So this is Christmas... and what have you done?

It's that time of year again. It's hard to describe - on the one hand, it's great to look back at what has without doubt been our most successful year to date, and on the other hand it's a time of year that always leaves me feeling a bit empty...

This year, I had a bit of a panic when I realised I'd only bought a couple of albums in 2009. I can't work out if this is because it's been a particularly bad year for music, or if it's because of current trends to 'listen' to music, and not 'buy' it. I mean, I've come across a lot of new stuff (mostly that I don't like) either on YouTube, or MySpace, or radio, but I can name the albums I have actually gone out and bought this year on one hand.

As a result, I've been looking through people's 'best of the year' lists - from the music journalists' ultra-art lists, through metacritic-style aggregated lists, to random bloggers top tens. It's had the effect of condensing everything I 'missed' in the year into one really concentrated period of music digestion.

After a pretty intense year of listening to pre-mixes, more mixes, further mixes, enhanced mixes, pre-production mixes, post-production mixes and final mixes of our album, listening to other people's music was somehow dulled as an experience, and seemed almost chore-like. Not to mention that you become so uber-critical about everything, that it's difficult to listen to something without analysing every tiny little detail...

But now I somehow feel free of that burden. Our album is finished. Complete. Mastered. Done. And now listening to new music is making me hungry for more. Every time I listen to something I've not heard before, I want to make a beeline for the studio and write. (Of course, this has its own problems, since we don't really have a studio at the moment, but that's another story.)

Of course, the fundamental problem is how can we build on the successes of this year in the coming year?

This year saw our most prolific period of gigging, with what is now an exciting, settled and amazingly talented line-up. Venue highlights have included the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Camden Barfly, 93 Feet East, Hoxton Bar and Kitchen, the Lexington, plus Glade and Hamswell festivals.

There were remix opportunities as well - our remix of Relation's Your Tiny Mind had originally been made the year before, but we got an opportunity to revisit that after it was pulled back out of the bin by Urban Torque and resurrected for the single release. We had two remixes released on singles by One eskimO as well, Hometime and Kandi, and our Kandi mix was even included as part of their US-released EP.

Although it has taken longer than we'd hoped, we now have a very strong album which has retained an excellent balance of styles, now all held together coherently thanks to the work of our producer Richie, rather than the hotchpotch of disjointed tunes that we started with. The transition from two-piece, bedroom-studio electronica to studio-recorded, live instrumentation electronica has worked better than I could have hoped, and gives us huge scope to push even more boundaries in upcoming tracks. Already, we have a whole host of ideas floating around and as soon as we can find a studio, we can get them down!

The studio problem has been a real low point. Whilst we both have our own project studios now, not being able to write/create together has really slowed things down in the last few months. And most of my equipment is in storage... Hopefully this is something we can resolve sooner rather than later, although I do recall that it was while we were both writing separately before that we had our most prolific period of creativity, so who knows? It may even spark a time of more 'grassroots' songwriting - something we have shunned in favour of technology and myriad plugins in recent times.

And then there's the constant underlying problem of sustaining the project. The studio crisis is a great example - now that we don't have anywhere for free that we can put the studio, can we afford to put it anywhere else? How much longer can we continue to shell out for transport costs? Rehearsal studios? Flyers? Equipment? The answer, of course, is that we will keep finding a way whilst the desire is still with us. And at the moment, the desire is very much still with us!

So with Red Sky Part 1, our debut single, already out there and Part 2 to follow in January, a new free track soon after that, a second single in the pipeline, and an album all wrapped up and ready to go, it looks like 2010 is set to massively outshine 2009!

Thank you to everybody who has been a part of it this year, either by buying the single, watching/rating/subscribing/following/tweeting/reposting or anything else online, coming to gigs, emailing us and telling us you like our music... So here's to 2010 and, with your continued support, a great year for Eat More Cake!

And from us, have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Red Sky - Out Now!

"The album version is absolutely stunning, i could listen to it for hours." - Andy Everett (XFM)

"That album mix is lush!!!" - X-Press 2

"What a fantastic track... fantastic lyrics and vocals. In a nut shell... beautiful." - Clara Da Costa (Ibiza Global Radio)

The wait is finally over!

Red Sky (Part 1) is out NOW! With mixes from The Diogenes Club, Lazybones and No Logo. We have had some great feedback from radio and club DJs around the world, including support from Kiss FM - now it's time to spread the word!

Red Sky (Part 1) is available in all good online stores NOW, including Beatport, iTunes, Amazon, Play.com and 7digital (although the information on iTunes is incorrect due to an error at their end - d'oh!). You can find links to buy Red Sky (Part 1) on our website.

We still have a load of free stuff available on Urban Torque's Soundcloud page as well.

You can also check out the video for Red Sky on our YouTube channel:

Please tell your friends and help to support independent music! See you on the 21st December at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen!

Christmas is coming!

You know the holiday season is creeping up when our Christmas Podcast surfaces on our YouTube channel!

This year, we have a treat for you in two parts:

Part 1. Matt and Andy are asked to put together a Christmas single at short notice...

Part 2. Eat More Cake featuring Lady Kay - One Wish. The finished product!

Also, we've resurrected last year's podcast, so if you didn't hear it the first time check it out now!

Don't forget to leave comments and let us know what you think!

Eat More Cake on Kiss!

