Mr Duffy's Mellotron

...and some preliminary thoughts on the use of Mechanical Keyboards with bands:

Well, spent an hour or two last night creating my very own portable digital mellotron. I'll explain.

Mellotron was (you may know this) a keyboard instrument utilising a little tape and tape head for every note. There were different sets of tapes the most famous being the strings and the flutes. They have a very wobbly strangely distorted and organic sound - mainly because they go wrong all of the time - imagine the mechanical nightmare!!. It goes really well with guitars, and somehow sounds nicer than a really modern digital sample of real strings. Probably because its less realistic oddly. Anyhow I got hold of some samples and loaded them into my hardware sampler. I think they might even fit on one disc making it reasonably giggable. Now, we don't have any songs with strings but I have always liked the idea of a mellotron verse into loud chorus....who knows. I like the idea of expanding the sonic pallette as it were. Just don't want any nasty overly modern things. I reckon keyboards are ok if you stick to machanical reproductions, so, electric piano, organ sounds and samples or originals of a mellotron all work well with guitar bands. Analogue synths rarely but sometimes. But no DX-7s, Rolands or other big shiny 80's sounding things. That's why the 80s sound so damn incoherent. Horrible mismatch between the synths they used and the organic instruments. Talk Talk however sound good - why? Mellotrons, electrc pianos and the like. QED thats my philosphy anyhow

Anyhow that's why I made a portable digital mellotron. It's the string machine for lovers of proper sounds. Just needed to share that

And Mr Duffy also appears on his beloved Radio 4 this week, on The Westminster Hour - skip through to 0:44:30 or so, and listen out for "Good morning", as Mr Duffy introduces "a grey-haired man in a grey-haired suit". Not a job for the retiring, indeed.

Save Omar

So who's up for "Concert for Justice", this Saturday 26th (tomorrow, as I write), at The Concorde?

It's an early show - 6pm to 9pm. £8.50 in, and it's for a very good cause...

... see the Save Omar website for the full, seriously fucked-up story of what happened, and is happening, to Omar Deghayes. It's just unbelievable.

So come along and show your support. There'll be music (Unseen Hierarchy, They, Roadhouse, Matt Kemp, and a certain other Brighton band), speakers, poets, and comedians.

C'mon, boys and girls, show us what you're made of.

Mr Duffy's Search for Mellow Fruitfulness

I would like to share with you, dear Reader, a delightful communiqué from Mr Duffy, on the subject of our forthcoming musical release:

Autumn sits on our pallid slack jawed faces like a wet flatulant dulux dog and we ask "Where is my Mellow Fruitfulness?" Salvation lies in the form of burying ones id in the sea of creative endeavour we have embarked upon. Burnished by the light of laptops we pare, scribe engrave and scrawl our wishes on the unbending unflinching plane of digitised sound which taunts us as ever. The recording light at the end of the tunnel is another take and the tunnel walls are our prison and fortress. If we get there will it be the city of wonder we dreamed of? Or a shortcut to disgrace and failure? Words like half seen moths flutter towards the gaslight and are burned by the glare of closer examination. Fresh laid tracks of musical indulgence await the wheels of song to become a railway but the leaves are all wrong and the conductors fear the passengers.

But this is a passing phase, a seasonal variation through which the truly dedicated must hibernate, asleep to all but the glory of the coming wintertime. The Snows will freeze our fears to nought! Something is coming and it is e.p. and it will glitter like the lights of a thousand Yuletide junketings. Be Warned. We are poised.

The Bad Corner

Toby and Joe are in the Bad Corner. Toby and Joe are the Rhythm Section. What have the Rhythm Section done wrong?

RIP Illuminati 3

So Illuminati 3 ("Chichester, West Sussex's finest exponents of post-kazoo conspiracy-rock", formerly known as "The Illuminati") are splitting up. This makes me sad - they are lovely people, and I know I'm gonna miss their brilliant, incomprehensible ska-fuelled math-metal.

Their last Brighton gig is at The Freebutt this Sunday (20th November 2005).

Gather, Children Of The Math Lizard...

Liverish

Bruges is beautiful... canals and beer and chocolate and interesting museums and waffels.

Don't let children or impressionable adults near the Choco-Story museum, though. If you believe the posters, chocolate is not fattening, helps prevent tooth decay, may well be an aphrodisiac, and fights diabetes. And my personal favourite, illustrated by friendly x-ray cocoa bean liver - "No, chocolate does not make you liverish." In fact: "Consumed in normal quantities, chocolate produces no heptatic intolerance effect". Uh-huh.

Bird and The Insight

So our humble little blog gets a mention in Brighton mag The Insight, courtesy of Bird:

"Every band these days seems to have a MySpace page which includes a blog," says Joe Holmberg, research fellow at the Interactive Digital Educational Applications Lab and bassist with Brighton band Republic of Heaven (http://therepublicofheaven.blogspot.com). "In local music communities, there's no real difference between the bands and the punters who go to see them, so making communication between them can only be a good thing. It's a young medium and conventions are still emerging. You can have a post on the North-African blues-rock influences apparent in Robert Plant's new record followed by a photo of your drummer, gurning with joy, giving the thumbs-up with Nicko from Iron Maiden, and somehow it all makes sense."

And:

"We get bored at work," says Joe. "We tell each other what bands we're going to see and what we thought of last night's gig. We post pictures of which Tintin characters we most resemble. It's somewhere less formal than our official band site to deposit our brain-pickings. Do we worry about it all being in the public domain? Someone said they wanted to cover our guitarist in gold and chocolate and eat him like a Kinder egg. That was a bit worrying."

Bird's ZenderBender blog is up for a Virtual Festival award, so g'won, go and show your appreciation and vote for her :)