The Official Rob Rideout Christmas Blog!

Hello from back in little-old Bolton!

Well, there is big news on the Christmas front, so I’m going to start from the beginning. I finished the Christmas song! Jenky Aid is now out, advertised in a very minimal way and up for grabs. It even got a small amount of radio airtime on RadioHUDD, courtesy of Mr Dean Morris and Adam Findley. I’ve never been on the radio before...

It’s Proper Exciting.

But now that project is off, all I need to do now is see how it goes. And due to an unexpected and VERY welcome intrusion by the good sir Marti March it’s now looking as though it could raise a reasonably be-proud-of-myself amount of money for the Make A Wish Foundation.
Basically, upon hearing I was doing a bit of charity work, he was eager to jump on board, because a part of his course requires him raising at least £50 for charity. So I let him use me as a medium through which he can get his work done, and it turns out it’s making a massive difference in the number I’ve sold! Because it’s for his course, he’s flogging one to pretty much every member of his family, and so are all the other people in his group, including putting a fiver in each! So this has been a boon to my project meaning it’s going to raise a bare minimum of £50 which is much more than I expected, and recent news suggests £100 is easily within reach. So today in celebration I bought myself a sausage roll.
So today, Monday the 14th of December my single is officially out for public purchase. I’m printing out the low budget coversheets as we speak. (Well, as you read. Unless you’re reading this from some time in the future in which case robots have probably taken over the world, and I have long forgotten my toiling.)

Here’s the sleeve for it:

And for those who are hard of sight, or if I just uploaded it badly here’s the notes at the bottom:

“This whole record was fantastic to work on, and my whole-hearted thanks go out to all involved, all the singers, the people who gave me ideas and the people who were unable to participate due to illness or other misfortune.
All proceeds from the sale of this single are going straight to the ‘Make A Wish Foundation in the hope that we can help others to have an equally rockin’ festive season!
Thanks, also to the people at uni for letting me persistently borrow their equipment and rooms and helping me during times of epic computer meltdown! For more details of the recording process and other musicy things please visit http://www.robrideoutsprogblog.blogspot.com/
I Genuinely hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a positively spiffing new year.
Jenkinson A is on a Boat!
Copyright 2009 Rob Rideout & Jenkinson A & Captain Fantastic & his Epic Robot Army”

If anyone outside of Huddersfield wants a copy I won’t be able to charge you for it, because I lack the technical prowess to set up a Paypal thing. So if you email me I’ll send you the MP3 and in return you must promise to be very nice. And give a pound to a charity at some point. :P pinky swear!
Also today I finished all my uni coursework until after Christmas, and consequently rewarded myself with a kinder egg. The toy was admittedly disappointing as there was no assembly required but my general feeling of elation negated that as I chomped happily upon the egg itself. Fantarstic.

I have a feeling, my friends that the next blog will be uploaded sometime next decade, but thankfully that isn’t long off! Gawd il be twenty soon. I can smell mortgage...

Merry Christmas, and a Happy new year!
Prog bless us. Every one.

Rock and Roll and Ebay.

In the words of the late great Geoffrey Chaucer, all good things must come to an end. And my Christmas project is in deep danger of coming to an end. God knows when this is finished I might have to do some actual university work. It’s all recorded, mixed, mastered, signed and sealed all that remains is to deliver it to Dean for his radio show next Monday and it’s gonna hit the airwaves harder than a drunk Scotsman. I found out the other day that it’s possible to borrow a HD video recorder from the tech room, so depending on the state of my actual coursework at the outset of this week I might make a start on the video!

I’m starting to get that odd feeling of Stockholm Syndrome with this song now in that I keep tweaking the mix. Things never really seem to be final anymore but I realised I should really stop messing with things after I tried putting a vocoder on the master track. This failed to give me any kind of increase in sound quality other than to make the record playable on some kind of dalek radio, I don’t even know what possessed me to think that would be a good idea. There was a strange insight into my musical world the other day with the release of this (http://the-doncastrian.tumblr.com/post/271144157) from Dean. It’s essentially his blog explaining this whole process from the point of view of someone who’s never been in the studio before. It’s quite refreshing to see someone so excited by all the knobs and buttons. All the people who recorded their voices on this record were uniformly amazed at the faders that moved themselves. It never ceases to make me chuckle.