Big thanks to Justin Wilkes for playing Red Sky on his Rehab show on Sunday morning on Kiss.

There's only a week to go now till the release, so some high-profile radio support is a big bonus! There's yet more feedback been rolling in for the release as well and there seems to be a lot of love for the album version of Red Sky, which is a simply brilliant feeling. It's often hard to stay objective about tracks after they've been works-in-progress for so long, so when impartial people have good things to say about them it's a real boost.

So thanks again to Justin, and to the other radio stations who are supporting us (Ibiza Global Radio, ILR digital radio... any more out there?) - we really appreciate it.

You can listen again to Justin's Rehab show here - we're the very first track.

Another free download!

In the continuing build-up towards the release of our debut single, Red Sky, Urban Torque have made available another free download - this time from Part 2 of the single release.

This time, the free track is the Avatars' reworking of Red Sky. Avatars are Belasco's Tim Brownlow and producer (of our album, amongst other things!) Richie Kayvan, who are forging their own unique 'stadium dance' sound. Their first single 'The Air' is coming along some time in the new year and we're big fans of it, so we're really pleased to have this Red Sky remix as part of the package.

Head over to SoundCloud now and grab yourself a copy!

Gigs/Feedback

Despite the title of this post, it's not going to be a rant about the poor quality of sound at gig venues these days. In fact, quite the opposite - our soundcheck at The Underbelly, Hoxton Square last night was one of the most efficient I've ever participated in, and the on-stage sound was amazing!

Seemed to be a pretty good gig overall. For some reason, I kept falling off the black notes on my keyboard (therefore playing wrong notes). I can't work it out - either the stage was really uneven and my keyboard was wobbling all over the place, or I'd put my stand up at the wrong height. I'd even made a point of not drinking all the way from soundcheck to gig, so alcohol was definitely not to blame!

Anyway, we had a pretty good turn-out for a Monday night gig on the other side of town. We now look forward to the next one, a couple of doors up from the Underbelly at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen on 21st December! Will post more details of that gig soon...

But no, the feedback I'm talking about is positive feedback. With the promotion cycle for Red Sky well under way, we've been seeing a steady flow of comments from people who have heard the promos. Generally feedback has been very positive, as you can see from the selection of quotes on Urban Torque's website.

I think having a two part, non-dance/dance release has helped, so that Urban Torque's largely deep house-orientated following have something to get their teeth into, and the more eclectic selection fits nicely with our 'something for everyone' ethos. And the beautiful thing is that there are positive comments across the board - lots of love for the original, lots of praise about the Diogenes mix, and the Lazybones dub, etc. Looks like we've got a pretty good package on our hands, and with the wide variety of mixes available we're hopeful of getting some radio support soon.

Don't forget - Red Sky Part 1 is released on 7th December, and in the meantime you can grab a free download of the Diogenes Club Radio Edit here!

Eat More Cake LIVE! Monday 23rd November

You know how you've never got anything to do on a Monday night? Well this Monday, head down to The Underbelly in Hoxton Square (click for map), where we, along with Oswald, Blue Gate Fields and the Brandon Allen Band will be presenting a night of live music!

The evening kicks off at 7, and we would love to see some new faces so beat away those Monday blues and come on down!

RSVP via the Facebook event and we look forward to seeing you there!

The Live Set-Up - Part 2: The Ableton Years!

So the decision to change to Ableton Live from Cubase was a massive one.

I knew about the capabilities of Live - I'd been playing around with various version of Live Lite since v4, but had never really properly got my head around how we'd transfer our songs into the Ableton way of thinking. However, to an extent, we'd already got into the whole 'songs as a series of scenes' idea, since we'd been doing loops in Cubase previously.

So the next question was one of control. With the Cubase method, we'd been using a small mixing desk to control mutes/fades for each element of the track. After some research (and friendly advice), I settled on an Evolution UC-33e. This ticked all the boxes - completely re-assignable, lots of faders, pretty robust looking... This, and a copy of Ableton Live 6, was the start of the new set up.

It was around this time that we recruited our drummer, Alex Lane. This added another problem to the mix: the drummer needs a click. Of course, this isn't really a problem - we just routed a generic Impulse drum machine playing an on-beat hi-hat in Ableton through a separate output of the sound card.

I was still running my trusty Roland JV1080 as my sound source, with piano sounds coming from my Alesis QS7. Andy was playing mostly electric guitar, and occasionally bass guitar. Owen was now a permanent fixture behind the Ableton controller, but had also added a turntable and DJ mixer to give us some scratching in the tracks that needed it. To top it all off we had a new female singer, Kay Juviler-Bacon, for a little extra flourish.

We decided it would be easier to run the effects for the vocals ourselves, to save the hassle of getting a sound guy to hook up our effects module and turning it on and off on the right tracks. This meant continuing to have an on-stage mixing console to route everything accordingly.

All these elements were giving us quite a technical headache, not least because of the amount of kit we had to lug around everywhere. We'd also faced criticism from sound guys at venues for taking too long to set up...

Investing in cases and cables is always a difficult choice. I mean, it's great spending loads of money on things that make great noises, or things covered in big knobs or flashing lights, but cases and cables are just things that make other more exciting things work better. It's a bit like trying to get excited about buying a new headlight bulb for your Ferrari.

