New Toys

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Today I picked up my new bass amp - an Ashdown MAG300 C210 Combo. What does that mean? Its a 307W combo amp (amplifier and speaker cabinet) with 2 x 10″ speakers. And its lovely.

When I was looking at new amps, I had a few choices. First, do I get a split setup, i.e. a seperate amplifier head unit and speaker cabinets (cabs), or a combo, with the amp and cabs built into the same unit. There were really two differences. Firstly, with split setups, you have more flexibility to mix amps with cabs, so if you already have some, or prefer a particular brand of cabs, you can mix and match your units. The other difference is price. You’ll probably pay about another 20-30% more for split setups depending on what you choose.

For me, price was a big issue, so I went with the combo setup. I saw the Ashdown amps in PMT in Birmingham and after some reading online, decided that this was my choice of amp. So I went over there on wednesday last week and picked up this bad boy.

Of course this was not the best idea as I had a gig on Thursday at the Hare and Hounds so I had about 10 minutes to give it a try out the night before.

Anyway, the gig went well, the amp is lovely. I hope to get more time soon (see Redundancy) to play around with it. I can say that the compression and Sub-Harmonics settings do some damn good work on the sound.

If you wanna see this lush thing, check out my Unboxing photos on Flickr.

Tags: amp, ashdown, bass amp, c210t, cabs, mag300
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New Gigs for the Douglas Furs

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Hello

Just a copy post here to let you all know that my band, the Douglas Furs, have got some gigs coming up. We haven’t played in a few months and have one or two new songs to play for the crowds.

Full details can be found via MySpace, Upcoming.org, Virb, and below.

• 11th April - Varsity, Wolverhampton. 7pm, £4 entry
• 1st May - Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath. 7pm, £4 entry
• 29th May - Bar Academy, Birmingham. 7pm, £4 entry
• 27th June - Jug of Ale, Moseley. 7pm, £4 entry.

Come along if you can, and bring some friends. We might be giving out some free CD’s too if you fancy it!

Tags: birminghamuk, douglasfurs, gigs
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Burnt Fingers Session

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

Date: 13/10/2007
Location: Dance Studio

Sorry! Its been too long since I’ve blogged the Douglas Furs action. We’ve been practicing! I promise. And we even recorded. It’s been 6 months since our last recording session and we were itching to get back in the saddle. Its just a shame it wasn’t as good as I hoped. Don’t get me wrong, the session went well (I haven’t listened to the results yet though) but it wasn’t as smooth as our previous session.

So I’ll be spending this weekend cutting up tracks to throw into iTunes and probably upload to Virb or somewhere. I’ll be sure to let you all know where to find them.
DF Out

Tags: , band, broken fingers session, douglas furs, recording, rich bitch, selly oak
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Phew! Its hot at Robannas

Friday, August 10th, 2007

Date: 7/8/2007
Location: Room 7, Robannas

After one hell of a hiatus, we finally got back together for a rehersal. It took a while since Rich Bitch seems to be out of order at the moment (why can’t we find out whats going on?! Oh yeah, too lazy).

Anyway, we tried out Robannas in town (which is NOT next to Sound Control, despite somone’s instructions). Anyway, we made it there, hiked our gear up the mountain of stairs and got our room (you pay at the end..intriguing). The room left a lot to be desired. It was small, which wouldn’t have been such an issue had the sun not been blinding us and making the room unbearably hot. So much so that we were all sweating like pigs. The gear wasn’t much good either. The bass amp and head were a bit dated, and didn’t seem to do a lot, plus the volume was all over the place. The guitar stuff was much nicer. The PA for the vocals?! A joke. The system was older than my amp, half the switches and dials were missing and the sound was just awful.

Anyway, we made do (even me without a tuner…probably was a bit off) and played our way through the usual songs. To be honest, our playing was rubbish. The vocals were rubbish. The room was too hot, we were all exhausted. It wasn’t pretty

But it was good to get back together and play. We’ll be trying out Madhouse next time, at least until Rich Bitch gets its act in order and we can get back there.

In the mean time, be sure to check out our virb page and have a listen to our songs, add us as friends, check out the photos and watch us playing Birclock live.

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Gigs and Failed Gigs

Monday, June 18th, 2007

As you will have seen on the previous post, the Douglas Furs played their first live gig to a crowd of dozens at the Bear Tavern in Bearwood on 22 May 2007.

After being the first ones there, we got on the list, went to enjoy some food while being nervous, we were told we were 3rd on the bill.
After sitting through a guy on an acoustic guitar, and a guy playing Gary Moore with his massive pedal, we took to the stage. Our set list went as Russia, Sequoia, Birdclock, and finished on Dog in a Garden.
It seems like the cowbell alone got a lot more cheers than some of the songs, which is a shame, but I’d put it down to not knowing the songs.
As said before, you can check out the photos on Flickr, or the video on Revver.

After the half-success of the first gig, we planned to return on 12 June. Unfortunately, I had a call from James to let me know that the gig was cancelled. The whole night was. Apparently there was some trouble with fighting, and the night got permanently cancelled.

And as you would have it, the Douglas Furs take a short break. The other guys are in moving season and houses are scarce, so practice and gigs have been put on hold until July.

Hopefully, we’ll be back with a bang, with a new song in tow (and one less song thanks to a missing notebook). We may even get back to record again.

So until more happens, keep listening!

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Band Recording: 6 April 2007

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, and finally decided to.

On 6 April 2007 (mark this in your DF journal) we stepped into the recording (dance) studio and did our first ever recording. Wanna know how hi-tech it was? We used mini-discs.

