First rock'n'roll photo.

If you're wondering, this is me during a rehersal in 2002. The only picture I really have at present, though the fact you're reading this means I've learnt how to post pictures! I will post suitable photos as I go. We've just got broadband, so let me know if a photo adds too much to your waiting time if you use dial-up.

Buff's Black Diamond Bar - 13 Jan '06

The Negotiators played at Buff’s Bar again last night, Friday the 13th. Just after a full moon. With a drummer who we’ve never played with before as a band. On the same night as the Schutzenfest (a big Adelaide german culture, sporting (shooting) and drinking festival, very popular). Not a big crowd. Not a big pub. Great show.

Played with Chris on drums, filling in for Sox who is incapacitated for a while. Steve knew Chris. He and Nancy jammed a bit with Chris on Monday evening. Terry and I first met him 45 min before we started. Nice guy. He did pretty good, it being a four set four hour gig with a few songs he’d never heard before. Engaged well with the music and the band on stage.

Playing with different musicians is a good experience for me and, I presume, all musicians and singers. It forces a degree of reflexivity on the playing, and exposes the articulation of a band’s groupthink – something of which we’re normally unaware. Thus, a level of sponteneity. And that is further encouraged (as long as the chemistry is there, which it was last night) by a level of reduced expectation – an expectation and, sometimes, an embracing of difference and error.

Not a large crowd, maybe a dozen or so locals for most of the evening (occasionally more), and half a dozen or so of our faithful few – who would probably have a very interesting perspective on sounds, faults and extensions every gig, every musician. I know that there were several locals and a few travellers who came in and/or stayed significantly longer than usual. I think Friday nights aren’t the biggest times of the week at Buff’s (or, the Port in general), especially with a start time of 7.30 pm. I haven’t heard one person complain, however, about the audience or its size. For once, the truth of its irrelevancy to how much one can derive from a gig (as opposed to what can be derived) has been demonstrated.

Tempos were mixed up a bit, need to learn a vocabulary (‘very slow’ through ‘moderate’ to ‘very quick’) so that we can set it up quickly with new musicians. Also for ourselves! A few songs were a touch slow. That’s better than too quick. Forces one to think about the spaces and allows the body a chance to process and play those thougts. Then again, I always was a cereberal muse.

The performance highlight was, I think, the second and first bit of the third sets. Nancy was really pumping along and right in the middle of the music, and the band played confident platform of music beneath her. Lead played around the voice, rather than compete with it. Favorite songs of the evening for me included, ‘Bobby McGee’ (wild and fast finale to the vocal ‘out’ section where Janis/Nancy is really belting it out, a modification of Pete’s Gaslight acceleration (see posting for Jan 5 gig)), Eagle Rock (nailed it), I’ll make you happy (in your face rendition, Chris accented the beat pattern similar to the vocal); Ring of Fire (got the harmonies right in the backup) and Shout (rocking along, co-ordinated, high energy). There were no real crashes except for maybe ‘Out of the Blue’ (we’d all forgotten the pattern – but faked it enough to finish). Levels were good until somewhere in the third set when I think Steve turned up (according to a bloke in the audience who’d been there from start of second set and ‘complained’ about having ‘lost the vocal in the music’).

For the record, the Gaslight grapevine had produced at least one other drummer willing and able to gig with us, Steve called Chris half an hour before we would have made the call. Also, my guitar was ‘serviced’, but still managed to break a string. Hmmmm….

Future gigs include Buff’s Bar on Feb 25 plus another Sunday Arvo (3 – 7 pm) which will be at fairly short notice as we’re expecting a newspaper write up soon. Feb 11 at The Glynde from 9 pm. But these will be confirmed later …

Gaslight Jam - 5 Jan '06

Happy New Year!

The Negotiators trotted off down the Gaslight last night, Soxless (see previous post), and played in the Jam that is still going strong every Thursday night. House Band has changed from when I was last there, to the more in your face and more laid back 'Overdrive'. Besides liking their hard pub rock, I really like the fact that they don't get up as a band after the first eight to ten songs, though they're on tap whenever there's another musician requires one or more to make up a band.