Anyway, I had a case custom made for me by the Flightcase Warehouse - 12U top for the mixer, and 6U front and back for equipment. In this was a Yamaha MG166CX mixer, a Phonic PPC8000E power conditioner (for power distribution), a Behringer HA4700 headphone amp, a TC Electronic M350 effects processor, a Behringer 8-way DI rack and my trusty M-Audio Quattro. This flightcase was internally cabled up, including power, so that all that was needed was for the few external connections to be made into the mixer. The DI rack had a 6m XLR loom on it for connection to the venue sound rig. This whole beast came to be known affectionately as the Mega Box. It just about fitted in the car...

Additionally, I bought a Gigskinz Laptop Rack Bag with its own 3U of rack space. This held my old Dell laptop and my Roland JV1080. I LOVE these cases, and would heartily recommend them for anyone who uses a few bits of rack kit with their laptop on stage. They're hard-wearing, have a good sized side pocket, large rear access through a separately zipped opening and an access hole between the rack bit and the laptop bit, so things can be cabled up easily. Genius.

This was the complete set up until I made some down-sizing changes early this summer, and worked a treat - apart from the missions of having to lug the Mega Box around. For the first time ever in our gigging history, we had a reliable, easy-to-use, quick-to-set-up system that allowed us to deliver a quality show without worrying about the 'how' of it all.

That on-stage kit list in full:

Main Stuff:

Dell Laptop running Ableton Live 6

M-Audio Quattro soundcard

Evolution UC33e MIDI Controller

Yamaha MG166CX mixing console

TC Electronic M350 effects processor

Behringer HA4700 headphone amp

Behringer 8-way DI rack

Phonic PPC8000E power conditioner

Custom 12Ux6U flight case

Matt's Stuff:

Alesis QS7

Roland JV1080

Andy's Stuff:

Yamaha electric guitar

A borrowed bass guitar

Owen's Stuff:

Technics SL1210

Erm... some sort of DJ mixer!

Next time I'll detail how we do things now, after deciding the Mega Box was a little too Mega after all!

The new home for Eat More Cake blogging!

So this is the new improved Eat More Cake blog.

What's changed, I hear you say? Well, the address for one. Also, it's now a collective blog, not just Matt's. So you'll still get the long-winded wanderings down memory lane from him, and now the added bonus of the crazed ramblings of Andy as well!

We're just too good to you.

Anyways, keep an eye out here for gig announcements, free download info, release dates, etc. - subscribe via RSS, if that's your bag - and enjoy!

Oh, and if you haven't already, head over to Facebook and become a fan! Already a fan? Tell your friends to become fans too!

One Eskimo 'Kandi' FINALLY available on iTunes!

We like One eskimO. In fact, we like them so much, we can't help but remix their stuff every time we get our grubby hands on it...

We did a remix of Kandi AGES ago, which the fellas were good enough to include on their US-only EP, but until now it's been unavailable in the UK.

Thankfully, they have now released a UK bundle of Kandi remixes, featuring ours along with several mixes from Cicada and Tom Neville.

Head over to iTunes now and grab yourself a copy! And why not check out One eskimO's eponymous debut album while you're there?

Bloggety Blog

Urban Torque, our record label, have made a free download of the Diogenes Club's Radio Edit of Red Sky available via SoundCloud, so go and grab a copy now, while it's hot!

It's also good to see some music blogs have picked up on the free download thing, so thanks to both Danger Danger and Blog Rockin' Peet for the props!

The Live Set-Up - Part 1: History

It's about time the whole live show got its own blog post. Of all the technical things surrounding Eat More Cake, it's the live set-up that I'm most proud of. It's almost become a labour of love...

Not that I'm going to take all the credit - we've got to this position after plenty of advice, plenty of mistakes, and plenty of on-stage disasters.

But first (as always), some history.

Andy and I played our first gig as Eat More Cake way back in 2003 (I think), at the Trinity Bar, Harrow. It was a wildly ambitious set that involved me dragging my entire studio down to Trinity. It featured something like 5 different singers and a good couple of hours of music, alternating between an original track, then a cover for the entire set. Some of the covers included Portishead 'It Could Be Sweet', Tasmin Archer 'Sleeping Satellite', Kosheen 'Hungry' and Faithless 'Insomnia'. In the end, the overly complicated set-up got the better of us, and my laptop gave up a few songs into the second half.

Now we were really proud of the fact that we'd managed to even get close to pulling this show off although, in honesty, it must have sounded terrible...

This was clearly NOT the way to go about playing live. The only difference between my studio kit list and the on-stage one, was that I took a laptop instead of my studio PC. Some refinements were needed.

Our next big gig was our 'album launch party' to celebrate completing our first full-length demo album. We held this at Ginglik, Shepherd's Bush in August 2004. This was still amazingly ambitious, but at least we had learnt how to pare things down a bit. We only used two singers this time - one male, one female - plus Andy, then me doing some backing. We managed to take a lot less stuff as well - just a few sound modules, two keyboards, a laptop, soundcard, mixing desk, some guitars, amps, etc. I seem to remember that during a couple of dance tracks, I made the singers wear headphones so they could sing along to the click track! Somewhere, there exists a really bad recording of this gig which, once again, demonstrates that we weren't actually that good on the night! How depressing...

We played Ginglik again the following week, performing an acoustic set. This was much easier - two guitars, one electric piano (well, not quite acoustic then...) and a djembe. I think we finally started learning that 'less is more' after this gig.

