The Spider Hill is dead, long live The Spider Hill

Hello all

I’m not going to be posting here any more, as I’ve bought a URL and some web space and am going to make some attempt at doing this thing properly. My new blog is over at www.thespiderhill.com, so please readjust your bookmarks, feeds and very kind links accordingly.

The new space is going to be principally getting me back into doing what I love most, which is listening to loads of music and then spewing out bile or joy dependent on my reaction. There’ll be the odd bit of other stuff in there, but it’s mostly a space for me to go on and on AND ON about music until you’re all sick of me. ENJOY.

www.thespiderhill.com

From Light To Sound recording – day one

The recording continues apace. Yesterday was a day in the studio recording drum and guitar parts for three tracks, ending at 11pm… this morning we kicked off at 10am recording synth and bass parts, then we’ll move onto rough mixes.

Here are a few photos from yesterday’s recording session…

Messing about with Storytlr

I’ve been messing about with Storytlr today, which to all intents seems to be an altogether swisher and nicer-looking way of aggregating your online activity than the somewhat utilitarian Friendfeed. It’s kinda neat – plug in your networks, from Flickr to Last.fm, give it a date span, and it produces an editable ‘story’ made up of pics, links and your general musings. Very interesting to stick in a week or so and see what your online life looks like – here’s one from me.

Unfortunately, since basic WordPress seems to hate you embedding anything, I can’t stick it directly in here, which is quite frustrating. Go and have a play, though.

Recording my new band

Exciting times ahead this weekend, as my new band From Light To Sound (although it’s been going for a year, so I should probably stop calling it ‘new’) goes into the studio this weekend to record our first tracks together.

It should be an interesting process for me particularly, as I’ve never done a ‘traditional’ recording in a proper band with live drums. Recording with Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element simply means me separating out all the individual electronic drums sounds into separate tracks, which I can do from the comfort of my own bed, then playing some guitar and synth parts over the top. A bit like a techno-guitar Milli Vanilli.

And recording with The Evenings I overdubbed my keyboard parts (have a listen over here) on top of band recordings already done without me being there.

This time around, we’ll mic up the drum kit, put everyone’s guitar parts through amp modellers/pods, play through headphones while we record the drums and scratch guitar tracks. Then re-record each guitar part properly, at volume. And we have eight hours to nail two or even three tunes, which will be tight.

Sunday will be mixing at my house, interspersed with Mario Kart Wii and a nice roast dinner being cooked by the bassist.

I’ll report back with some pictures and stuff, and of course the finished tracks when they’re done, but in the meantime here’s a rehearsal recording of one of the songs we’re recording, called ‘Compliance’. It was recorded with a little MP3 recorder in the corner of the practice room, hence the distinctly lo-fi quality.

Nice Country Walk

In the absence of anything better to write about, ravaged as I am by a minor illness, here’s a collage of some nice pics from today’s Nice Country Walk out at the White Horse in Uffington…