Despite all this horrible yucky rain, I’ve managed to have a pretty productive week full of travelling, music and jack-to-jack leads.
Earlier in the week I headed up to London to play a gig with Nicky (Swann). Nicky had a gig booked at The Troubadour and asked me if I could accompany her on Karon (my Cajon). It was a bit of a mission getting up there as it was piddling down with rain the entire drive up, but thankfully when we got to London itself it was dry as a bone (which was very fortunate as getting to The Troubadour involved a fair bit of walking and Tube hopping!).
I’ve done a fair few gigs in London before and I have to say it’s not my favourite place to gig, but The Troubadour was a really cool little venue and lots of peeps came along to check out who was playing. They have music on seven nights a week and there were three other acts on the same night as us which was pretty cool.
The sound was good and the audience were appreciative, so all in all it was a fun night and made getting home at 3.30am not so bad.
The day after the London gig I was very excited to see that my (ever so slightly late) Christmas pressies had arrived. These were both items for the studio so I was very much looking forward to getting them all hooked up and trying them out.
The first (and by fast the easiest to get started with) of the two items was a Art Tube MP Pre-amp
If you’ve read any of my articles before you might already be aware that I have a gorgeous TLA Audio dual valve compression unit and I’ve wanted to get a pre-amp for a while as the compression unit works lots better if it has a nice big signal going into it. Most of the pre-amps I’d been looking at were stupidly expensive, but when I stumbled upon the Art Tube MP I did try desperately to find something wrong with it – as I thought it just can’t be possible to have so much nice stuff for under £60! But I have to say it really is an amazing piece of kit and with all the pre-sets included it does make life soooo much easier.
My second pressie was a Behringer Patchbay… and I’ve wanted a patchbay for blooming’ aaagggeeess now as I was sure it would make day to day studio life much easier.
I have to say I had no idea what I was letting myself in for (and it didn’t help that I’d only had a few hours sleep!) and I thought re-wiring my current set-up would be easy peasy… but it really did push my little pea brain to the limit, as I had to figure out the best way to hook everything up to the patchbay and also what I wanted in there… it’s giving me a headache now just thinking about it! lol
Everything put back into place….with the addition of a shiny new patchbay!
One half of my patchbay that now enables me to hook up my compression unit to what ever I want by moving one jack lead (rather than four!)
…the other half that has the inputs and outputs from my mixer and Alesis recorder, horrah!
So yeah, it took a while… but I think I’m there and I’m really looking forward to trying it all out properly (and no doubt it’ll all get changed!).
This week I’ll be heading up to Somerset to be filmed for a online series called Songs from the Shed. Mr Chris (Woods) will also be coming along and playing a few tunes, should be fun.
Chris and I recorded a couple of tunes in my studio last week and they both sound really kewl. (I’m hoping you’ll be able to take a listen to both of them very soon). The second song was a bit of a nightmare as it hammered down with rain shortly after we began recording it and all the mics were picking up the general rain sound, but in a strange way it does add to the ambience of the song (honest…)
Anyways hope you have a great week and I’ll see you next time!
(image: Katie Marie Photo taken by Lisa (Indigo Blue Photography) and edited by Sandra (Soul Photography))