Besides The Negotiators and Overdrive, a third band played - 'Bon'n'All', an ACDC cover band. Excellent. I haven't had chance to see them before, though have known of them for years. All in all, if you had to see three stage worn bands, interspersed with thrown together outfits of reasonably accomplished musicians, then the Gaslight was the place to be last night!

We did about half a dozen songs, ranging from Voodoo Child to Satisfaction. We were fairly different from the hard rock and psychedelic blues preceding. I wondered how it would go, with Pete the pissed but practiced drummer. A few funny moments (particularly when Pete all of a sudden doubled the tempo of Bobby McGee - which we adapted to and pulled off much to the crowd's delight). We had singing, dancing and (a most Adelaide thing), quiet eyes closed careful listening (in a hard rock pub at midnight!).

I played Steve's guitar as mine is off to the guitar doctor. Played through Overdrive's spare amp. It was set very loud and dirty (even when through the clean channel). I think Steve found the gain on Overdrive's lead rig pretty overwhelming. We pulled it off however, particularly "I'll make you happy".

The things I most appreciated were the feeling of coming home when I arrived - haven't been there for half a year but people remembered me and our band. Also, about 90% of people were in black, and three quarters were over 30. Dim and dark also. Classic rock venue.

Other thing that struck me was the number of folk who have seen us many moons ago, saying how they liked the changes we've made to repertoire, the new pieces. And they weren't being polite, they were correct in their comments.

That's where Nancy's gone tonight to see if she can round up a drummer for our next gigs.

(Friday 13th, 7.30 pm, Buff's Bar, Black Diamond Corner, Port Adelaide)

Soxless

For a wee while The Negotiators are going to have make do without our erstwhile drummer, sox of the infinite beat. This has come about due personal reasons for Sox. Should be back on stage in a couple months. Till then we have two gigs lined up, and another just to have the date confirmed. So, we will either not play, play without a drummer, or, play with a different drummer.

Nancy's off at the moment hunting us down a drummer for next week's show (7.30 pm, Buff's Bar, Black Diamond Corner, Port Adelaide). If anyone can pull it off, Nancy will be able to (she's probably the Negotiator's foremost negotiator). Will keep you updated.

Buff's Bar - 18 Dec '05

On Sunday afternoon The Negotiators played a return gig at Buff’s Bar in Port Adelaide. In case you’ve looked but can’t find, it’s in the fantastic old wreck of a building on the main corner just before you get to the Port Markets. Apparently there’s restrictions on what the publican can put up for publicity (ie nothing). It’s also just up the road from Cash Converters (plenty of ugly signage there), but more on that later.

We were booked to play from 3 – 7 pm. It’s been a while since we played a daylight gig. We usually reherse on a Sunday arvo (when we reherse), in my mind at least there was some of the relaxed informality of our show that goes with weekly practice (which we have been known to do in the ‘off season’). Which was good because, for me at least, quite a few things went wrong and it would sometimes be quite a battle to remain focused on the show. Being in the less-self-conscious mode that goes with practice certainly helped. More of those things-that-went-wrong later as well.

A good thing about playing Sunday arvo in summer time is that it doesn’t get dark while we play so we don’t need to set up the light show. The front of stage looks barely defined without all the lighting cables. Conversely, one of the sad things about daylight gigs is that there’s no light show (nothing like coloured lights to make you know you’re a rock star). Still, less time to set up and take down, less gear to cart back and forth.

Nancy and I got there around 2 pm. We were half an hour late, which isn’t as bad as the group of ‘fans’ who’d walked from Hendon the night before, thinking we were playing then. The publican was pretty impressed, said they stayed all night. Apparently they’d seen us play here last time and liked us. Quite an honour.

