Katie Marie Photo taken by Lisa (Indigo Blue Photography) and edited by Sandra (Soul Photography)
Blimey, what a summer it’s been! OK so the weather was a bit on the crappy side, but thankfully I’ve had oodles of musical goodies to make up for it.
The Tea Total Tour was a real success… which was both a pleasant surprise and a massive relief! As mentioned in previous articles, being super organised is most definitely *not* one of my strengths and it was a mega mission to put the whole tour together.
But I learnt so much and it hopefully means I’m much better qualified for organising next year’s tour (yikes!!) which will be a co-headliner with US instrumental guitarist Richard Gilewitz. Richard and I played our first gig together a few weeks ago at Calstock Arts Centre in Cornwall and it was so much fun, so can’t wait to do a whole tour next year.
Also for the past few weeks I’ve been test driving a new pre-amp for Takamine. It’s a bit of a beast and looks a bit like this:
Tara (my Takamine) was so excited about testing out a new pre-amp, but wasn’t too thrilled when I told her a small operation was needed. Thankfully this wasn’t too much of a painful process and Tara is now very much enjoying her newly equipped CT4DX. As Tara is a TAN16C she was originally fitted with the Cool Tube Pre-Amp. The CT4DX is very different. It doesn’t have a valve so you loose that typical valve tone, but so far I’ve only used it for studio stuff and already I love it lots. It really suits my percussive finger picking style and it’s wonderful to have so much scope over the EQ settings. It’s also got a lot more clarity than the Cool Tube (mind you it does take 2 9v batteries!) and together with my LR Baggs venue DI I’ve got a pretty lethal combo to play with… can’t wait to try it in a live situation.
So next week I’ve got lots to look forward to as I’ll be heading off to Germany to do some recording with Elli. We’ll be recording a track we wrote together earlier this year as well as some brand new tunes, can’t wait.
In between writing new tunes for the Germany project I’ve been recording some cover songs in my little studio.
It’s been lots of fun and if you fancy taking a listen you can hear my versions of Boom! Shake the Room and also Warren G’s Regulate on my new Soundcloud accout:
I’ll be off to Germany on Sunday and will let you know how all the recording went, with all the usual random pics and stories.
