My Window To The World…

Here is the press release from Placebo *:

“PLACEBO PART COMPANY WITH DRUMMER STEVE HEWITT

Placebo have parted company with drummer of 11 years, Steve Hewitt, due to personal and musical differences.

Brian Molko commented “Being in a band is very much like being in a marriage, and in couples - in this case a triple - people can grow apart over the years. To say that you don’t love your partner anymore is inaccurate, considering all that you’ve been through and achieved together. There simply comes a point when you realize that you want different things from your relationship and that you can no longer live under the same roof, so to speak.”

The split is amicable and a sad time for both parties. Steve Hewitt replaced Robert Schultzberg behind the drum kit in 1996 whilst the band were promoting Placebo’s eponymous debut album and went on to record the following 4 studio albums ‘Without You I’m Nothing’, ‘Black Market Music’, ‘Sleeping With Ghosts’ and most recently ‘Meds’.

Placebo have just returned from the USA where they were part of the high profile ‘Projekt Revolution Tour’ alongside Linkin Park and My Chemical Romance. The band are now taking a well earned break.

Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal will begin work on Placebo’s 6th studio album next Spring and are in no rush to find an immediate replacement for Steve.”

* sources:

Placeboworld.co.uk

Placebo MySpace Blog Entry

Technorati Tags: Placebo, Steve Hewitt, Placebo drummer, Placebo drums, Brian Molko, Stef Olsdal, Stefan Olsdal

It has been claimed that by writing a checklist, you are more likely to memorize what you are writing down.

Whether I go out to play the drums in a studio or at a live gig, I always make sure that I have the following items in my bags:

- Drumsticks
- Music Charts / Scores / Notes
- Writing Paper & Pencils
- Roland SPD-20 Drum Pad
- Roland SPD-20 Drum Pad AC Adaptor
- Roland SPD-20 Drum Pad Mounting Kit (incl. Screws & Tools)
- Laptop
- AC Adaptor for Laptop
- Firewire Cable
- USB Cable
- External USB Mouse (in case the trackpad malfunctions)
- M-Audio USB Sound Input/Output
- Headphones
- Spare Headphones
- Headphones Extension Cable
- Chinch to Jack Adaptors
- Jack to Chinch Adaptors
- Gaffer Tape
- Tuning Key (for Drums)
- Spare T-Shirt
- Towels
- Custom Earplugs (not the cheap ones from the Pharmacy)
- Flashlight

For gigs I like to add:

- Laptop’s Operating System on CD
- Software I am using (Ableton Live) on CD
- CD or Harddrive Backup of all (Audio/MIDI) Data needed

The list might seem kind of crazy, but experience shows that most things listed can come in handy at one time or the other.

I have had my laptop “go crazy” on me before. Re-installing the operating system as well as the application took care of it. (It is best to have no data on the harddrive that has not been backed up yet, so one can just format the HD and start re-installing.)

Another time the laptop’s harddrive stopped working an hour before the gig. Luckily, one of the VJs had a spare laptop. I installed the application, copied the data onto his harddrive and was (more or less) ready to go by the time we hit the stage.

Since I oftentimes play with backing tracks, I cannot survive without headphones. I usually have some left/right channel splits happening, so the headphones must work 100 %. The spare one has saved my life more than once.

The custom earplugs I also want to mention again. The volumes we are often exposed to on stage are nothing but poison for our hearing, so it needs to be protected. No hearing = no music!!!

Technorati Tags: Drummer Survival Guide, Drummer Checklist, Live Gig Checklist, Rehearsal Checklist, Drums, Drummer

Since momokomotion could not find a keyboard player yet, we will be using backing tracks on every song.

Being the drummer, I am in charge of feeding the PA system with the backing tracks. I am running them in Ableton Live (Version 5.x), off my Apple iBook G4, into the M-Audio Fast Track Pro; Channel 1 is the actual backing track, channel 2 the click track.

On one song I was persistently thrown off the beat, which was very annoying. Even more so because it did not seem to make any sense.

I did some research via Yahoo! and Google and found some valuable information.

The click track that the studio engineer had recorded for me was nothing more than a metronome sound (very annoying and poison for your hearing!), with an accent on the 1 of every beat.

