Archive for April, 2009

What I saw today


I’ve been out touristing today (while also working obviously), taking in the sites like the Albert Memorial and Hyde Park in the sunshine.
Best moment was waiting for a bus by Marble Arch and watching the Royal Horse Artillary clip clop by.


Archive for April, 2009

Diving at Easter


Sunset in Weymouth

Sunset in Weymouth

Just been down to Weymouth for the first diving of the year. As usual Easter is pretty packed even though everyone said the weather would be super shite – not just your normal shite for April but really rather spectacularly shite. Turns out everyone was wrong, wrong, wrong. Weymouth was super sunny for the whole four days.

And because it hadn’t been too warm there was no massive plankton bloom to get in the way of seeing stuff underwater. So our first dive on the Countess of Erne had some of the best viz I’ve seen on it. Given I haven’t been diving for about 18 months and had a bunch of new kit I was preparing to be quite the fuckwit underwater, but turns out I hadn’t forgotten everything and there was just a lot of messing about to be done configuring the kit to feel exactly right. All the stuff I’d bought at the Dive Show worked fine, although anyone who can go diving in the UK in just a Fourth Element Xerotherm undersuit and a membrane drysuit has to be pretty hardcore as it took me hours before I felt even vaguely un-hypothermic. The water may have been 9 degrees but it felt like I’d been dipped into an ice bath and left there for hours. Mental note: next time go for the full on Arctic undersuit. Admittedly the Xerotherm does look very fashionable and stylish, but there are limits. Strangely enough my feet (encased in top quality £10 football socks) and my hands (3mm neoprene gloves) felt so much warmer than my core.

One thing that has to be said about UK diving is that it is a million times better when the sun is shining and we were treated to some class sunsets. Sweet.


Archive for April, 2009

Colorsplash


Another neat little app for the iPhone, Colorspash is probabably the best £1.19 I’ve spent recently.
Colorsplash strips the colours from your iPhone photos, then lets you put it back in a finger painting style. Simple to use and with the best help system of any app I’ve played with, this is both powerful and fun to use. It is also highly versitile, allowing me to fine tune the feathers of The Diva’s boa.
There has been a growing trend for apps that make the iPhone into a truly creative platform – painting and photographic ones especially – and Colorsplash is a great,fun addition to these.

The Diva in performance mode

The Boys discover bottle throwing


Archive for April, 2009

Noise Annoys


I’ve been spending time tied down by my sequencer this weekend in the vain hope of being able to actually create a breakbeat of some sort that’s not uniformly shite. This is mainly in response to this post by Alex Buga describing the new Maschine by Native Instruments. Ever since Guitar Rig 2 allowed me to plug my guitar into my mac without any latency problems, I’ve been a big fan of NI, not least because Guitar Rig has meant I can throw away the 20 or so odd bits of guitar paraphenalia I’ve had cluttering up the front room and replace them with one nifty foot control. It even makes my guitar sound good.

Anyway, Maschine is a really cool looking ‘groove production studio’, which means it handles samples, sequencing and a bunch of other stuff, but I figured before I simply splashed out, a decision based solely on the ‘new and shiney’ qualities Maschine possesses, I really should actually try creating some beats or sequences using the stuff I already have. If only so I know that Maschine will make it all better later.

So I smash out some distorted concrete guitar noise and spend a bit of time getting to know Logic by putting a nice bassline on it. The bassline being inspired by John Carpenter’s music for Assault on Precinct 13, which aside from being a great ’70s movie (think crazed ASBO gang attack police station, no survivors) is featured on the back of the 7-inch sleeve of Killing Joke’s excellent Pssyche single. However the bassline isn’t quite right, so I have to mash it up with a certain amount (a lot) of Bitcrushing.

The result –‘John Carpenter Noise’

But that wasn’t really doing much on a sequencing level. So I started playing around on the built in Ultrabeat drum/sampler sequencer that’s built into Logic. The great thing here is that it comes with a whole load of rhythms and kits built in and a nifty little sequencer that’s really simple to use. And I’m playing around with this and I discover that you can drag the sequences from Ultrabeat on to ANY other midi controlled instrument. So a pattern that was originally for a hip hop kit can be dragged onto a saxophone instrument and the saxophone plays that pattern. This is great not just because the Ultrabeat sequencer is easier to manipulate than the normal Logic one, but because the rhythm patterns don’t bear any resemblance to melodies. And the most bizarre thing is that they actually end up sounding really neat, kind of like early 808 State.

I’m calling the result – ‘After Cubik by 808 State’

Now after an entire weekend of sequencing, I still don’t think I can entirely justify the £600 plus for Maschine quite yet. But a few more weeks and I may just have to get one….