Blind Voyeurs: In The Studio - Ep2 - BIG CITY

I've just uploaded a new Blind Voyeurs studio video. It's a bit shorter than the last one. This one was filmed around Spring '08 - just never got round to editing it.

So here it is in all it's Vimeo glory. I've also uploaded it to youtube on BlindVoyeursTV.


Blind Voyeurs: In The Studio - BIG CITY from Steve Beck on Vimeo.

Pale White Dot...?

I can see light at the end of the tunnel, the end is near approaching... yep, that's right we've nearly finished the Blind Voyeurs' debut album. We've got a small list of a few bits here and there on each track that need tidying up. We've been clipping our lovies and sweeping the dust under the carpet for so long now that the album has completely changed direction from original vision. But all for the better me thinks - it actually 'feels' like a complete body of work.

In the last 14 or so months some of our favourite songs/tunes have been removed and new ones have surfaced that have raised the bar. We've made some controversial decisions and will be making MORE controversial decisions in the next couple of months. We've had band members come and go and then come back again (and then go...) We've also got a new top secret weapon that can only be unveiled in 2009.

In the next 2 to 3 weeks things should all be being finalised (I'm not saying too much yet cos you never know what might happen) then it's time to look at artwork and inlay cards etc.

People keep asking us 'how long does it take to make an album???' Well, the answer to that is - as long as it has to!

Y'see the thing is, we all have full-time jobs and we have social and family lives to lead. And then there's holidays and sicknesses etc. If we were a fulltime band working 9 to 5 on nothing but music, you could compress all the time we've spent on this album quite easily into less than 6 weeks. Don't forget that we're doing everything ourselves AND learning everything from scratch.

We've also switched our recording software platform 3 times since we started and new hardware equipment has been purchased halfway through from mixing desks to bass amps to microphones! Add to that the fact that we all really care about this project - it's a complete labour of love - so we're never using the "That'll do" mindset.

And then there are the gigs. We found out at the end of last year that with a project this big we can't concentrate on recording and rehearse for 2 or 3 gigs a month at the same time. So in 2008 we decided to tone it down a bit... until eventually not gigging at all!! It was tough turning down gig offers - and I still hate doing it - but we had to try and prioritise. Gig or record. One or the other. If we attempted to do both, each would suffer. We would have ended up with a string of shit gigs followed with a dessert of a half-arsed album. That would've pissed everyone off!

Anyway, I don't want to build it up - in fact I dunno why I rambled as much as I did. It all just came blurbing out! I do that sometimes. Anyway... enough for now.

Home Alone

So Lisa's buggered off to Wales for 4 nights. Which leaves just me and the cat left to fend for ourselves!! She went yesterday and I already miss Lisa loads - just don't know what to do with myself. But that being said I can always find things to distract myself - I've got loads of little tweaks to do with the BV album mixing, I'm learning how to use Final Cut properly (God it's sooo fuckin in-depth and professional! FACTOID: The Coen Brothers used Final Cut to edit and colourize one of my favourite films - No Country For Old Men)



I've also got The Force Unleashed to play - which is totally frickin awesome! Absolutely love the storyline in this. If you're a Star Wars fan (which I clearly am) then you have to check this out because the story is mindblowing!



Last night I finished off watching series 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Woah, what a finale?!?!?! Battlestar is, IMHO, probably one of the the best sci-fi shows in the history of all TV ever - it's sooooo realistic and dark and the characters are deep and ... and... I could go on but I won't!

Before Lisa left we popped into ASDA to grab a few things and just as you walk in they had boxes and boxes of Carlsberg and Kronenberg (18 bottles) for a fiver each!! So we grabbed a box of each - there were loads of freshers there buying them by the trolley load! So, all in all, I've got loads to keep me occupied, 36 bottles of beer in the fridge and a chippy/chinese/indian take-aways just round the corner .... I think I'll survive!! :)

Blind Voyeurs: In The Studio - Episode 1

Jamming in the studio Saturday 13th Sept 08



The BV boys have a new studio to play in. Interestingly it's situated underneath a pole dancing studio in Southbourne! This is the first in hopefully many insights into what actually goes on in there. This week we decided to take a break from recording and decided to have a jam - to see if we come up with anything interesting.




Blind Voyeurs: In The Studio - episode 1 from Steve Beck on Vimeo.



Blind Voyeurs on Myspace

JB records guitar

JB records guitar, originally uploaded by SteveBeck.

We had our first band practice at the new rehearsal studios on Sunday. Sound was good - nice and punchy. We re-recorded the guitars for The Christening because it was too muddy. We decided to record them totally clean. Also added a few incidental drum and percussion sounds here and there in the parts that will adjoin Chistening with Pale Blue Dot. Other recorded parts were lo-fi drums for Keep It On The Road.

The practice room is situated in the basement of a Pole-Dancing dance studio. It was empty - they have classes on Thursday. There was an old tuneless upright piano in there which was a bit of fun to tinker on. Thinking about using it for something in the album. Could be pretty haunting

GTA has got me and not letting go!

