News from Great Castle Wilson

Ken just posted the tracks from Friday’s jam session to his blog. If you’re interested, go have a listen.

Since he doesn’t have comments enabled, and I wanted to comment :-), I figured I’d do so here. Anyone else with something to say can pile on this post’s comment section.

First off, I want to thank Ken for going through the pain of producing individual tracks from it. I particularly like the name choices. Having names on the tracks almost makes it seem like we intended to do them. 😉

My personal favorites are “Oh Ah”, “Float Me” and “Worst Bar”.

I also think the recording quality is surprisingly good. I clearly would have benefitted from having better amplification, although given how long it’s been since I last played (keyboards) with anyone, I think it’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t too loud.

Yup, they’re blown.

In honour of the last day before the holiday, Steve (electric guitar) and Ken (african percussion) decided to get together to do some jamming yesterday. I had my laptop and a usb keyboard at work, which is all I need to make music, so I figured I’d join them.

Unfortunately, all I had to play through were the Logitech Z-4 speakers from off my desk. Now, these are perfectly reasonable computer speakers — better for gaming and techno music than general listening, but not bad. The thing is, when you’re competing with djembes, dunduns, and killer guitar rifs you have to be loud. And despite being plenty loud enough for my office, the Z-4s just couldn’t compete. Somewhere about twenty minutes into the jam session, I realized that every patch I played sounded like it had a wee bit of extra distortion added; after about an hour, this had progressed to that sound that guitarists lovingly call “crunch”. Yup, they’re blown.

Rather than just replacing the speakers with new ones that would also be destroyed the next time I got an opportunity to play live, I decided to look for something with a bit more oomph. My constraints were:

• no distortion,
• good dynamic range, and
• (with luck) usable for both keyboards and my cello.

I looked around a bit before I found something that seemed like it had potential, which didn’t cost multiple arms and legs: the Behringer K1800FX.

I picked one up from Ottawa Pianos today. So far it seems pretty promising. As usual, Behringer has loaded it up with features for a very nice price (< $400):

• 4 channel input mixer (with mic pre-amp)
• 7 band equalizer
• auto feedback cancellation (excellent for the cello!)
• a reasonable mix of effects

The sound quality is good, but a little “boxy”. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds good, but I guess when you’re used to studio monitors, you get spoiled. It is however, definitely loud.

Hey guys, next time I’ll be ready!

Update: Ah, it’s not feedback cancellation it’s feedback detection. You still have to use the EQ to remove it. Oh well.

As your typical high tech weeny, I basically treat electronic devices as “toys that are cool only till the next big thing happens”. That goes for computers, PDAs, phones and even electronic musical instruments. Heck, I even want to upgrade my cello. 😉

The thing is, to truly master a musical instrument, it takes serious dedication and that kind of focus is hard to maintain in a world where something “better” comes out every few months (whether it’s a software instrument or a new piece of gear).

That’s why I genuinely admire those who work with a single instrument to the point where they have mastered it. One way to make that happen, is to just stop “playing with” everything else; sometimes it leads to the Bach solo cello suites and sometimes it leads to Roger O’Donnell.

For those who don’t know Roger, he was the keyboardist for The Cure from 1987..1990 and from 1995..2005. One of his recent projects is an album recorded entirely on a Moog Voyager synthesizer (+ vocals) called The Truth In Me — bonus video link.

I have so far only heard the demo bits from his website, but I find the pieces starkly beautiful and quite compelling. I’m now hunting the CD. If anyone sees it somewhere, please let me know.