And now onto a totally new uncharted piece of life I have moved into. Some things you always hear about as both good and dangerous. It’s apparently highly addictive and I can see why because it’s such a rush when you finally get what you want out of it. Don’t worry kids, I’m not on drugs. I’m talking about that superbly stunning stack of stuff that is the sultry world of Ebay. Not least because you can own something new without having to go to any kind of shop, or even move. Not even because it’s so fantastically cheap. But because of the clever use of the word ‘win’. Now in my understanding of shopping buying something has always been something of a mundane activity, but once you have bought something, it delights in informing you that you have ‘won’ it. Which instantly leads you to think: ‘won? Me? Fantastic! ... Let’s play again!’ which is a bad road to go down. So I now own a thoroughly awesome J rock jacket which is currently hurtling through the air to find me. Sensational. On a rather final note, I have contacted the lovely people at the Make A Wish Foundation about making the donation so there’s no going back now. I just made the little sleeve I intend to provide the CD in so the admin is now dangerously close to the ‘all done’ stage. I’m going to miss this when it’s gone.

Here’s a little preview of what the sleeve will look like:

(I know you can't read it, il put a better version up once it's finalised and out there to purchase.)

And I intend to add a little design on the front, of which I will ask the lovely Miss Sarah Lowe, as her artistic skills far surpass my own. I wonder how good she is at drawing reindeer...

Bye, all!

The Nearly-done Stage!

Well HI!

Good news, prog fans! Well. More Christmas fans.
First of all on the agenda, all the vocals are done! And you all know what that means...

Thar be a ticking afoot!
Ah that’s better... but wait... there’s another box to tick! And it’s a biggun!

So that’s done now. And although it was stressful, time consuming and ultimately tiring it was also thoroughly marvellous. i got to know a few people around Jenkinson a bit better, found out that some people are fantarrrstic singers, and had an all round awesome time. This is without a shadow of a doubt the best thing I’ve done since being at Uni. I can’t stop listening to it back now and it I chuckle every time; it makes me feel like this:
Also, in the age old tradition of the Christmas single, I needed something else on here. For a while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, it just didn’t have enough Christmas flavour. And today after hunting high and low I found it. Sleigh bells! So now with them on the track it’s sounding entirely festive! Ooh I could have a bit o’ mince pie right about now.

So that’s all the instruments recorded, all the vocals recorded and everything is nearly mixed. I thought id struggle to meet the deadline, but I should be finished by the end of this week! What could I possibly do with the time spare...

Did someone say ‘music video’? I’ll ask who’s prepared to do one. :D

So now I’m nearly done it might be a good time to have an emotional montage of photos from the studio. Cue the emotional and inspirational music!

Ah. Good times we had by all.

And you know what? I have thoroughly earned this sausage roll.
Now what’s left to do...
Well, I’ve been trying to mix it as I go along, so I don’t have to mess about with it too much and as far as I can tell it’s been quite good, so I shouldn’t have to spend TOO long on that and it sounds pretty good now. So it’s just a matter of very fine tuning, I’m so EXCITED! Meanwhile, in another panel of my Christmas comic book, Rob toils away upon his guitar...

Yep, I got started. I started with stripping off all the tape and taking some hardware off. In short I did everything that was possible without tools. The stripes were a bit stubborn as they’d been there for a while, and decided out of spite to coat most of the surface of my guitar in what can only be described as a traumatic post-adhesive sticky mess. So at the moment I’m in the admittedly dull process of setting upon that with some polish to get it off my precious fretboard. I’m not going to bother taking it off the main body, as I’m planning to sand that down. So logically the next step is to get me some tools so I can actually do something interesting.