Terry had already brought in most of the gear from his van (as had sox and steve). We were all set up and ready to do a sound check with about 10 minutes to go. There were around a dozen people there already (I didn’t know any, I think Sox knew at least one). With five minutes to go, we’re out the front getting some fresh air, greeting some fresh arrivals we knew. What does Terry do? Wonders off to have a look in the pawn shop (no more free advertising), comes out without having bought anything, and we’re playing a couple minutes later! Almost surreal. And very Terry.

From my point of view, the gig was interesting. I broke my record of breaking strings, busting 2 B strings and a D on my guitar, and a D on Steve’s. I think I busted one at the end of the first set, two in the third (beginning and near the end, on stage change while Nancy first sang solo and then the band started ‘I’ll make you happy’). I broke the last in the final set. Normally busting one string can rattle a guitarist, let alone breaking four! I was moderately impressed with the way I changed the one on stage and joined the song in the first chorus during the third set. Perhaps the unprofessionalism revealed by the breaks was countered with the way we dealt with it. Perhaps I need a new guitar (I’ve never had a new guitar before).

The other thing of note for me was that it took a while for my ear to sort out my guitar from the general mix where I stood. We have a fair bit of room in this venue, and when I stood stage left (near my amp) I could hardly hear myself to start with. My ear started zoning in after I’d played while standing near the drums at stage centre several times. I sorted out my sound better as the gig progressed, even though I think Steve was turning up behind me (at least, I was hearing him as ‘louder’ as the show progressed). I know I consciously had to resist the temptation to turn up. I could hear Terry pretty clear all along, Sox and Nancy also.

Nancy put in a ripper gig, despite the fact it was an afternoon she gave a great performance. She nailed a few songs we’ve not quite nailed before. That was satisfying. Our interaction on stage was coming along nicely too, I think that some in the audience would have enjoyed the looks on stage. Hard to describe, but a communicative exchange of expressions in a song can add to the song for observant viewers. A friend of ours brought along a video camera and filmed a couple songs. Not planned, but it will be interesting if he caught some of the interaction.

The audience was an interesting cross section. We had around a dozen friends and family rock up. They range from one year old to somewhere in the seventies. There were around a dozen ‘classic’ port types – working class men and women of varied age, gender and shape. Had three members of an outlaw motorcycle club there for most of the show (lots of tats there), several ‘old digger’ types, and a handful of passerby that stayed. At least six times I saw someone on their way home from the market poke their heads in, surprised to see a band and, I suspect, that there was a pub in the building. I caught several people dancing outside out of the corner of my eye.

And we had an honoured guest, Santa, pass through. We welcomed him at the christmas pageant, and now he turned up for a few songs at a gig of ours. We must be doing something right!

At most, we had around forty there. At the end, around fifteen. Not bad for the trade I suspect.

We now have a few weeks off to enjoy the festive season. We play Buff’s again on the night of 13 January, a Friday, starting around 7 pm. On 11 Feb we play the Glynde (start around 9). On February 25 we expect to be playing Buff’s again (this gig to be confirmed). We then have bookings for 1 and 29 April, venue to be announced. Those, anyway, are the gigs I know of so far for 2006. Please note, however, that this is rock’n’roll and thus subject to change.

If I don’t post on this blog in meantime, I wish all my regular readers a safe and fun festive season! I hope to see you at The Negotiators next gig!

Mastering the Music

Last week’s recording session produced 17 tracks, of which 15 are good enough that I would willingly put my hand up for them, warts and all. It’s a fairly neutral mix, perhaps a bit heavy on the drums. Makes me think of Nesta setting up the drum mikes while saying how he’d been “getting into” drums a fair bit in the recent past, having just “discovered” them (after 20 years in the business). Overall, satisfactory effort in getting what we sound like down on disc.

My guitar is ‘out’ on several of the tracks, though I sometimes manage to play around the deficiency. For example, although the guitar in Bobby McGee starts with an arpeggio where the bass note is ‘off’ to something else (and hence Terry’s bass in the background also sounds ‘off’, much to his disgust), within four measures I have transferred to playing in the higher registers of the chord. And then I stay there for the whole piece. Which removes the worst of the problem with the key, but leaves my sound a bit saw toothed. And it doesn’t help the fact that the track starts wonky. Never the less, it leaves a pleasant aftertaste.

