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Steve Woodward
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Get that bleedin' kettle on

Simple mambo pattern = tying me in knots

I've spent the last few weeks trying to get my head round this devious mambo pattern, taken from The Drummer's Bible via my drum teacher. Closehat-5 is actually a pedal hat, and the Ratty Rimclick is a rimshot.

No bass drum on the one is a tricky devil, and means fighting the natural inclination of my right foot to stamp down at the start of each bar. It's me trying to do something different to the usual funk patterns I've memorised and play over and over, and dammit it hurts, but that's what (my) learning is all about, constantly shouting at myself - "stop doing that thing you can do in your sleep, do this stuff that makes you feel like you're a beginner again".

So I've been practising at my usual slow tempo, here's a rendering of the beat from Ableton Live using a motley collection of drum samples at 115bpm, or thereabouts:

  
(download)

...which sounds alright, I guess. I don't watch Strictly Come Dancing, but I'd like to think that the Reithian edict is still in order and you've all become experts on dance steps and tempos through Bruce Forsyth's tutelage; so you'll all no doubt be smacking your foreheads at this point and be going - duh, mambo tempo is 192-204bpm - hello:

  
(download)

...which makes much more sense. Obviously I've a way to go before I can get up to 200bpm with this pattern, but I'll get there. Possibly in 2015.

The great thing about this pattern is I can break it apart and use the constituent elements to torture myself in other ways, the "no bass drum on the one" thing, the pedal hat on the one and three, the ride pattern and strange accenting, the toms... weeks and weeks of twiddling out of a couple of bars. I might need to come back in another life to get this drumming thing down.

Filed under  //   drums   music  
Posted November 1, 2009
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Micro Live - Computers in music (1985)

Lots of juicy instruments being demoed in this edition of Micro Live from 1985 - Prophet 5, Fairlight, Kurzweil K250 and a Synclavier which crashes just as Martin Rushent demonstrates how he sampled some drums off David Bowie's "Let's Dance" for an Associates record. Oh and Then Jerico looking thoroughly bored in Genetic Studios.

Posted October 15, 2009
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Distorted output from an Akai S950 sampler

Mmmm, chips. Barely 20 minutes into using my newly-purchased S950, the sound became extremely, digitally-ish distorted. So before I start crying, it's a good chance to whip the top off the thing and see what we've got in the grey box. Mmm, circuit board porn.

...and it's a lot busier in here than I expected; the weight of the box (almost 11kg according to the manual) should have been a clue here. But then this thing did come out in 1988 - my (also broken...) E-MU ESI 2000 is virtually empty by comparison.

So you can see the power supply on the left, with a large heatsink. There's at least two big main circuit boards, the lower one hidden by top one, which I'm guessing is the voice board, because of the eight identical columns of chips, one for each voice. I imagine the main out is on the right-hand side somewhere. Underneath this I imagine we have some sort of CPU board. There's a large trapdoor underneath for adding two 750KB expansion cards. If your S950 says 512 Kwords on bootup, it's unexpanded - 1024 Kwords equals 1.5MB, 1536 Kwords means it's fully expanded to 2.25MB. 

I was hoping that there was some sort of loose connection rather than a blown opamp or power supply problem, which I'd be rubbish at fixing and tricky to track down. There are wires connecting the circuitboard to the audio out board - waggling and pushing the wires down into the socket the wires in this area (top-right as you look at the picture above) fixed the problem.

So I've not had a great chance to play around with it, but here's a not-particularly indicative scratchy loop of a TR-606 and Boss handclap, with heavy spring reverb, sampled at 5KHz, sat next to an MS20 bassline recorded straight into Ableton Live. 

  
(download)

Filed under  //   akai   electronics   music   s950   sampler  
Posted October 12, 2009
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Silvers reunion, Oct 3rd 2009

I'm amazed that the Silver Sword (now Trinity's) is still there, but this is probably down to Sainsburys' being bastards and not shifting from their Trinity St location for the millennium building work.

Fourteen years since we frequented Silvers, we went to the (Facebook-organised) reunion. Some familiar faces/arses above dancing to something vaguely industrial. I had a good shake to Front 242's "Animal" which I've not heard in years. I've never seen the video for it until today, looks like it was done on an Amiga:

No Meat Beat Manifesto or Nitzer Ebb while I was there, dammit, though we did get the endurance test of RevCo's "Beers, Steers and Queers".

Posted October 11, 2009
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Sniffin' wires

 Rubbery wires, vinyl, exhaust fumes. I think I just love the smell of oil.

Filed under  //   photography  
Posted October 4, 2009
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Wombling along - Russell Davies on world-building

But the number one reason is the combination of great songs and brilliant world-building. The best bands are almost always fictional constructs. They make little myths out of themselves; through music, interviews and performance, the best bands have a story as well as music. And this gives them a constructed world their songs can spring from - meaning they can be about more than Boy Meets Girl, or can at least approach it in a different way. For The Smiths it was a literary melancholia. For ABC it was sarcastic glamour. For The Wombles it was the importance of tidying up.

From "Wombling along" by Russell Davies.

Filed under  //   art   music  
Posted September 25, 2009
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What does your city sound like?

Really love this idea - a site that shows you tracks on upload-yer-own-music service SoundCloud from cities around the world. According to their blog, it came out of the London Music Hack Day held at the Guardian offices.

If the city you want isn't listed on the main board, try bunging it in the URL - from round here Birmingham, Leamington, Rugby and Coventry all have tracks listed against them. 

Filed under  //   music   soundcloud   web2.0  
Posted September 24, 2009
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Lift to fasten

Lovely bit of typography on a window catch in our dilapidated offices.

Filed under  //   photography   typography   work  
Posted September 24, 2009
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Gavin Russom's bootleg remix of "piece of me"

Ah, Britney just reminds me of when all you (apparently...) needed to do to get your site to the top of search engines was to put "britney spears, mp3, porn" in the meta tags. Bless 'er and her frequently photographed ladybits.

Anyway, here's a rather moody bootleg remix of the search engine queen by Gavin Russom of Delia and Gavin on DFA (check the epic Carl Craig remix of Relevee), and latterly of Black Meteoric Star - it appeared briefly on his Myspace page - yeah, remember those - last year sometime, and Youtube appears to be the only place you can get it from.

Filed under  //   britneyspears   gavinrussom   music   youtube  
Posted September 16, 2009
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Hello from space

It's pretty cold up here but the drums don't half echo about. 

Here's a loop of me drumming through a lovely old RE-201 and a home built spring reverb thing, much sweeping of the eq on my desk. It's too much fun really.

  
(download)

Posted September 8, 2009
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