Finally, my new band, Cartoon Explosion, has got our first gig on the 17th at Livingstone’s in the Hudd, and it’s going to be awesome. Especially for me, as it’s my drumming debut! I love drums, and usually end up playing guitar or singing in all my other bands, so this will be a very welcome change. It’s a very accepted change of style too, so I’m going to get on writing some more stuff for them which will be a nice change as its more of a rock band so I won’t be able to use my usual 13/8 widdly widdly crazy cacophony of guitars every other bar. Hmm. Power chords anyone?

Bye guys!

xxx

The Good Bit

Thursday...
I had been dreading this for quite some time. Yesterday I went round with a little piece of paper with times on it, and got people to tell me when they could get in to do some singing, as I had 12 hours of studio time booked. It was foolish to believe I could do it all in one day, but I was a man with on a quest, and I vowed to do my best! And so, the day began quite badly, as someone else really needed the studio so I cancelled my first 3 hours of recording because I’m lovely. After that everything fell into place beautifully, short of a couple of people not turning up. I was pleasantly surprised at the tunefulness of some people, and pleasantly amused at the tunelessness of others. It was a good day.

So 3 hours of mixing later I have a reasonably nice low-fi recording on my hands, short of a few vocal tracks, which I plan to ship in next week of the people who couldn’t get in today for reasons either time or germ related, and then I’ll have everything done. Which of gonna be positively one of my best ticking-off moments off the project so far. Can’t wait for the blog of being done!

On a side note, which may in the future become a big-fat-in-the-middle note, I have embarked on researching for a new project! I am planning to completely refinish and remodel one of my old guitars. I tried spicing it up about this time last year but wasn’t very into it, and did most of the work with electrical tape... but this im going to sand it down, repaint and rewire it an hopefully discover things about guitars along the way. In short, I’m just going to ‘man’ around with it for a while. Here’s how it looked when I bought it...

And heres how it looks now... (I suddenly realised the other day that it looks rather like it’s sponsored by Newcastle, hmm?)
So, my first order of business, after removing the strings is to take away all the tape, and try and get off the sticky marks left on the fretboard, as in a vain attempt to learn the notes on the guitar, I used tape to colour all the sharps/flats black. It didn’t work, because after about a week of playing the black rubbed off and left them as what I imagine is the colour of disappointment.

So here goes!

Any cool Ideas or advice will be well recieved :D

Peace out my prog flavoured amigos!

The lost weekend

Hullo Peeps! Today I will be portraying my emotions using Warburton’s Milk Roll.

First of all, I have a week off this week! So I’m hoping to get a lot of the vocals done by the end of the week, with today and Thursday being my main days in the studio. But not the huge studio, not anymore, since I had another epic cock-up involving a disagreement betwixt pro tools and logic, and to understand this I’ll have to start about a week ago...

*cue wiggly memory effect and spacey wholetone music*

Before I recorded Ollie and Frasers vocal part last week I moved my project from the tiny EMS studio seen in the video of me and dean into a huge proper studio with 2 live rooms, mucho expensive mics and complicated awesome hardware. And best of all... Pro tools! This posed the problem of getting all my files off Logic in one room, with a different setup, and transferring them painstakingly into a different studio, a different setup, and different software. After about 3 hours of arsing about with exporting and importing and renaming I managed to get everything up and running, and after a bit of messing about with Dave the Uncooperative Preamp, I managed to get my first set of vocals recorded.

This made me happy.

For a while me and pro tools got on like a house on fire, it was bliss, and life was simple. But then the honeymoon period ended. And Pro tools started disappearing without explanation for long periods of time at night and came back with other peoples lipstick on the collar. It also cut all my tracks into tiny, TINY pieces for some reason, making everything nearly impossible to edit.
This made me sad.
So we had an enormous fallout and I took my project and left it. It wasn’t happy, because it started to fix itself just as I was about to leave, but it was too late, and I didn’t trust it anymore. Here’s a small breakdown of what happened:

Pro tools:- “Oh, rob., where will I go, what will I do?”
Me:- “Frankly, Pro tools, I don’t give a damn.”