Sorry about the lack of posts. GTA IV is to blame mostly! Whenever I got a spare moment I'm on that thing plugging away at those missions, sniping people, stealing cars, killing prostitues etc.

That being said, I HAVE been having a life....



I went to see Iron Man with Lisa (after a really nice meal in Wagamamas). 2 words about the film ... 'fucking incredible'! Robert Downey Jr is amazing as Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Jeff Bridges is unbelieveably brilliant! The storyline is totally believable and solid, the acting is superb, the sprinkling of comedy had me laughing out loud, the effects were seamless and it had the best cameo of Stan Lee ever! It will have to be owned on Blu-Ray when it comes out.

I've been to 60 Million Postcards this week twice - once to see Maz perform her RubyMusic stuff live and give her a bit of support, and the second time was to go to the 'It Came From Japan' evening (I write about that on my Bi-Polar Bears blog)

I've been to see my dad during the bank holiday weekend

I watched the Snooker final.

...and the footbal final with Chealsea V Man U (that's probably my only football entry on this blog!)

Been getting back into Heroes


I received my NIN Ghosts Deluxe Edition in the post this week. Chuffed!

We played a gig at 60 Million Postcards for Solid Air - everything went really smoothly... apart from the very end where the last track fell apart because of technical difficulties (although, nobody in the audience actually noticed - they all thought it was part of the song!)

Oh and I've shaved my head!

New music video for Blind Voyeurs

So, I figured it'd be good to submit something to Vimeo as I love that site and I thought why shouldn't I showcase some of my material!? This video is a short snippet of some of my live visuals for Blind Voyeurs gigs put to some music. The tune is called Chemical Burns.

New tune + New Visuals = New Music Video.



Blind Voyeurs - Chemical Burns (DEMO v1.02) from Steve Beck on Vimeo.

It's also on YouTube. If you've got a profile on there and want to fave it, comment it, rate it. Feel free

I'm on the Radio tonight

...with my band, Blind Voyeurs. Here's a Copy&Paste of our Myspace Blog post...

We'll be on Hope FM tonight between 7pm and 8pm (GMT). We'll be playing 4 tracks from the upcoming album and chatting with the hosts about stuff. Listen to the stream online here...

http://www.hopefm.com/

...or tune your analogue dial to 90.1 FM - but you'll need to be very local as their range is pretty short. If you listen in online be sure to have pop-ups enabled on your browser.

Hope you can tune in

Blind Voyeurs - Stoner Jam

Here's my first video from Vimeo. Wanted to test how long my videos can be cos YouTube is limited to 10 minutes. It appears that the only limit on Vimeo is by the size of the video file! Sweet.


Blind Voyeurs - Stoner Jam from Steve Beck on Vimeo.

Classic moments

I loved playing this gig. This was last May at the bank holiday weekend. My band, Blind Voyeurs, aired the track Chapter13 for the first time and it went down really well. Was really nervous about playing it at first but I soon got into it. Here it is recently uploaded to our YouTube channel...



This is proving to be a bit of a nightmare to record unfortunately!! We'll keep working on it though - I think it HAS to be on our first album

Recording

Lee popped round to our flat on Sunday to do some recording. He needed to record his parts for Christening, Pale Blue Dot and we had a stab at the vocals for Ghost Written - but we'd left our popscreen at Andy's so we had to do a make-shift one out of a wire coat hanger and a t-shirt. Wasn't too happy with the recording though - Lee's voice was a bit shakey and the popscreen made his sound a bit muffled. We'll try it again another time. Other than that the other recordings were successfull and we had a laugh to boot!

No posts for a week...

Yep, I've sent no posts for a week! So what the hell's been happening since my last nerdy tech post?!? Well, it's a mixture of 'not a lot' and 'too much to mention'. My main thing has been preparing for moving out of mine and Scott's flat to move into Lisa's flat. Lottie will be taking my place.

Friday 2nd Nov, 2007
Went to work - it sucked. Scott and Lottie were off to London to see Carter USM supported by Sultans of Ping. Lisa came round to help me pack some stuff. We also managed to get wasted and stay up til 4am!! Not good as I've got a gig the next day!!

Saturday 3rd Nov, 2007
This was the day of the all-dayer at The Gander (oh and Rob's birthday!).



For those that don't know (shame on you) this was a day to celebrate the re-opening of The Gander as a premium local venue for unsigned bands, and to give Imogen and Chris a good send off as they're moving to Japan. Their departure will essentially be removing a leg from the Betika and Dutch Husband table. Luckily Betika have found some fitting 2 by 4 to prop up the table while they're away. Dutch, on the other hand will attempt to stand up as a three legged table. What the fuck am I talking about!??! I dunno... I think I've lost it.

Anyway, we got there at about 2ish to set up. I was starving and a bit shaky on my legs after only getting abut 4 hours kip and being hungover like a bastard. I got myself a Subway and bottle of water. We did sound check with Dave Purse on drums - Scott was still on his way back from London and apparently there were railworks on the track so his train was delayed. After all sounded good I got my frist drink of the day and enjoyed the first two bands.