In Ableton Live, I played the backing track (audio), then created a MIDI track, and went through different drum sounds to find one that I felt most comfortable with. I programmed the MIDI drum to play the kick drum on 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the 4/4 beat, added a dry tambourine sound to the 1, and set it to “loop”. Those MIDI drum sounds feel more natural to the ears, and grooving along to them is much easier and much more fun than the high-pitched metronome.

I played around with different sounds on the click track, and varied them slightly on two of the songs. (The kick drum sound I had first used was “drowned” by other frequencies in those songs, so changing the sound was the solution.)

To hear the backing track as well as the click track, I used the headphones output on the M-Audio Fast Track Pro. It has a nice “Mix” function. Depending on the song, I would change the balance (mix) between the backing track and the click track.

This solution, BTW, did not help to solve the initial problem. The engineer had done something wrong on the click track of that song, and there was no time to have him redo it. How did I work it out? Instead of a “proper” click track, I put the original song from the CD as my click track, and switched off the backing track in my headphones. Guess what? We went through the song without any difficulties!

On a sidenote: in some loud live situations, the M-Audio Fast Track Pro headphones output might not produce enough volume for you to be able to hear everything easily, so I recommend having a preamp ready, just in case. And always remember: use custom-made earplugs at any gig! The standard ones that are readily available in supermarkets are useless!

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: How to play with click track, click track for drummer, drums, drummer, playing with click track

Not only are there new alleys for promotion, like Last.FM or MySpace, but also brandnew channels for selling material. Most importantly, and most worryingly for the big record labels, cutting out the middlemen.

Today I came across a new and very interesting service, that I feel you bands should take a look at: Songslide.

Thanks to Jonathan Coulton, on whose website I found the link.

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: Songslide.com, Last.FM, Jonathan Coulton, Music Promotion, Selling Music

No… have not run out of ideas yet… Au contraire!

Just been way too busy…

Will start posting again soon…

P.S.: Happy birthday to my little bro’, to my friend Dani, and to Boy George.

Today’s Top Tune, Round 019.

Let us expand the horizon a little.

Let us go classical.

No, none of the boring, fit-to-be-played-in-the-background stuff… but something that was a huge influence on Mister Frank Zappa - and countless other musicians/composers: Monsieur Edgard Varèse. A composer, most people would say, but he preferred to call himself an “organizer of sounds”.

His orchestral pieces are mind-blowing, a true experience, whether on CD, or live. Though live it is one of the best sonic experiences ever.

My first exposure to Varèse was “Ionisation” - today’s choice.

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: Edgard Varèse, Frank Zappa

Today’s Top Tune, Round 018.

Another singer who has been a favourite of mine for many, many years: Marc Almond.

Of course I always enjoyed hearing Soft Cell, but the first album that I bought by Marc Almond was “Mother Fist And Her Five Daughters”. To this day, it does occupy a special place in my heart.

One of my favourites by him is “Live At The Royal Albert Hall”. Off of that album, I totally love his version of Jacques Brel’s “Jacky” - today’s choice.

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: Marc Almond, Soft Cell, Jacques Brel

Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code there with your own.

Today’s Top Tune, Round 017.

Time for another freebie.

Nannue Tipitier has been mentioned on these pages before.

He was the producer of the excellent “My Day EP” by Bangkok-based trio PRIM.

Most of his excellent productions he makes available for free download on his website.

Grab his stuff, scrobble it, add him to your MySpace friends, and ask him to officially release his material.

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: Nannue Tipitier, PRIM

“If someone is not humane in spite of being human, what has he to do with music?”

© (Confucius quote) Oxford University Press.

Technorati Tags: Confucius, The Analects, Confucius Analects, Food For Thought, Philosophy

Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code there with your own.

Today’s Top Tune, Round 016.

Today I’ll give you something a little different… a little harder… a little more aggressive… and extremely energetic…

The band is called NoMeansNo.

They are from Canada and have been around since the 1980s. They did release great stuff, then had an awful time in the late 1990s, but (according to online sources) are back on track.

My favourite album by them is “Wrong”. I am recommending track 2 “The Tower”. Believe it or not: it goes so well with tracks 1 (”It’s Catching Up”) and 3 (”Brainless Wonder”) - you should listen to all three… and while you’re at it, keep going until the bitter end… you won’t regret it! (The album is unavailable at the moment, according to Amazon, but the re-issue should be easy to obtain.)

© Patrice Schneider. No reproduction without prior written consent.

Technorati Tags: NoMeansNo