Benefits for The Negotiators include the shared experience of the day and the fact that we have the raw material for a demo (the stated purpose for the day). For each of us, our fans, friends and family, there is now a permanent record to replay. Hopefully, we did the music justice. Finally, for me personally, there was the additional benefit in seeing how the whole process fitted together, and seeing Nesta at work in the studio proper once we had laid down the tracks. This last allowed me, at last, to see how the mechanics of working through a wave editor interact with the process of engineering the sound (indeed, how one actually approached these aspects of production). I’ve had various wave editors for over a year, but never managed to get ‘into’ the packages. After last Saturday, however, it all made sense. I had finally got the big, if still blurry, picture of studio work.

In the last week I have been playing around a lot with Nero Wave Editor. It’s probably not the most modern or even the simplest of the software I have access to, but the interface makes sense to me. I have been learning by playing and trying things out and listening lots and going back again and again to try new variations. The trend has been to do less each time I tackle a piece. It is, however, still the case that the more I listen the more feel that I’m still doing too much. Of course, the less I do, the longer it takes.

Learning by experiment is a heuristic process with lots of redundant experience built in, yet it helps create a synthetic understanding of the whole as technique develops. It leads to refinement through time. I hope…

What I’m doing (putting the recording mix (thanks Nesta) into shape for release on CD – when it will need to be able to sound okay on any reasonably conceivable sound system. It is also when ‘buff and polish’ can be added to the individual tracks, levels harmonised, etc. Compression and volume normalisation also contribute to welding whatever the chosen tracks will be into a unified sound of experiences. The whole of the CD is greater than than sum of tracks it contains.

The one thing I have continuously read about record production is that ‘mastering’ is an arcane art, the domain of the experienced professional sound engineer (and access to their professional studios). There’s a lot of truth in this. But, this is (only) a demo, so I’ll take my crash course on the understanding that the labour involved will only be used if the end result is an improvement on the original mix. Which, after, about 20 hours and serious attempts at six different songs, is only true of one track so far.

But the method of what I do is now becoming more visible, allowing for efficiencies in time used in future attempts. Which allows more space for the creative spirit to work the subtle magic that I think is required.

Fish Shop R & R Studio - 26 Nov '05

Last Saturday The Negotiators recorded a demo CD at the Fish Shop R & R Studios in Port Adelaide. Neat little set up, with Nesta, a most pleasant techie, running the show. We were there for eight hours, and managed to get down 16 tracks plus ‘Mercedes Benz’ (with Nancy singing solo). At least, that’s what I hope happened as I had to leave over an hour early for parental duties. I left when we were entering the ‘mix down’ phase. Or, as Nestor said, “just when the real fun begins”.

It was a bit over an hour between arrival and having set up. It was nice to not have to lug around mixing desks, speakers, scores of metres of cables, etc. We would have been ready even sooner had not Terry gotten his days mixed up. Nancy called him at 10.15 and just caught him before he left for his day’s business. We took this minor hiccup in our stride, no angst. A good omen.

Then we got going. We firstly laid each track down in one hit as a band. Nancy was in a booth on her own (glass walled, so she could see us). Terry, Steve and I were in the largest of the spaces. Sox was in a booth with open ends and glass walls, in the same large room that us guitarists were. I think everyone else could see everyone else, I had a pillar between myself and Nancy (couldn’t do much about moving too far as I was limited by a baffle and the length of the headphone lead). The keyboard was DI’d (Direct Input), as were all vocals and the harmonica in Dumb Things. Each of our amps was set as normal, with a mike down its throat. The drums were miked up with similar to what we do with them these days on stage (I think). We had baffles (chest high, thick partitions) in front of the guitar amps to stop them splashing around the room.