Our next experiment was to go for a completely live band - no computers/sequencing/click tracks. We recruited our drummer friend Roland Trimmer (who played v-drums - this meant we could continue to provide a variation of sound between tracks), added a bassist (Andy Potter), a new female vocalist (Jenny Moore) and kept our existing male vocalist/second guitarist Baby Dave. Andy still provided guitars and more vocal while I played keys and sang backing.

There were lots of pros for this set up - rehearsals were much more fun, my life was a hell of a lot easier and everyone seemed to be in good spirits about the whole thing. However, without the original samples some tracks lost their impact, and the lack of click track meant that we were not always quite as tight as we were used to.

After a few gigs, we took another break from playing live until we finished 'The Red Sky EP' - our second self-produced demo. We knew we were going to put on a big event for the launch of this CD, so we took it back to the drawing board. This was the first gig that Owen did with us, as a kind of on-stage sound man. We also managed to blag two session musicians for free (by advertising on Gumtree) - Xan Blacq on percussion, and Wun Chan on bass. Both of these guys were amazing - quite how they put up with us I'll never know! We recruited a new female singer, Lisa Lee and a new male vocalist, but after a couple of rehearsals we had to ditch him due to - ahem - 'irreconcilable musical differences'. Baby Dave came back in to deputise.

For this, we brought back the computer - running Cubase on stage. Where possible, songs were set up in 4- or 8-bar loops, with each part running through a separate output of my soundcard. These outputs ran into a mixing desk which Owen had control of, so he could mute and fade tracks as necessary. Kind of like a primitive, manual Ableton Live.

This was a great show - probably the first time we'd ever managed to sound remotely professional on stage. The launch party itself was held at TenWest in Ladbroke Grove in March, 2006 and was a truly memorable event.

We downsized this set-up a bit to just Owen, Andy, myself and Lisa and played a number of gigs throughout the rest of 2006 and beginning of 2007.

When we signed to Urbantorque, we once again decided to redefine the live show, and that is where the history becomes the present...

Red Sky - Adverts on Spotify!

Jason from the label sent us a copy of the advert that they're running on Spotify for Red Sky Part One. I really like it - kind of makes the whole thing seem a bit more real and it's nice to know that random Spotify users will get to hear about us and the release.

There's a whole big world out there of potential listeners - I guess it's difficult to get my head around how many people we can potentially target. I mean we have loads of business cards, and we give them out to anyone we come across that might be interested. Then there's gigs, and that's a whole other way of getting the name about. Then we think about our online presence - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, this blog... It's never ending!

Spotify was well off my radar - I'd heard of it, but I don't really know many people using it so hadn't really thought about it as a potential source of new 'targets'.

Anyway, here's the ad on SoundCloud for your listening pleasure:

Red Sky Spotify Ad

Red Sky Single Release Details

So all the details have now been confirmed for our release of Red Sky. Here's the lowdown:

Red Sky Part 1 will be released on 7th December on Beatport, iTunes and all good download stores. Part 1 features the album version, Lazybones Dub Remix, No Logo Remix and The Diogenes Club Radio Edit.

Part 2 contains the full length Diogenes Club Remix, Borkmanns Remix, Avatars Remix and Nikola Gala Remix. This will be released exclusively on Beatport on the 7th December, and will be available on iTunes and other download stores on the 4th January, 2010.

Click the artwork to hear a preview of the tracks.

We're looking to have a single launch party nearer the time, so keep an eye out for details of that!

Meanwhile, we've been writing lots of to-do lists and meeting with various people about videos, the christmas podcast, more giveaways and all those good things. More details soon - definitely exciting times ahead!

I'm back!

Sorry about the lack of posts - first I was ill, then I went on holiday for a few days...

But there's been some stuff going on, so let me fill you in. First off, we played a gig last night at The Good Ship, Kilburn. I've not played there before, but I've been to a couple of gigs. I really like the performance area being in a kind of pit - it feels almost voyeuristic watching a band in this way, maybe even gladiatorial, so if you don't like the performance you can send in the lions to polish the band off...

So anyway, after an awful sound check (the monitors were off-puttingly loud), we bowled over the road to the Black Lion for a couple of quick bevvies and expected the worst. Bad sound checks are the worst motivator ever... Fast forward an hour, and we jumped on stage, no monitor problems and smashed it!

Seemed to go down pretty well, and it was not a bad crowd for a Wednesday night. Got some good feedback from people who were there and had some interesting discussions with Jason from the label and Richie Kayvan, who produced our album, about what we can add to our set to improve it. It's a difficult one, really - on the one hand, we want to give a pretty good account of the album tracks in the lead-up to the release, but on the other hand, we want to keep the set fresh. Plus there's the logistics (and not insignificant cost) of getting rehearsals together to learn new songs. Then there's writing/extracting loops for Ableton, sampling the necessary sounds for Reason, etc. (Which reminds me, I need to do a post at some point about the live set-up...)

Anyway, a good time was had by all. Maybe a little too much of a good time, since I ended up with the hiccups, and got home about 3 hours later than I would have liked. Still, nothing a coffee and some ibuprofen won't fix...