So today I spent my day clearing up after my lost weekend. Taking another 3 hours to transfer every file back to my trusty EMS studio and begging Logic to take me back. Eventually I managed it, and I am looking forward to a long and happy relationship with Logic now.

So, now we’re all caught up, and I can continue as normal. In half an hour I’ll be meeting the beautiful Miss Sophie Harvey to record some more vocals and I might even finally get Dean’s vocals recorded after that, so I’ll check in tomorrow and let you know how it goes!

Bolognaise tonight. Win. :)

xxx

Prelude and Rant. Opus 1.

A prelude to today’s blog...

Why recording is so frustrating:

1. In a line of 8 or 9 connections from microphone to computer any can go wrong, and if one of them goes wrong it’s frequently impossible to tell which, leading to a very lengthy investigation as you go through every possible permutation of those 8 or 9 things.

2. Sometimes these things go wrong for no particular reason, which aside from making the problem even harder to trace, also happens to the user at the most inconvenient possible time. This is known as Dave’s law.

3. These things that go wrong randomly cannot always be fixed, as there is not always a reason for the fault, leading to the inevitable ‘off and on’ again technique used by all good producers and IT department staff, to be the least helpful, but most effective solution to any given problem.

4. IT department staff know this, and refuse to do anything other than turn everything off and on again, even if there is a quicker, more logical, and more efficient way to solve the problem.

5. Sometimes the problem persists and the computer requires a ‘cool-down’ period of several hours before you can do anything. This also eliminates IT help, because all they do is ‘off-n-on’ everything, and this is already proven to not work

6. Sometimes... you have just forgotten to plug something in properly.

And now, ladies and gentlemen...

The blog.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recording is so frustrating.

I had every intention of getting a lot done today and it seems as though the mac and all attached software and hardware were having a right good larf making it as difficult for me as humanly (or computerly) possible. I also ended up wasting several hours of poor old Dean’s time as well as he watched me potter around the studio ranting about how the preamp was called Dave and was not cooperating. I imagine it was a fairly boring time for him, although it would seem he didn’t mind informing twitter of my massive studio fail:

'technology is refusing to cooperate'. Damn right.

I feel so exposed...
But we never did get his vocals recorded.

I was later joined by the erstwhile Messers Baker and Tarbet to record their epic bono line of ‘well tonight thank god it’s them, instead of youuuuuu!!!’ which seemed to be more about volume than pitch or tone, but it’s all in the spirit of fun and it has some amusing giggling on it as the vocal part fades away, but nothing quite like when I accidentally recorded a soundcheck and now have a small MP3 file of Ollie thinking of as many words for boobs as there can possibly be. And chuckling. Marvellous.

Blogger will apparently not let me upload this sound clip either. How thoroughly disappointing. Bad blogger. *Squirts with water*.

Anyway, with that done and the guitars nearly in the bag, the end is truly in sight! By the end of tomorrow I should have finished all the instrumental parts and just have to focus on the beautiful voices of the Jenkinson A Conglomerate and the long dark soulless void of the mixing stage... god help me.

Goodnight world!

Something I should have done a long time ago...

Hi Guys!

And gals I suppose to be politically correct.

Gawdddd. What a week. Spent most of it trying to put up my last blog, and to be honest most of that’s old news by now. Many things have happened since then, both in the production of Jenky aid and in general. The most notable event being seeing a gig in Cardiff which cost me just over a hundred pounds on train fare. The gig was only a tenner as well; I feel like I have just been wallet raped by transpennine express. It was worth it, though as I got to see the best band ever and shook the hand of my idol Mr Godfrey, along with meeting some friends I’ve never actually seen in person before.

Anyway, as they say, to business.

Firstly, I have a couple of ticks to make. I’m happy to say I have recorded everything but the guitars onto audio now, and written a bassline. Got my good friend Mr Oliver Baker to lay it down and the beautiful man nailed everything in 1 take. I love working with talented people. So that’s 2 ticks there.