The way Rich Bitch works, they have a professional recording studio, where you can pay about £400 for 10 hours of studio time to get proper recordings. Or, you can hire the Dance studio for the standard price (£12.50ph) and record for free to your own minidiscs. So thats what we did. We booked our normal 2 hour slot  and went in armed with a few discs. You can ask the technicians to come and set your levels right and then start the recording. So we got the man in, did a run through of Russia, and let him adjust the sliders and dial and switches that make us sound just like U2. There is even a Bono slider for the vocals. Weird.

Anyway, we pretty much just went through the set a few times over, took a few takes to get it right but we did each song about 10 times so we came out with a good few trials.  The session went quite well. It was cool to play on a stage, with a full rig, and monitors, and the room was really cool too. Very hip (or whatever is the cool word the kids are using)

Anyway, recording was the easy part. Since we recorded to minidisc, the trouble next we getting it from MD to my laptop (I took charge of this fun task). I did some searching and found the only way was to do it through a line -in port and a 3.5mm mini-jack. So that meant recording in realtime. So I set the thing to record, hit play on the MD player, and buggered off for a while.

A bit later, I had 3 .wav files recorded in Audicity, that I could play with. I brought them into Logic Express and just used the cut tool to snip around takes of songs, then dragged them to a track for each song. This meant I could easily export all versions of one song in one go.

After tediously listening to the whole thing (almost 2 hours) I had split the tracks. They were then exported to wav files, and i used a open source program called Max to convert them to MP3’s, and finally, imported into iTunes and set the ID3 tags. Phew!

The only problems with all this is, the recording level was low so the songs are all really quiet (at least the raw tracks), and its all as one track, in mono, so can’t do any adjustment of each instrument. To be honest, I thought the bass should’ve been louder, and I didn’t like the sound much, and the guitars were a bit loud. So some tweaking needed.

Anyway, some of those tracks are now up on Virb, and if you really want, you can have the raw wav files, and can do some editing of your own. A challenge for any amateur music producers. See what you can do. email us at douglasfurs at googlemail dot com for info.

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Summer time is here again

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

Summer has hit the UK and the ice cream vans are out. Here’s a few pre-rehersal shots of the treats we enjoyed.

You may ask why there are less pics of me. Well I tend to take them, and can avoid them.

Practice update coming soon…

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It’s been a while

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

Don’t worry. This isn’t a tribute to our favorite(!) Durst-assisted band, Stain’d (why the apostrophe? is an e that difficult to find in the keyboard?) Its just an explaination of where I’ve been. Here’s a run down.

1. Been moving house. This means packing boxes, buying furniture, moving boxes, putting together ikea flat packs, contacting many companies about my new address, emptying boxes, cleaning the new place, cleaning the old place, buying food, and some other bits and pieces.
2. Trying to get someone to look at our (new) broken fridge that is about 10 degrees too warm (15C at the mo)
3. Trying to do some studying for my A+
4. Working - gotta make a living
5. Actually sitting down once in a while.

I’m gonna try and do part 3 of the Great Mac Apps. Hopefully the list and indepth reports are useful. Its always worth hearing a bit about apps, rather than a list. On that note, check out osx.iusethis.com for more great app ideas and some reviews too.
Have a look at my shared Google reader feed. I throw a lot of Mac stuff in there, including some great articles on Quicksilver. It is the best app I can’t live without (apart from iTunes).

Please leave comments on the blog. If you find something useful, let me know, let me know what else you wanna know about. I might be able to help, after all I wanna get a job working with Mac’s in the future.

Should also be some band news soon, once we have a practice (last one was a few weeks back and was dreadful. seriously bad). Check us out at www.virb.com/douglasfurs and add us as friends. More tracks will appear as soon as we can record some.

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Band Practice - 10/03/07

Monday, March 12th, 2007

Date: 10 March 2007
Location: Beige Room, Rich Bitch, Selly Oak

Its been too long since the last one of these, but don’t worry, we’ve been practising. To prove it, here are the dates we practiced: 10 Feb, 13 Feb, 22 Feb, 28 Feb, 3 Feb, and then 10 Feb.

What have we been doing? Well practising really.  Been trying to finish Birdclock, Just Woke Up, and also jamming, trying to get some new stuff. We had two, one which was based on the chords D and F (Douglas Furs? That was pure chance, I chose the chords) but despite some people liking it, it was voted off, so its hit the scrap pile. The other one’s chords escape me, but we did work on one this week, which went A, E, B, D (I think, can’t be certain without taking my bass out of its case) but unfortunately, it dawned on me (who then shared it) that that is the same as Just Like Heaven by The Cure, which we were planning on trying to cover anyway! So that quickly came to a stop, although we may be able to salvage it.

There were a few hiccups too, some dropped sticks, retuning (Nick, if you’re reading this, get a new battery), some joking around, and a broken sofa. Don’t ask me how, I just walked in to see it awkwardly broken, and James looking guilty!

I guess the main point of this post, cos not much else happened thats notable, is that we are booked in to do some proper recording. We couldn’t stretch to a full production set-up cos it was about £400 for 10 hours and we haven’t got enough completed material yet, but we’re hiring the Dance Studio and can record onto a minidisc so we’ll be doing that, then do some clever transferring to get it into an MP3 and maybe, just maybe, post it on here. Then maybe you’ll be able to hear a bass line in Birdclock.

Until that day (won’t tell you when), we have one more practice in the Green Room (new to us) which hopefully will be really productive.

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The band has split!

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

I’m afraid its true. The Douglas Furs have split up. You can now find a dedicated blog to just the Douglas Furs at http://douglasfurs.wordpress.com

So if you don’t care about my crap posts, pop over to there and have a read.

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