In other news, it looks like the remixes have been sorted for Red Sky. We'll be releasing it in two parts - the first containing our album version, our turntable wizard Owen's dubstep remix, the Diogenes Club radio edit and No Logo's Balearic chill-out mix. The second part has a more clubby feel to it, with the full-length Diogenes Club mix, Nikola Gala's deep house mix, Borkmann's club mix and a reworking from Avatars as well. It's certainly a strong line-up, and we're dead excited about it - roll on November 30th!

[EDIT] Just been informed that the release date will now be a week later, so roll on 7th December!

Red Sky - debut single out 30th November!

Urbantorque have announced that our debut single, Red Sky, featuring Alexis Griffith, will be released on the 30th November. Woo-hoo!

At the moment, there are remixes listed from The Diogenes Club (as featured on Hed Kandi's The Mix 2009), Nikola Gala and No Logo. We've been getting some mixes in from other artists as well, so it looks like it should be a good sized package with plenty of mixes for everyone!

This is great news for us - Red Sky was originally slated for release almost two years ago, so to finally have the opportunity to get it out there is fantastic. Will post more details of confirmed remixes, givewaways, promos, pre-order info, etc when I have them but for now you can enjoy the Diogenes Club remix from YouTube:

Studio History: The Eat More Cake Years

So I guess it's time I wrapped up the studio history series. It seems somehow fitting that I should be doing this a matter of days after the studio has been packed away again!

So I moved home from Aberdeen about six months after my 21st birthday. My band, Charlotte Says, had long since ground to a halt and I hadn't written a song in earnest for ages. On my return home I got a part time job so I could spend two days a week pulling in a bit of pocket money, and the rest of the time pretending to be a musician!

My studio was lacking some pretty essential components at this point, so I spent time scouring free ads papers like Loot looking for bargains. (Largely, this meant sitting in the pub reading newspapers, which was a dream job really!) In the end, the good deals came from an entirely different source: perennial bargain merchants, Behringer.

Now whatever your opinion of Behringer and their products, their value for money is exceedingly high - especially when beginners are looking to expand quickly without spending their worldly savings. At the time that I moved home, they had a particularly interesting package deal that consisted of:

1 x 32-channel Eurodesk mixing console

5 x cheap condenser mics

2 x eq filter/feedback destroyers/de-essers

1 x 2 channel compressor

1 x limiter

1 x Digital EQ

1 x FX unit

All of a sudden, my studio had substance.

I was quickly becoming frustated with the 15 second limit of my Akai S01 sampler, so I also added a second-hand Akai S3000XL sampler. This gave me huge scope to change the way I worked. Now I could sample myself playing whole guitar tracks. I could layer even more drum loops. At one point, I even took a set of mics to a mate's place and multi-sampled his drum kit! I started taking samples of old 7" records - the sky was the limit!

One final major change marked this period in the studio's history: I finally retired the Atari ST and switched to running Cubase VST 3.5 on a PC.

And so it came to pass that a cheeky upstart named Andrew Briggs persuaded me to let him come round and write a dance tune using my studio. The song was toilet, but it marked the start of an unlikely writing partnership that became the band that we know and love to this day.

The studio remained pretty much unchanged for the next couple of years. Working with Andy really started me using the kit in my studio to its potential - especially in those early pre-digital audio days. The Akai S3000XL was the focus of most things, with other sounds provided mostly by the Roland JV1080. I bought the FX card for the Akai so we had more creative control over the samples and we used to spend hours drawing automation curves into Cubase to control filter sweeps, etc.

The next thing to eventually change was the mixer - the Behringer desk was great value, but the power supply was temperamental (it would sometimes blow 6 fuses before I finally switched on...) and the routing wasn't the most flexible. I bought an ex-demo 32-channel Mackie 8-bus, which was HUGE but amazing. This was my pride and joy, and a real head-turner in a bedroom studio like mine...

A few other things followed - I bought a Novation A-Station off current band member Owen, I replaced the two-channel Behringer compressor with a 4-channel Behringer one (!!), and I replaced the barely-adequate PC with a rack-mounted high-spec jobby from Digital Village. I also got more racks, patch panels and cables, external hard disks, and the studio was finally as well equipped a home studio as I could have hoped for.

With a high-spec PC, I started exploring virtual instruments. I bought a copy of Rebirth, which I loved. We'd make beats on Rebirth, then sample the individual hits onto the Akai to process them and put the beat back together in Cubase. Rebirth was the source of the majority of our drum sounds until I purchased Native Instruments' Battery 2, which in turn fuelled the start of my obsession with VSTs, along with the beginning of the end for all our outboard gear...

And that's about that. From here on in, it became a virtual world, with VSTs replacing rack-mounted sound modules and FX units gathering dusts un-patched. And that is a whole other story to tell.

The final studio kit list in full:

Mixing Desks:

Behringer Eurodesk 3282

Mackie 32 8-bus

Keyboards:

Alesis QS7

Yamaha SY85

Yamaha SY22

Roland U20

Sound Modules/Samplers:

Roland JV1080

Korg 01R/W

Novation A-Station

Yamaha TG55

Akai S3000XL

Akai S01

Sound Processing/FX:

Behringer Suppressor (x2)

Behringer Limiter

Behringer Ultracurve Pro

Behringer Virtualizer Pro

Behringer Multicom Pro

Roland RSS-10

TC Electronics M350

Several Behringer Patch Panels

Computer:

Digital Village-built 2.0GHz Pentium 4, 4GB RAM, 150GB System drive, 500GB audio drive

120GB external Glyph audio drive

2 x 17" CRT monitors

Other:

Phillips CD player

Sony Minidisc player

Alesis Monitor Ones

Alesis RA100 Reference Amp

Peavey T-60 electric Guitar

Jasmine by Takamine electro-acoustic guitar

Vox Standard bass guitar

Rhythm Is A Beggar - Out Now!

