ComEnts

Müf gigged at the Cellar Bar in Bracknell last night, with some awesome bands - Shomaha were amazing. Kinda atmospheric, ambient, dark prog/trancey rock. Really tight and nice guys to boot. Mike and I decided that it was a cool gig for our second outing, although I think we all feel frustrated that the performances aren't doing the songs justice. I think I still have a lot to learn as a "frontman" (Eeewww! I get horrible images of Steven Tyler flashing up whenever I use that term. Not that I think Steve is horrible, but it's just not my style!) in terms of talking to the audience, etc. but at least we weathered the storm of not having a great sound (they don’t have monitors in the cellar bar, you rely on the sound bouncing back off the back wall to hear yourself!). It's an awesome "Cutting teeth" venue, one of my favourite local venues to play, I think I've played there five or six times now and apart from lugging kit up and down the stairs it's always been a good experience.

Looking forward to the 3B's gig now, I feel like I've got a few gremlins out of my system and will be able to put on a better performance at the B's. Now that I can remember all the lyrics, I'm much more relaxed about everything - apart from my amplifier which seems to be a bag of shite unless I have the master volume on full and moderate everything through the individual channel pots. Wolfie was telling me that you can get a power breaker which means you can have your amp on full blast all the time, to get the full Marshall tone out of it, and control the volume levels away from the amp itself. May have to investigate this as tone/volume issues completely wrecked the start of the set last night.

Managed to triple book myself this weekend: Müf are in the studio to record our EP, but I'm rehearsing with White Sunday 2-6pm on Saturday and even tried to schedule some drummer auditions for Red Antennae on Sunday! The Müf recording takes precedence, but as White Sunday are making our debut with the new lineup and new songs at the Fez next Wednesday I really need to rehearse with them on Sat! I can lay down guide tracks, etc in the morning and then let Ian and Sam (and hopefully Mikey Hefflehoff) do their thang before doing my rhythm and lead parts on Sunday morning. I've never recorded my vocals before, so I'm looking forward to that - will need to bear in mind that when we play the songs live my phrasing and accentuation tends to fall in line with whatever the guitar part is doing. This means that I need to work out if I want to have a totally free vocal part (which will be hard to re-produce live) or if I want to record it as I will play it live. Dimebag Darrell gave an interview once where he went into the ins and outs of his recording philosophy - he was always aware that whatever he played in the studio he'd need to be able to reproduce live, and he talked about juggling a sense of artistic licence with an obligation to the fans to be able to give a great live rendition of any tracks that he'd done. I think my own attitude to this is that I'd always want a live show to offer the audience something new, otherwise they may as well just stay at home and listen to the CD. Not sure how my dilemna fits into this though, as if I give it 100% on the vocal take, I'll always struggle to live up to it live. Still, art is struggle, mais non?