Gig news

It seems that every few months I have to do another 'catch up' post. This could simply demonstrate that I'm a terrible blogger with nothing to say, but I do have an excuse this time in that my missus gave birth to our daughter on May 17th. "But that's ages ago!" I hear you cry. Yeah, well - babies take up a lot of time, energy and 'thinking brain'...

So anyway, to the news. Hmm... where to start? I might have to break this up into a few posts (a-ha! That automatically gives me more material for the next article...) so let's start off with gig news:

We've only played a couple of shows that I haven't blogged about. First off, we played at the Cobden Club on April 28th as part of the BMI Sessions/Hit Sheet showcase night. The Cobden is a funny old place. I know the area fairly well as it's just down the road from Eastcote Studios, where we recorded our album, and I love that part of London. The night, however, was a bit odd. As an industry showcase, we knew it wasn't going to be a night where a sea of appreciative audience members whoop delightedly after every song, but even so it seemed a very staid and somber affair. Unfortunately, everything over-ran. So much so, that by the time we got on stagewe were told to keep the levels low, and the sound man turned everything down. Not ideal for a band like us... Quite how many 'industry' people stayed to listen to us I don't know, but we played pretty well so I hope anyone that did bother to stay enjoyed it.

Whilst flyering around the local area before the gig, we bumped into Tim Brownlow (of Avatars and Belasco fame). we had the opportunity to work with Tim's 'voice' when we remixed Avatars forthcoming single 'The Air', so it was great to put a face to the name. He's a top guy too - we ended up hanging out in the pub with him much longer than expected - so long, in fact, that the label ended up calling us from the venue asking where the hell we were!

So yeah, a good night all in all, and a venue I'd like to play again - although maybe not quite so late next time!

On May 20th, (me with bleary eyes and a lack of sleep) we were back at the Hatfield Forum. JamJar is the student-run monthly event at the Forum which we played back in February and I raved about the show and the venue then. This time it was a 'best of' event, showcasing the best bands that had played at JamJar nights during the year. I don't need to say again how amazing a venue The Forum is - my previous blog post says it all - but I will say that if I could play venues like that every week, I would be the happiest gigging musician on the planet.

Anyway, the night was topped off by the audience cheering for the band they thought were the best of the 'best of' show. We won this hands down and were blown away by the response from the crowd once again. We even managed to shift a few albums! (More about the album to follow - that's a whole other blog post...)

Once again big thanks to the Forum for having us, and to our artist liaison, who managed to track down some headache pills for Andy and was still there to help us load out after all the other artist liaisons had left hours ago!

My last blog post was short but sweet - Glade Festival was cancelled. This is a real shame. We loved the experience of playing at the Rabbit Hole Stage at Glade last year, even though we had to perform without our drummer Alex, who was in the US at the time. Glade's organisers' statement alluded to problems agreeing policing arrangements, etc. with the local authority which is such a shame. Unfortunately, it highlights the fact that cancellation can happen to any festival, no matter what its size, at any time - even well established ones.

Nevertheless, we plough on and we currently have a few dates on the horizon. First up, we're at Hamswell Festival near Bath for the third year in a row. Early bird tickets are still available for £35 for the whole weekend and you can click here to buy them. This is a proper grassroots, up-and-coming festival, featuring a fantastically unpretentious line-up and about the best atmosphere you could hope for in a small festival. Hope to see you there!

The week after Hamswell we're off to Spain, for two gigs in the North-West. On Thursday 19th August we'll be playing at Le Club in La Coruña, then on Saturday 21st we'll be at the Festival Independente de Vilalba. We're really looking forward to this trip - it'll be fascinating to see how we're received by a completely impartial crowd. I'm also looking forward to hearing Andy's Spanish banter!

The build up for these gigs has included some features in the Spanish press and on local Spanish radio, so hopefully there will be a few people there to support us!

Along with all of this, we're hoping to do an online streamed gig on the 4th August - details of this to follow. There's talk of some other exciting venues coming up as well, but with nothing confirmed, I'll leave you in suspense for the moment...

Right - I think that's us all up to date with the gig news now - I'll be back soon with the other news!

Glade Festival Cancelled!

Gutted...