Secondly, I have sorted everything out for the church! 30th of November, 10 days before the release of the final thing, which means I’ll have only a couple of days to mix it all in, so I’m hoping to get the individual vocal recordings done MUCH sooner to allow myself what I have come to know as ‘fail time’ because I never end projects like this without losing some very important file right at the end. Fail time gives you time to rectify this although it shouldn’t happen this time because I think I’m keeping on track with everything. I even bought a pen drive to keep all the files on. I’m so responsible. Yayer. I’d upload a video of me doing a little dance but blogger might try and shove it up my nose again, and I’ll lose another week, so feel free to use your imagination. Maybe this will get you started:

And here’s the list with the new tick, along with the tick for making more lists as I’m being organised for my course now. Good times.

So all that’s left to do is record my legion of guitars and army of nutters that is Jenkinson A; and mix it all together. Then the actual song is done, and I just need to get it on the internet, for which I will require the services of Dr Ben Little from flat 8. Or maybe 7. I can never tell. Either way, he does websites and techy things, so he'll be able to help me make this a download :)

Ooh, also. As a thing. Some people have told me they quite like reading this blog. Woo! So I’d just like you to know that your time is not wasted in vain, I appreciate it very much, and I deeply love you all. As does Funk Snail.

I look forward to next time! Bye!

the great rap-missing ballsup.

Well hello there! I didn’t hear you come in...

firstly and most importantly... blogger has let me down. in a BIG way. i haven t posteed anything for about 4 days because blogger took 3 days to upload a video i wanted to use, then decided i couldnt. so im very sorry about a lack of amusing video. it was just me spinning around on a chair really, but it made such an excellent point. anyway...

Straight to the point, I ballsed up. Plainly and simply just punched myself in the face. Listening back to the song today when I noticed something was missing, and after some inspection realised I missed out a whole section.

Yes, a huge whopping 10 bars containing a tiny guitar solo, and a rap. Couldn’t be doing without it really, so I spent an inordinate amount of time today and yesterday sorting that out, and as I had already bounced everything to audio I had to go back to the midi and write in some lovely new chords on strings and piano, bounce them to disk and integrate them with the new audio files, which turned out rather nicely, although there is a very slight but irritatingly noticeable change in volume due to the fact that logic 9 wants to normalise my entire life. For people who don’t know what that means it’s when the programme attempts to make everything you record AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE because these days there seems to be a competition going on in the pop world as to who can make the LOUDEST CD. But now, hopefully that’s dusted. Managed to cut and paste the drum parts from the audio because, let’s face it, any drum line sounds very much like another. Whew. That’s my mistake fixed and my rant over.

Hopefully this time it will stay done. So now I turned my attention to making it Christmassy! So I messed around with some lovely bells and recorded a few lines. Still choosing which one I like better but I think i found it after singing along loudly in the studio :D

And finally, I turn my attention to my big list. Today the last vocal part was taken. Huzzah! This means that the vocals are good to go! And not only is that on my list... it’s one of the MEGA BOXES! I’m going to enjoy this ticking...

Yaaaay. Good stuff. Just need to get down to recording. The room is proving difficult to book, but I have a couple of times set aside for it so I’m looking forward to getting my church on.
PS. On an unrelated, but equally awesome note, I made armour out of pizza boxes. I'm now officially a megazord.

'til next time!

The Great Concert Hall Mishap... and Unmishap. todays blog, up today!

Evening peoples!

Excitingly, after a good 2 hour session of exporting as audio and bouncing and importing again, the actual track is starting to properly take shape. It’s only a shadow of what it’s going to be, but it inspires a great amount of pride nonetheless. It’s like seeing a rock n roll ultrasound :) Included in the audio bounces were the mass of drum tracks that I managed to get finished off last week. Although I did a few desperate tweaks before I finalised it all and added some yummy fills, so now that’s the drums recorded! Let’s go over to the board...

Ding, ding, ding! Nice work, me.

With my project developing lovingly, I turned my attention to the adminny stuff and asked one of my tutors if I could book out the concert hall for the choir recording later on, and a very bad thing happened, followed immediately by a very, VERY good one. Apparently, due to the concert hall’s doubling as a lecture theatre, it’s very rarely free, so I’d have to choose a really pain-in-tharse time, which made me look like this:

I was told, however, that there is a room big enough, and maybe even better for the recording that is frequently available; any guesses? Anyone? No?