Our singer, Lady K, has been hard at work on her own material recently. Part of the product of this hard work has just materialised in the form of a track on the new Ido Tavori (and friends) album, Rhythm Is A Beggar.

The track is called Born To Love You, and was written and recorded by our Kay, so get yourself over to your favourite download store and buy buy buy!

Studio... Gone!

Hey, bloggy people. Sorry for the radio silence - thought I had swine flu, but ended up with a mental tummy bug instead. Either way, I've been knocked out since mid-last week so I'll attempt to get you up to speed in this post.

The old studio is finally no more. Yesterday, I put the 'spare' kit in storage and this morning I took apart the benching. It is now a bare room again... *sniff*

The project studio has made a few advances. First off, I got hold of an 18" LCD monitor so I'm back to having the amount of desktop real-estate I crave. Next, I found a product called ipMIDI, which is a very quick and easy way of adding an ethernet MIDI connection between computers. Now I can have my PC running Cubase, whilst my Mac runs some of the more powerful VSTs (like QLSO, for example) and all I need to do is plug a standard network crossover cable between them. Brilliant!

I've also added an E-MU 0202 soundcard that I had lying around for the Mac to use. This way I don't have to worry about using any of the stuff that's 'reserved' for live use and the 0202 can stay plugged into the mixer. Finally, I've re-arranged things a bit so there's more room for my external hard disks, etc.

So that's as much work as I'm planning on doing on the studio for the moment. Everything is working nicely now and I can certainly get on with everything I need to. The only thing I'm missing is some decent headphones. For now, I'm working exclusively on headphones, so I need something that's comfortable, light, flat EQ and not bank-breaking. I always used to use a set of Fostex T7's, but they've blown in one ear, so everything bassy is accompanied by a grizzly noise in my right lughole. Any recommendations greatly appreciated. I don't really want to spend more than about £50...

There's a few more things to talk about, but I reckon they're all worth their own posts, so from the 'studio move' posts, this is it!

The new studio takes shape!

Having finished exporting stems for all our works in progress, I've finally started setting up the project studio.

Originally, I had planned to use a keyboard stand to put my master keyboard on, then plonk the computer somewhere on the existing computer desk (my 'general use' Dell desktop is also in the corner of the new room). My other worry was trying to find a home in storage for all the stuff left behind, so I eventually decided to bring some racks through to the new studio and use them as a keyboard stand instead. I brought through two Quiklok 10U racks on casters, one under each end of my M-Audio Keystation Pro88.

Keeping some rack space is a bonus - it means I can keep my (rackmounted) PC off the flimsy existing computer desk, plus I've still got some space to put other equipment in if I need to. At the moment, the space above my PC contains my ESI Wami Rack soundcard and an old Roland RSS-10.

The RSS-10 is an interesting bit of kit - interesting in that I've had it for around 4 years (I long-term borrowed it off a friend of mine named, coincidentally, Roland!) and have never once switched it on! It's a 'sound space processor', and gives the impression of stereo sounds appearing to be in a 3-dimensional space. For example, the demo I heard on a cover CD once had a helicopter sound, which sounded like it was flying around your head - not just stereo panning, but virtual 3D panning! So anyway, I left that in the project studio in the hope that I might actually switch it on and see what it can do...

The other rack is currently holding my Yamaha MG166CX mixer - I knew I'd find room for it somewhere! How much use it'll get I don't know, but it's a big bit of kit to find room for in the storage unit.

There's enough room on my chest of drawers (god bless bedroom studios!) for my Macbook Pro, but I'm a monitor down, since I can't really fit the 17" CRT monitors from my old studio anywhere. It's amazing how quickly you get used to multiple screens, and how irritating it is when you have to downsize. I'm thinking I might have to buy a cheap LCD monitor so that I've still got enough space to have the arrangement, mixer and any relevant VSTs open all at the same time in Cubase. (Yes, I'm still using Cubase. There's probably a whole other blog post there, but avid readers will remember that I've been a Steinberg aficionado since around 1991!)

Since my Macbook far out-performs my studio PC, and has most of my biggest virtual instruments installed on it already, I'm toying with the idea of using some kind of MIDI-over-ethernet trick to use it as a remote VST station, while my PC worries about running Cubase. I'd need something cross-platform, since one end is Windows and one end is OS X, so I'll have a look into that at some point. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know!

Anyway, the studio is working enough that I've managed to start work on another remix. More on that later, once I've got something to show for it. In the meantime, have a picture of the new studio (apologies for quality - iPhone is amazing, but not at taking photos...).

Saturday's gig and more studio packing

Great gig on Saturday. Unfortunately Kay was ill, so we had to switch to our emergency four-piece set list. Didn't seem to matter too much (though Ever So Gently was a bit ropey), and we had some good feedback from the crowd.

The Lexington was a nice surprise - a big, wide stage for a change and a huge sound system! Also, and probably most importantly, we had a sound engineer who really knew his stuff, ran a tight soundcheck and gave us great sound both on and off stage. I didn't catch his name, but I did make a point of thanking him after the show...

