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:

View Larger Map

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