800. That means I saved just less than £2000 pounds from building the Hackintosh, so to all who were involved, the people who advised me via the internet on what to get, or how to put it together, thankyou so much.

On that note, it’s getting late, and I have to be up early to listen for the postman, so I’ll see you all soon!

Bye!

xxx

Our house, in the middle of our street...

Well, hello there peeps, it's been a while again! I'm currently in the middle of writing 4 separate blogs, so do forgive the delay. Although I suppose if you’re actually reading this, there’s 3 blogs left to put up. It’s like the wussiest version of busy ever.
Well, as I said a while ago I moved into my lovely new abode on the 1st of July. Since my family have always lived in the same house before now I’ve never really had the pleasure of moving into my own lil house. Granted, it’s not entirely mine, (I’m sharing with 6 mates) but it’s nevertheless a step in an exciting new direction.Since I knew I would have my own room I have had the plan to turn it into a small studio, in which I will record my first album Into the Sun with my band hQ (unfinished blog number 1). All that is left to complete the studio part is the computer which I’m building myself! (unfinished blog number 2).
So, without further ado, allow me to introduce my new living space! It’s still a work in progress, though, and I have a LOT more posters to put up...

The Wall of Progressive Inspiration!
Desk (Yum, chippy remains...)Progpit studios! (construction pending.) It’s also probably worth mentioning that it’s on a really cool antique dresser type thing that I got with the room. There was a not on it asking me not to damage it, so there’s a little sheet under all the heavy things. I’m also pretty proud of the fact that the dresser opens up into my guitar rig, but seeing as pieces of it are here and some pieces are at home and/or broken, I’ll show you some other time. This is the part I’m most proud of, all the bits seemed to fit together seamlessly but I won’t bore you with the finer details. Maybe it’ll give you an excuse to come visit!Epic bed! It’s probably worth mentioning that I didn’t think the sheets would be as shiny as they turned out to be when I bought them, and it seems to add a slightly Peter Stringfellow quality to the room. It’s not THAT bad a turnout. I might have to buy a tigerskin rug to go with it...And this is my workshop for now. Although procrastination is crippling most of my projects, I’m rebuilding a guitar and cutting down some cymbals to make a myriad selection of bell chimes and splashes. I might even try and spiral one to make one of these beauties...And with that I bid you all adieu, until i get the pictures of the new hQ gear. (unfinished blog 3).

Bye guys!

http://twitter.com/drblowthingsup

Let's Head Into The Bright Lights Again...

Hello, people I like!
Meet some other people I like...
Tom Lancaster (Drums)Scott Cawley (Bass)This is my band hQ. We've been playing our brand of bluesy rock and roll for about 3 years and we're planning our historic first album, and dear lord, it's so very complicated.We started writing our own songs about 2 years ago so songwise, we're all sorted for material. But I want our release to be as professional as possible, given our budget which is essentially whatever we can get out hands on.
We have been pooling our money from the last few gigs and built ourselves a fantastic PA system which we tried out at the last gig at the Barnstormers in Horwich and that turned out as one of our best gigs ever. The actual PA came together surprisingly cheaply and quickly, and this is how we managed it...

----doo doo doo dooo----

(That's dreamy flashback music, to you and me...)

About a month ago we decided after a string of techincal hitches and trouble with levels to finally make that historic switch from amps to a full PA system. We tried borrowing a PA system for our first gig a while ago, but due to us not having a clue how to work it everything went a bit tits up and we ended up playing through just the amps for the rest of the gig.

We had a budget of about £450 pounds to build a full PA. And here is how we spent it...
(Cue A-Team like building montage...)
This is some of the hQ garage.
hQ Hq, if you like.
First of all, we made a list of things we needed which looked basically like this:

. Big speakers!
. Mixing desk
. Power amp
. Leads and connecty bits

Not so hard you might imagine. However, for a combination of reasons involving price and my love of building and messing with things we thought we would have a go at building the speakers ourselves.

It is at this point that I should mention Steven Cawley, Father of the hQ bassist, Scott, and our general financial saviour.
He found some 15” woofers on Ebay for around £30-40 pounds and decided to invest in them on our behalf. We paid him for them using money from the hQ budget and the next day he jetted off to pick them up for us. When he arrived in Nottingham to pick up the speakers the seller proposed that we could have an extra set of ridiculously powerful speakers if he could have a lift to a place in Manchester. It turns out that he had been trying to buy a car part off someone who was having trouble with communication, so Steve agreed, and drove him all the way back to Manchester, where he found out that the car part deal had fallen through.

On the way back the seller mentioned another car part seller that he could pick his item up from, if he could get there, but it transpired it couldn’t be picked up until the next day. But Steve decided to offer a lift from Nottingham to Manchester again, as he felt like he hadn’t upheld his end of the deal after the first journey.

So the next day he got a call from the guy asking if it was still ok for him to have a lift, so Steve drove all the way back down to Nottingham, to Manchester, back to Nottingham to help this guy out. Now, that’s just magic, isn’t it? Makes you feel nearly as happy as this does...A lick of paint through the new wooden stencil and...Speakers number 1
Speakers number 2
But wait... It gets better.

In thanks, the seller of the speakers brought out a large square case containing a fantastic mixing desk, and gave it to us in thanks for our trouble. We had just acquired around £750 pounds of hardware for about £50.Now, the moral of this story is, in the words of Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves:

Right. All we had left to purchase was a power amplifier, and we knew a guy who was in charge of a lot of karaoke stuff and was possibly selling one. Short story shorter, we bought it for around £100 and it was ACE.The final bit of the checklist involved a trip to the electronics shop Maplins. From whom we have bought so much stuff we’re considering asking them to sponsor us. As the speakers, power amp, and mixing desk all had a different input method we spent about £50 on mono jack, stereo jack, and XLR adaptors and leads, and 2 large, intimidating speakon cables.
Which lead to this most beautiful of monsters, the homemade Public Address system. (Yeah, I had to google that.)You may also have noticed that we sprayed the logo on the front of the speakers. You really can’t imagine how satisfying that is. We also have an old rolling blind which we’re going to spray hQ on and use as a backdrop for the next gig on the 30th of July, and we’re going to do the unspeakably vain thing, and paint hQ on the front of Tom’s kick drum head. Cliché POWER!

So, hopefully, for the next gig the whole setup will be complete and we will have a rockin’ stage setup. I cannae wait!
In addition, since I wrote the first draft of this blog, it has got better. Today we added 8 lights and 2 huge pole things to put them on, for just £30. We rewired the plugs to go to a switch for the top 4 lights, to create 3 spotlights (one each, woo!) and one will eventually have a UV bulb, just to add an extra tasty layer of awesome cake.The bottom 4 were wired to go in sequence or flash to music, so photos don't quite portray the extremity of the deliciousness.We're adding this to our current lighting rig, which consisted of these:So we're looking forward to our gig this friday at the Red Lion in Blackrod. Pop down if you're anywhere near the area!
We should be painting the backdrop tonight as well, so keep an eye out for the blog about that!
Also, I'm ordering the parts of my new computer on monday, so an album should be well underway sometime in the next month which, if all goes well, should be video blogged, Frost* Report stylee!I will talk to you soon, guys! I'm in a thoroughly fantastic mood now!
xxx