We spent quite a while in the green room chatting to the band that were on before us, Sleeping With Antares. I really enjoyed their set - yet more proof of the good sound engineering - which had me reminiscing in parts of the wall-of-noise sounds of bands from the early nineties like My Bloody Valentine and Ride at their most shoegazey, but with some distinctly modern riffs and strong vocals. Nice guys to boot, so good luck to them. They've recently launched their eponymous EP, which they gave me a copy of, so check them out if you get a chance!

On the studio front, I've decided to lend Andy some of the stuff out of the old studio, since it seems to make more sense than putting it in storage. Plus, he has a dearth of usable sounds in his project set-up. He's taken the Novation A-Station, my beloved JV-1080 and my Alesis Monitors (no room for monitors in my new set-up - am I going to have to write everything on headphones?). I offered him my small mixer as well, but he doesn't have room. I'm thinking I should probably hold on to that for the moment anyway, but I don't know where the hell I'm going to put it either!

Anyway, tonight I'll be setting up my project studio so I will post tomorrow with a report, maybe some photos and also (no doubt) a shopping list of things I'm going to need!

iPod selection dilemmas

Now that I've moved closer to my day job, my walk to work only takes me 15 minutes. Before, my walk was around 45-50 minutes.

This is mostly great, of course, but the one problem I've found is that it's even harder to pick something to listen to on the way to work now. Before, I could pretty much get through an album on my journey - now I only get 3 or 4 songs!

Since this new problem has arisen, I've been panic-choosing. After all, if I take 5 minutes to choose the first track I want to listen to, that's a whole third of my potential listening time gone! For example, yesterday morning I listened to Soulwax's Conversation Intercom, followed by Kielbasa Sausage by Tenacious D, then Geek USA by Smashing Pumpkins. None of these were tracks I desperately wanted to listen to - in fact the only relation between the songs, and the eagle-eyed of you might have already spotted this, is the artists' names close proximity to each other in the alphabet (song ends, quick scroll through artists, panic again, play).

This morning, however, I knew straight away what I wanted to listen to and put on the Pixies greatest hits collection Death To The Pixies. It took me a while to realise why I'd chosen this album, but it would appear that subliminal forces were at work: I noticed Gigantic somewhere in the background on the telly last night, yesterday I read a review of The Pixies gig at the O2, and our label-mates Relation have just made available a download of their reworking of Here Comes Your Man.

So there we have it - maybe I just need to be more easily influenced by the subtle signs around me throughout the day. Or maybe I just need to be a little more decisive...

Eat More Cake LIVE! Saturday 10th October

We're live again this weekend at The Lexington in Islington:

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It's not on a school night for once, so no excuses for not coming along! We should be onstage around 10pm - entry is only £2 before 9:30.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Aberdeen - The Studio Moves North

I lived in Aberdeen for two and a half years between the ages of 18 and 20.

My first flatmate, Alan Newman, who also happened to be a work colleague and drinking buddy, was a guitarist and together with his bassist friend Wayne Parley and a female singer, Jo McCafferty, we formed my first 'proper' band Charlotte Says. We were a kind of 'Faith No More meets Skunk Anansie' rock/electronic affair which proved quite popular among audiences normally treated to Radiohead-impersonating local bands...

We went through an assortment of drummers, eventually deciding they were all too unreliable. By the end of our time all the backline was provided by me and my Atari ST.

My studio gear expanded quite a bit during this period. First of all, I needed some better amplification than the little Hitachi stereo I'd been using previously, so I purchased a pair of Alesis Monitor Ones, and a matching Alesis RA100 amp, which are my monitors of choice to this day.

Next, the limitations of a 61-key keyboard were beginning to show as I constructed more elaborate 'multi' patches with many split zones for playing on stage. I purchased a 76-key Alesis QS7 (which I still use on stage), partly on the strength of its piano sounds and partly for the semi-weighted larger keyboard. I still love the touch of this keyboard - not too heavy for synthy-type sounds, yet enough responsiveness to create the kind of tonal variations you need when playing a piano sound.

The sounds of my SY22, U20 and TG55 were beginning to wear thin, especially since I was still a preset junkie, so my last two purchases were sound modules to expand my palette. First, I purchased a Korg 01R/W (an 01/W workstation in a box) off a guy I worked with (I think his name was Charles, and I think he was from Fife. Either way, I do remember that he was a demon harmonica player who used to whip out his harp on nights out and wow drunken audiences...). The Korg had a built-in sequencer, so I used that in rehearsals for a while to provide beats while we wrote songs.

Next, my most important purchase, and one that would be the core of my choices of sounds for many years to come: a Roland Super JV-1080. This box is amazing - huge polyphony, 16 part multis, a massive (and outstanding) range of sounds (especially for its time) and expandable. I added the Bass and Drums expansion card, and (much later) the Orchestra II and Pianos cards. Nearly every pro studio I've been in during my time has had a JV1080 or 2080 sat in the corner somewhere. It is a proper daddy amongst sound modules...

The other important thing about Aberdeen was that I made my first unnecessary purchase - a keyboard I'd hankered after since I saw it in the showroom when I purchased my first keyboard: a second-hand Yamaha SY85. To this day, I've never used it to its potential. There are a few key sounds I've used in tracks, and I did some experiments with dumping samples from my Akai to it via a MIDI cable, but mostly its sat gathering dust in the studio. Having said that, it was a sturdy beast of a box, so I used it as my second keyboard on stage.

