A sigh of relief, and filming videos.

OK, so I guess you're all dying to know how my studio computer is...

Good news! It's fixed! There was a VST plugin that had 'gone rogue' and was stopping Cubase from loading. Plugin identified by watching the loading messages on Cubase, then removed from the VSTPlugins folder and it's all fixed! Woop!

Of course to keep the ying and yang of technology balanced, the digital fates have now decreed that Andy's laptop won't load Pro Tools, or edit video...

The video editing thing is a bit of a problem, since we're in the process of creating a video for our track 'Has To Be Done'. This is a far cry from the last video we made, but instead comprises of Andy and I filming a lot of stuff in the dark.

I've mentioned before about how important YouTube is as a source of information these days and this is definitely true of emerging artists. However, it's often easy to be lazy about such things and post up videos of songs with single still images over them. We're guilty of it ourselves, but with such a wealth of material that we want to make available on YouTube, we have to cut corners somewhere.

In order not to cop out completely, we like to make sure that there are proper videos for some of our tracks every so often, so that's where this video comes in.

Hopefully it will be ready in the next couple of weeks (if we can get a video editing computer working again...) so keep an eye out for it then!

It never rains, but it pours...

So a catalogue of things have pissed me off in the last couple of weeks.

First up, WHY oh WHY is it so difficult to get any information out of Ryanair about how much a flight is going to cost? Here's the scenario: we're playing a festival in Spain in August. We need to get to Spain, along with our equipment. How best to do this? Surely flying on a low-cost airline seems the simple solution?

Since we're organising travel ourselves, rather than the festival organisers doing it (gah...), I had to provide a rough estimate of the total amount I'd be invoicing them for. So I pop onto Ryanair's website (no email address for sales or anything and a permament 20 minute wait on the premium-rate phone line...) and flick through the price list and come up with a figure.

Now, I knew that I was going to have to pay through the nose for baggage. That's fine - we're taking loads of heavy stuff, it's to be expected. So I cost up the required number of flights, an extra seat for the guitar, the additional costs for flying musical instruments, etc and come up with a figure, which I present to the festival organisers. They seem happy with this and off we go.

So I actually go to book the tickets online and there's a £30 per seat charge for online check-in, plus a £10 admin charge per seat, and no sign of the alleged discount for checking in baggage online! So now I've booked flights, but no baggage, and I'm already nearly over budget! I mean, what the hell is that all about? So it looks like I'm going to be paying out of my own pocket to be able to go and play in Spain after all. Ridiculous.

Second gripe: how on Earth can the Trinity Bar in Harrow justify having such a terrible sound system? As Harrow's only live music venue, they surely have some sort of responsibility to make sure that bands playing there get to properly showcase themselves. And Harrow, once again, seems to be a hotbed of talent at the moment...

Playing your home patch is important. When we played last Thursday, there were loads of people there that wouldn't normally trek up to Shoreditch to see us play, but were more than happy to pop up the road to Trinity to see us. Yet after the show, the general response from punters was, "yeah it was alright - sound was shit, though".

Yes, I'm well aware that somewhere like the Trinity can't have the kind of sound system that, say, The Cobden Club or Hoxton Bar and Kitchen have, but there seem to be some pretty fundamental problems there:

1. Why are all the Bose speakers around the room pointing at the same spot in the middle of the dancefloor. Doesn't this create some horrendous phasing problems?

2. Why are there four Martin PA speakers hung in front of the stage that aren't even connected?

3. Why is the sound position not front-of-house? How can you expect a sound engineer to have any idea what is going on from a monitor engineer position?

4. Why does their website say, "We now have finished installing our brand new PA and we think you'll agree it sounds pretty tidy"? Sorry, Trinity, but I'll have to disagree with you there...

It's really sad, cos I see a lot of benefit in playing at Trinity - the only venue in our home town - but if the venue isn't up to scratch then I guess we'll have to keep hacking it up to Shoreditch instead...

To be fair, maybe not all the blame should be levelled at the Trinity. Maybe the question should be: why are there no live music venues left in Harrow?

Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, our main studio PC has stopped working in that in no longer loads Cubase. I've yet to see the problem first hand - I'm going round to have a look tonight - but it sounds pretty grim to me.

I bought the studio PC around 6 or 7 years ago as a custom build from Digital Village's shop in Acton. It's a 2.4GHz P4 with (now) 4GB RAM running DV's stripped out version of Windows XP and Cubase SX2. It's old, tired and I have a terrible feeling that it might just have finally decided it's had enough and wants to be retired to the great circuitboard in the sky...

The problem is what do we do now? I mean, we've got a small Pro Tools M-Powered rig running on Andy's laptop, but we have a lack of plugins for that, since everything we own is VST and on my PC. I've got Ableton running on my Macbook, but I'm only just getting in to that, and it's proving a difficult learning curve after so many years of Steinbergishness.

Meanwhile, we've got half-finished remixes on the studio box that we can't get off, and a stack of other work piling up. Gah!

Moan, moan, moan... Maybe I can find some good news to end this post? Um... Oh yeah, the Cobden Club gig has been moved forwards to April 28th, so that's a good thing.

Other than that, keep an eye on this blog for either tears of joy or sadness when I've assessed the state of the studio PC...