Category: music

The ‘Having to stop playing music live’ post

peter wyethLeave a comment

You may have noticed from some of my recent posts that I’ve been having a fair bit of trouble with my hearing lately. It’s something I’ve been dealing with fairly well up until now but unfortunately it’s gotten a lot worse and I find myself having to take some action to try and help myself. As a consequence I’m going to have to stop playing live music for the immediate future.

I’m absolutely gutted about this – live music is where everything comes to life, it’s something I love doing so much but there’s no point me doing that if I’m just going to destroy my hearing. Though I wear ear protection whenever I go to a gig, I’ve struggled to use them when performing. It’s OK if I’m doing just instrumental work but it’s very difficult to sing and improvise when wearing them.

Now, I know what you’re going to say, ‘a 30 minute set with exposure mainly to a monitor set up surely can’t be that bad for you?’ Well, to give you some perspective on this, a 40 minute recording session last week with a 10 watt practice amp on 1 and a half left my left ear feeling like it had been punched by a particularly vicious doorman. I then spent the rest of the evening in a weird kind of daze. A journal entry for the day says something so woefully teenage I’ve prevented my self from repeating it here but suffice to say it’s forced my hand.

It also means I’m letting some wonderful people down with the gigs I’ve got booked at the minute, especially John from maybeshewill, which makes me feel terrible but I can assure you I would not be doing this unless I thought it was absolutely necessary. And right now I do.

So what next? Well, I’ve got around one and a half hours of audio recorded that I’m trying to edit down into one cohesive piece. I’ve got an ‘instant composition’ piece that I was going to make into a business card cd-r for the Her Name is Calla gig that I’ll probably just put up for free download in the week. After that I’ve got to try and work out how I go about doing things, I really hope I can play live again soon but until I can work out a way of doing it, I’m sort of stuck.

But I want to hang onto my hearing for as long as I can.

unfurling morning / untethered afternoon

peter wyeth1 Comment

It’s been a difficult week or so. My ears have been ringing worse than I can ever remember. I’ve been doing a lot of recording and very little of what’s been making it to tape has appealed to my ears.

On sunday morning I took my partners iphone outside to record the bird song – I could hear that thrush again – a thin squiggle of audio drew itself on the touchscreen. Later on I sat on the bed with my daughter’s guitar, the iphone on my lap, listened to the birdsong and started to play. Our cat climbed up on the bed and purred. I listen back to the sounds and pressed the icon marked ‘share’.

I’ll gladly sacrifice sonic quality to get within a quarter’s touching distance of getting what’s going on inside of me outside and I feel this does that. I’m going to make a little film for this song. It’ll just be for me. It’ll be my children spinning round and round in the garden, rolling on the grass.

Enjoy it. Share it with your friends. Thank you for listening.

P.x

[I’ll probably write later on about using multitrack DAW to record this as it was a valuable experience]

The phrase ‘untethered afternoon’ comes from an A.E. Stallings poem.

‘it’s not really a remix though, is it?’

peter wyeth2 Comments

Last weekend I attempted to do some remixing of some sound files ( ‘stems’ I believe they call them) from the upcoming We Are Altered record. John M of the band had sent me some of the files, I downloaded them onto my phone and went from there.

Now I know most folk would pop them into their computer and start bouncing around ideas from there but I don’t like working with computers and I have’t got any of the software for that kind of jazz anyway. Nope, my kit list was as follows –

into this

into this

and that’s it.

I listened through to the files and waited to see what caught my attention. Two samples immediately leapt out at me and I basically used those as the basis for my ideas. The first idea came out terrible – trying to pretend your The Neptunes using a mobile phone as a sample player is never going to work. It was awful. The second track (Resigned ARP) faired a bit better – not a lot happens in it but I like it all the same.

Check out more of the remixes here – http://soundcloud.com/groups/we-are-altered-remixes/tracks

Have a go at remixing with the stems here – http://makerecordings.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/remix-we-are-altered/

The record will be coming out on cassette and download on the ever lovely make recordings soon.