It’s only the ENTIRE CHURCH.

Apparently st. Pauls hall has been properly redone as a concert hall, with a mixing booth at the back and everything, and it’s still a church. Still a massive echoey awesome church. So I’ll be recording the choir of hoodlums in there, which when you think about it, is rather apt. As it is a choir, after all. And it is a Christmas song. I love Huddersfield.

There has been a slight tiny snag on this, though. It seems as though no one seems to know how one goes about booking out the church. It’s like in a final fantasy game where you end up having to talk to everyone a million times, because all they do is tell you to talk to someone else. A tutor referred me to another tutor, who referred me to another, who referred me to the scary tech people, who told me in a deeply unhelpful way that I’d have to talk to the people in charge of the church. Now, unless he meant the Pope, or God, I’m stuck. I’ll have another root around tomorrow.

On an equally musical note, I have now started recording ‘I Wanna Be a Pirate’, and I’m thinking about releasing the MP3 of that at the same time as Jenky Aid, so watch this space, buccaneer lovers!

See you soon! xxx

The week that wasn't. mondays post... up on tuesday.

Hullo readers! :D

It has been a WHILE since my last entry so I’ll have to play catchup for a while until i manage to get to what i did today, fortunately for the impatient amongst you; the rest of last week was painfully slow, compared to how productively it started. In the interest of fairness to all other forces involved, it was mainly my fault that much didn’t get done after that, due to a generally good time being had in the flat and a positive wad of good stuff on and around the television. As you may have seen I finished the piano part and last week I bounced that all to audio, which means that that’s done and dusted and I don’t have to touch that now until the mixy-mixing stage.

So that’s 2 Piano Lines and a very minimal String line finished. Holla! That’s another crossout! Also I bought potatoes and decided to make it a download, rather than a CD to cut expenses and make it easier to get, so I can cross those off too! Let’s go over to the chart...

As I was feeling so very ahead of myself at the end of last week I decided to get started on what I had scheduled for this week, which proved nothing other than the fact that I am useless at following schedules, even when I make them myself :S, although I did get a massively satisfying chunk of this week’s work done in the aftermath of last weeks work-void. So looking back on the timetable I made:

It should now look something more like this:

Now you add a few lines...

Voila! Frank Zappa. Prog is truly everywhere.

Due to this mass of overlapping and cunningly hidden moustaches I have now programmed all of the drums, completely doing away with the rubbish ones I did on the guide tracks with a familiar ‘what was I thinking?’ fervour. Made a drum line? Programmed a drum line? Let’s see if it’s on the chart... Woo! More crossing out. I really should have instituted some kind of gold stars system.
So that’s all the catch-upping done, with a bit of drumming on the side for good measure. I was pleasantly surprised this week to find that the studio I booked was the very same one me and Dean had filmed in a previous blog, which gave me one of those lovely familiar homey feelings, and for old time’s sake I decided to invite Dean to join me to witness some more of the chaos that this project is turning into. Mind you, it’s the good kind of chaos, like falling out of a helicopter into the playboy mansion.

((//picture censored//))

(dont worry, that was a joke, im not trying to blog porn.)

Although after a while the devil took over and I picked up my trusty guitar and had a lovely noodle over the track. I have a feeling it’s not going to be in the final mix, but who knows, I might release bonus tracks featuring unnecessarily LARGE solos. This did give me insight into the lead guitar part for the end, though and after messing around with the little guitar line over the last chorus I decided to harmonise it Queen style. Which meant working out a four part harmony line and playing them all in. I won’t lie, it sounded ace. I’m seriously considering whacking it in, as I had an epiphany at the end of today’s session and decided to keep the ridiculously epic huge ending section with the fabled MS patch and a brilliant sample I found called MIGHTY ORGAN! This is gonna be so loud it’s going to shake the actual concept of Christmas.

Peace!