At this time I was still running my Atari, and still running Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four. Even on stage. In fact, pretty much my whole studio came with us when we played.

The Aberdeen Years Studio kit list in full:

Keys:

Yamaha SY22

Yamaha SY85

Roland U20

Alesis QS7

Sound Modules/Samplers:

Korg 01R/W

Roland JV-1080

Akai S01

Other:

Alesis RA100

Alesis Monitor Ones

Studiomaster Diamond Club 16:2 Mixing Desk

The world's biggest 3-tier Quiklok stand...

In my next post, I'll move back home, form a band called Eat More Cake and start making some proper music!

Works in progress

So the main thing that needs to be done before I break down the studio completely is to make sure we've got all the parts of all the tracks we want to continue to work on.

Since most of the outboard kit in my studio is pretty much redundant these days, we should be able to carry on with tunes already in progress, and also with remixes, new tracks etc. purely in a 'virtual' environment.

Andy and I wrote a list the other week of any old song ideas that had not been finished, that we thought were too good to throw away:

I appreciate that you probably can't read that very well, so allow me to help. The list contains such classics as 'New Dark Thingy', 'Little Man in a Box', and 'Cuthbert and Timoblourgh Go to the Round Pig'. I'm sure I could write a whole other post about our working titles for tracks - we'll save that for another time...

Anyway, since my beautiful (but far too big) Mackie 32 8-bus console has already gone into storage, I've had to set up the little Yamaha MG16CX that I used to use on stage for the moment. After re-routing a few cables, I've got a functional studio again, for the moment.

Working through the list of tracks, it's interesting to see how 'developed' a song needs to be before we consider it a viable idea. I mean, some of these tracks are little more than an 8-bar loop of a riff and a beat yet some others have 20+ tracks and a complete arrangement.

I've exported stems for the first two song so far and there's another 10 to go before I can finally dismantle the studio and move my project set up.

Next time, I'll finish the history lesson of the studio - even if only for my own wistful, reminiscing benefit!

But first, some history.

Our studio had a humble beginning. A very humble beginning. I first began making electronic music with a Yamaha PSR37 (NB: that's not me in the video) hooked up to an Atari Mega ST2, running Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four.

The PSR was no good for anything other than dire synth music. Not even synth pop - just electronic arse-music. So I soon replaced it with my first synth - a Yamaha SY22. I loved this synth, and it opened up a whole new world of sound creation, etc. However, I just continued making awful music with the SY22's presets...


I made a few tunes with a school chum called Steve Kielty (continuing the 'link everything' theme, I wonder if it's this Steve Kielty?). We listened to hardcore and wrote bad imitations. There was one tune we wrote that used a specific patch from one of his keyboards - on the strength of this one sound (Shakuhachi), I bought one for myself. A Roland U20.


So now I had two very different keyboards, a wealth of sounds, and so I started writing more filmic, atmospheric stuff. The problem with this set up was beats - nothing I had so far made any decent drum noises. So the next addition to the studio had to be a sampler. I bought a second-hand Akai S01 and thus began the real start of my musical journey.


Since sample CDs were expensive, and the Internet was still called 'books', I relied on the Future Music cover CDs as the source of my samples. As a result, I would write in whatever style that particular month's CD had samples of. One month it was jungle breaks, the next edition would be pop-funk, etc.


About this time, Tricky won the Mercury prize with Maxinquaye, while Portishead's Dummy and Earthling's Radar were never off my CD player. This was the first time a musical genre had ever wholly captivated me. I started writing trip-hop-esque tunes (including the original version of our very own Music Box), bought one more sound module (a Yamaha TG55 - again, off the strength of one or two patches - Modomatic and St.Michael) and the studio in this guise would be the basis of my studio for a good while to come.



The original studio kit list in full:


Atari Mega ST2
Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four III
Yamaha SY22
Roland U20
Yamaha TG55
Akai S01
Sudiomaster Diamond Club 16-2 mixing desk
Hitachi Stereo


AFTERTHOUGHT: I've just read this post back - this is what I meant when I said that this blog might end up a bit of a geeky vanity project. Hopefully in my next post, I will waffle less and maybe say something interesting!

A new start - a new blog...

So I've decided it's time to start a blog.

The Eat More Cake studio is finally shutting down, you see, and I wanted to have some kind of record of the breakdown of the existing studio, along with the setting up of mine (and Andy's) project studios. It's part diary, and part geeky vanity...

It's a good time for Eat More Cake - the album is finished, we've been remixing, gigging and things are generally on the rise. Consequently it's not a brilliant time to be shutting our studio, but circumstances mean that we no longer have a room to put it in, nor money to get another room.

The other problem, of course, is that we have to keep working. Ideally, we still need to be able to write, remix and produce, although this now is likely to be in our own individual bedroom studios. It's not something that's completely new to us. After all, we finished the first 'album' while Andy was still at Uni in San Diego, and we had to send CDs to each other via Air Mail to share ideas!

So that's a kind of introduction to this blog. I'm hoping to share my experiences of downsizing, along with maybe any tips I come across, equipment I really miss, music software that helps bridge the gap, and all other things Eat More Cake related in the build-up to our album release next year.

And maybe we all might learn something too...


-M