I don’t know what sort of rig Nesta was driving in the control studio, but it looked quite visual and complex, with a triplet of VDUs providing the visuals from the computer and the mix desk (both a virtual and actual type appeared to be in use).

The technical equipment problems were all mine to deal with. To start, both my pedals failed to pass a signal across from input to output jacks. Very strange. Both worked last time I tried to use them, both have fresh batteries, there’s been no obvious damage to them, I tried various combinations of four different leads to make sure leads weren’t the problem. Eventually I plugged straight into my amp and adjusted it accordingly. I bet the pedals’ll work fine next time I try (after blogging this).

The other problem I had was more fundamental, my guitar kept losing tune. I haven’t suffered this to this extent before (or, for years at least). Either it’s been knocked around that I don’t know about, the G string is fading, or the atmospherics were just enough to stuff it up. We persisted for four songs, me retuning each time, and then I changed to Steve’s Les Paul (after lengthening the strap). Fustrating. I guess I’ll have to take Fernandez to a guitar doctor.

Anyway, we put down a basic mix as a band for each of the songs. This took about four hours (including listening to the final takes). After we’d played a piece, we took a concensus of what people reckoned. It’s usually majority rules, but only because, usually, the minority concedes. We don’t analyse how we make artistic decisions as a group, we just do it. It has a lot to do with respect for each other and not taking ourselves too seriously. Doing a demo isn’t a perfect science, there’s a lot of room to compromise. Ideal for The Negotiators!

Ended up we played most songs twice, and we played a couple three times. I think there are clangers in most of the final versions. Luckily, there’s usually no more than one falling down per song and it is most often at the very end (can usually be dealt with by fading the mix, and won’t be heard by our principle targets, venue booking managers who will tend to only listen to the first half a minute of each track). There were a couple songs (Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and another (?)) where we seriously diverged from the usual way of piecing out the texture between instruments – but we managed to hold onto even the wierdest improvisation in a manner that will hopefully be interesting to listen to. I think the way we do this is a function of our amassing public ‘flying hours’, as well as the raw fact of having made music together for over two years (some of us, six years).

Once we had agreed all the first takes as minimally acceptable, we overdubbed backup vocals. To do this, Steve and I each had a mike in the main room, and Nancy was back in her booth. We therefore skipped over those phases in the recording ritual where, ususally, at least the vocalist and often the lead guitar (if not the whole band) overdubs their own parts until they are ideally ‘perfect’. Nancy didn’t overdub any of her main vocals (she has a strong voice, doesn’t need it for present purposes). And it isn’t economical for the rest of us to do it, considering the purpose of the exercise (a demo CD).

I think Steve and I, alone with two mikes in a quiet main room, found it alien to begin with, but were getting into it properly by the eight track (we put backing vocals onto eight tracks – all of them over ‘chorus’ sections only). Neither of us is much of a singer though, so we’ll be mostly right in the background. This took less than an hour, with Nesta rapidly taking us from one chorus to the next.

The next stage is the one that I left shortly after it began, the Mixing Down. This is really interesting, as you can get to hear just your own instrument, or hear it relative to one or more other sound inputs (eg the vocal). The idea is to adjust the relative levels of the various inputs to what is appropriate to each song and, if necessary, parts of each song. This can encompass adding effects. For example, a touch of reverb on the vocal, a bit of ‘fattening’ on the guitar. Thus, we could bring the keyboard solo out more in ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, and the level up generally through the whole piece.

It was really interesting to listen to some of my guitaring in isolation, the little bit I heard Nesta separate for whatever reason was actually pretty good – a lot of variety with a steady pulse, and I know I can repeat the patterns if and when required. This despite my rarely learning specific ‘riffs’ for general rhythmic work. Maybe that’s the flamenco in me – pick up a basic riff and then run with it within the confines of the form and piece, ideally combining with my emotion of the moment.
So, that’s where I’ll leave this. When I get to hear the final mix, I’ll report on it. By the way, I am starting a new webpage at ‘negotiatorsnews.uk.geocities.com’. As I learn more about http it will develop. I’ll keep you posted.