so many things....

good arfternoon Ladies and Gentlesirs!

I come to you this instalment from a fervent bubble of ennui at the back of a composition 1 lecture. I haven’t posted anything on here for a while, due to a mass exodus of effort consisting mostly of attempts to get work in on time for Uni. Shortly before Christmas I made a list of my projects for this year, so here’s my 2010, part 1 itinerary:

2 Demo EP's for Cartoon Explosion and nameless prog band. I might call it MetroGnome.

HQ album

work on my workshop guitar (see list below)

and get my uni work done.

I wont bore you with the details of the latter, im not one for complaining about uni work via a blog. Here's the rundown of the things I must do with my workshop guitar!

Yeah, many a thing to do...

This Thursday, however, Cartoon Explosion has booked out studio time to record our songs. The main twist to this tale is that we haven’t technically written them yet. We have songs, but if I am permitted to let them speak for themselves the working titles for the 2 finished songs are ‘Sumptuous Willy’ and the hauntingly beautiful ‘Tears On My Cock’.

No, there's no picture to illustrate that.

Obviously the lyrics aren’t finished yet, and many of the solos aren’t written but my opinion for the moment is on a very basic demo we want to capture the real soul of the messaroundy band that we are at heart, as we are slowly becoming squashed into the box that far too many bands feel the need to constrain themselves within, which is that of the ‘serious band’.

And yes... that may mean we will have to change the names. Of both the songs, and the band. But dammit, Me and Ollie will fight for our rights to keep that name. I don’t feel a band should be forced to be serious. Just do what you want and let the public decide whether to take you seriously. As this bunch of rapscallions showed us not too long ago...

On a slightly contradictory note... we were playing around last week with Gay Bar by Electric Six and came up with a smug jazz cover, called Wine Bar whose lyrics were cobbled together amazingly by Mr Harry Doodson. A short preview is as follows...

Girl,
I wanna take you to a wine bar.
I wanna take you to a wine bar.
I wanna take you to a wine bar, wine bar, wine bar

Let’s have a white.
A chardonnay white....

And so on. :D

I may or may not post the entire song some other time. I might even record it one day :)

Also, in ProgBlog news this week, I typed my name into google images and the first thing that comes up is a picture from my blog! Well done, all. I feel just a LITTLE bit famous. Though these days it seems like an inherently vain act to google one’s own name. I don’t know why.

But I have a week off next week, and though that screams ‘work’ and ‘revision’ to some, to me it simply screams ‘Prog!’ so maybe I’ll make a start on Worlds Apart. Most probably by seeing how much I can do with MIDI, without playing them in because a lot of the solos are at a Jem Godfrey level of insanity befitting a prog odyssey and my weedy fingers cannot keep up. I almost get the feeling that guy TRIED to set his fingers on fire. He looks a tad young... oh well.

Finally, 1 last plug. If you have never heard of audiosurf, for the love of god look for it on youtube or something it’s one of the greatest ideas of all time. ;)

Ooh, and a big hello for all of you from Funk Snail Bye guys! I’ll try and leave less of a gap between this and the next one. This gap was caused partially by a massive 2 day computer fail.

Oh well, see on the flipside, motherflippers!

xxx

The Rob Rideout ProgPit Constuction Blog vol.1

Well, hello there!

It’s a new year, a new decade, and now that Jenky Aid is done, thar be new projects to get on to. Not least those of the mountain of actual university work I’m supposed to do this term. But as a start to the new year goes, the gig my band, HQ played last night was proper bo. We got one of Tom’s parents’ friends to do guest guitar on Johnny B Goode and Purple Haze. The man is almost definitely a blues genius. We polished of the evening of several arrangements of auld lang syne ranging from a punk rock one to a nice reggae rendition which was my personal favourite.
But as good news goes, this next nugget is up there.

A couple of weeks before the end of term, I sorted out my living arrangements for my next year. It’s a fantastically lovely 7 bedroome house on an ol’ school cobbled road, with 6 of the awesomest people ever. Proper looking forward to it, but that’s not even the best bit...

After seeing my room for the first time I immediately decided that I would be turning my room into a bit of a home studio, so over the last few weeks I have been wondering about what exactly I need to buy. Essentially I’m planning on an Imac, a reasonably large MIDI keyboard, some adequately badass speakers and maybe a little DI box or something like that for if I want to record guitars. Well after posing the burning question of ‘What shall I get’ to the Frost* Forum community I got some fantastic advice of the dudes there which definitely helped to shape the mental image of the finished product, and then something wonderful happened. Jem Godfrey, Keyboardist and songwriter for Frost* has recently been tweeting about how he was moving house and dismantling his old studio; and I thought seeing as how some things would be thrown away, I might ask if I can just nab them before they get to the skip so I can use them in my evil plans. And it turns out that If I can get down to london before the 4th, I can get this: for free, and this: for just £100! It makes me so very, very happy! This is possibly the best opportunity ever. It makes me feel like this: (i would like to point out that in real life that jacket is a nice manly red... but this camera apparently disagrees.)

I expect I’ll get the majority of the money towards the Imac for my birthday and will buy the monitor speakers over a great deal of saving up. But as for now, that is all the news about the Rob Rideout ProgPit. I’m still settling on the name to be honest...

Peace out, and enjoy the new decade! (Apparently we’re in the ‘Teenies’ now)
xxx