Hopefully we'll be able to find some more gigs to fill the gap, but the summer won't be the same without our trip to Glade...

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...

Catch Up

I know, I know - it's been ages since my last post...

It's not that I've had nothing to say, it's just that The Day Job has been pretty manic recently so I've had a lack of time on my hands.

So what's new? First up, we played a couple more gigs - first at the Rhythm Factory (a new venue for us) and then back at the Underbelly, Hoxton Square as a last minute fill-in for another band that had pulled out.

We're now racking up the gigs for the coming months, so grab your diary and put these dates in:

1st April - Trinity Bar, Harrow
20th May - The Forum, Hatfield
30th June - The Cobden Club, W10
17th July - Glade Festival
14th August - Hamswell Festival
21st August - Festival Independente de Vilalba, Spain!

Hopefully there will be a few more to slot in over the coming weeks so keep an eye out here, or on our Facebook page, for any announcements!

Meanwhile, label-mates Relation are gearing up for their next single, 'Optimistic' - our favourite track off their debut album, 'Fear of Night'. One of the remixes on the single is by us, and as part of the promotional drive this is available FREE for a short time only! You can pick up the free track, along with a couple of others from the single, from Soundcloud now! Click here!

On the releases front, we've been gathering the remixes for our next single so hopefully we'll have some details about that very soon.

More posts to come, I promise... I know I've been slack! Meanwhile I look forward to seeing you on the 1st April at Trinity - we're assured this is one of the busiest nights of the year, so it should be immense!

Smash more gigs!

Whenever we play venues we've never been to before there is a certain sense of anticipation. Will it be dingy? Dank? Will the sound system be appalling? Will it be too small? Too large? Will we get a decent dressing room?

Sometimes, things work out much, much better than you could possibly imagine, and that's what happened to us last Thursday.

The Forum, Hatfield opened in September 2009 and is one of the premiere live music venues in Hertfordshire. Built at a cost of £38m, it boasts a total capacity of 2,000 people over three rooms and has already hosted acts such as will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Doves, Scouting for Girls, Taio Cruz, Enter Shikari and N-Dubz.

Situated on campus at the University of Hertfordshire, it also acts as a massively impressive venue for student union events, such as Jam Jar - the night that we played at.

So anyway, we rocked up and sound-checked, whilst technical folk scurried around sorting out lighting, monitoring, smoke machines, etc. (All of us except Owen, who managed to be 3 HOURS LATE for soundcheck. Nice one...) and wondering how many people would turn up to such a big venue.

The answer was lots! It's a bit of a no-brainer, really: free entry, pound-a-pint, free parking (for those not taking advantage of the pound-a-pint promotion, of course), great venue... makes me wonder why we ever bother playing dingy basement venues in London that are £8 to get in, and over £3 a pint!

Seriously, though, the whole student union experience far outweighed the recent forays into London. The crowd were much more responsive, the venue was much more impressive, the staff were much more accommodating - whether this is just a great advert for The Forum or whether it's the norm for such venues we'll wait and see, but for now I'm crossing my fingers for more University gigs!

Anyway, here's a snippet from the gig - our opening track from the show, "Underwater". Enjoy!

PS: If you haven't already, head over to SoundCloud to download our latest free single NOW!

Eat More Cake LIVE! Wednesday 3rd February

So we're back at The Underbelly, Hoxton Square tomorrow night (early doors - on stage around 8pm). Last time we played there I blogged about the excellent quality of the sound and the engineer, so I'm hoping it's the same guy tomorrow!

We've made quite a big change to the set list this time round. We've got half a mind on our festival dates for the summer, so we're attempting to liven up the set a little bit. It's always a shame to drop songs from the set, especially ones that go down really well, but in these days of 30 minutes slots, something will always have to make way for new stuff to come through.

Talking of new songs, you can catch a preview of our next track, "Fear No Evil" on our MySpace page now! Featuring mixes from Choking Dolphin and Steviebeatbox, the single will be available for FREE in the next week or so.

Meanwhile, if you're coming down to the Underbelly tomorrow, don't forget to RSVP to the Facebook event for discounted entry. Hope to see you there!

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 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...

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!

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!

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!