I'd seen Slate Caverns before. To the untrained ear it sounds like he's making shit up on the spot. But I've seen him several times before and I know that what he's playing is pre-planned, written and sharper than a surgeon's blade. He's also the only act I've ever seen use his foot to play guitar, his knee to control a wah-wah and both hands controlling two separate pedels simultaneously. Amazing! If I ever write a film, I want a Slate Caverns "tune" in the soundtrack.

Creepythinguy was great too. Reminded me of a Graham Coxon solo acoustic gig - if he ever did solo acoustic gigs that is. It was interesting to see him using a nylon stringed classical guitar though.

We were up next. The crowd was getting big by the time we got on stage. I thought we played like shit. My bass was slightly out of tune near the beginning, even though I'd tunes up. Both the guitar amps were WAYYY too loud and I fucked up loads on the keys during Pale Blue Dot. There were more but can't remember them. Anyway, we played and entertained. And what did me in the most was that people were coming up to us and say we were awesome. One comment was "You guys should be fuckin' headlining Glastonbury, or sommat!" I'm like, "Glad you liked it!" But I wasn't gonna start putting ourselves down. If he enjoyed it then that's cool. My job was done. I just took it.



We had to get all our stuff off stage and get it home before we could relax and enjoy the rest of the day. I've played at an all-dayer before and when it came to taking my stuff home at the end of the night I was drunk and left half of my shit there never to see it again so I wasn't gonna make the same mistake twice. We dropped our stuff at James' and Emma gave us a lift back.

By the time I got back Dead!Dead!Dead! were on stage - man, I didn't think we were gone that long! But that's ok, cos I love D!x3. Such a good band. They were giving out free CD's too - which I wish we'd done. Actually, that reminds me. I spent three hours the previous night making an "Album Preview/Exclusive Demos" Blind Voyeurs CD for the raffle and I don't remember hearing it being mentioned. I think Tone might've forgot to put it in with the rest of the prizes. Oh well.

As the night went on my memory of what went on get's hazy - not that I felt drunk at the time. I remember getting my nursery rhymes mixed up with Simone at one stage and Nikki was being my clapping buddy (we were both holding drinks so we used our spare hands to clap - she was my left hand, I was her right hand)

Potts was on a mission to find the most disgusting combination for a drink - and came up with Tequila & tobasco shots! He made me his guinea pig and force fed me the prototype (the git told me it was a normal tequila) and although it was really hot it was bearable. It ended up being like an endurance test as we were challenging each other and other people to down one, too - I think I had 3 or 4 of them!!!!!



Me, Summa, Kai, Potts, Mark and JB went to iBar after for more drinks. Were were in there for a couple. Kai didn't believe me that the owner of iBar wrote the original Worms game. I had to call Andy over to prove to him that he did. Even then Kai said "I dunno.. I think you set that up!" After a drink too many it was time for us to all head home. I think I completely passed out as soon as I hit the pillow.

Sunday 4th Nov, 2007
This was a null-day. Too hungover to do anything!!!!!!!!!!! Stayed in bed - even that was an effort!

This week so far
Lottie and Scotty went to Wales on Monday for a dirty week in a log cabin with hot-tub and jacuzzi. Which was good for me cos that meant they were out of the way for me and Lisa to start doing some proper packing and shifting. My bedroom is all echoey now - all that's left in there is a matress and a check of drawers - both of which are to go to the tip.

And that concludes the summary of my week!

Strong Coffee

Man, I hardly slept last night. I just couldn't sleep. I remember seeing the clock at 3:20 thinking "For fuck's sake SLEEP!!" I think it was due to the 3 strong cups of coffee I had over at Lee's earlier. Now, I don't normally drink a lot of coffee - I used to when I was at College/Uni - but I've started drinking it again recently, and last night I needed one ....or three.

I was over at Lee's doing some overdubs on Mockery. It took us probably about 4 or 5 takes before we were happy with what we've got - all recorded in nice managable chunks. Now it's really starting to take shape.

We also had a lot of time to record Lee's guitar parts to Ghost Written and play around with 2 new ideas/tune. One of which you can hear below. It was just recorded as an acoustic guitar played to a click track.... but like I said I couldn't sleep last night so I had a little fiddle around with programming some beats to it.

Have a listen and tell me if you can tell that I'd had a lot of coffee that evening...

Lee's Idea 1

Hallway Reverb

Me and Scott recorded some over-dubs for Lyposuction last night. Here's a pic of Scott 'performing' the tambourine to put on a section of Lyposuction. My plan was to get a nice active 'real' sound of a tambourine being hit on the snare on the second half of the song. We put the microphone in the bathroom and Scott played the tambourine in the hallway where there's lots of hard angles. The result sounds great. I know that nobody will ever notice it but that's the point - if it sounded 'off' or too clinical it would stick out like a sore thumb. If it's not noticable then my job is done!!

Blind Voyeurs Gig - at Kyps 27/09/07

On Thursday 27th, Sept Blind Voyeurs had a gig at Mr Kyps. I was real excited about it cos it's a great venue with a amazing sound system and proper lights and dry ice. I knew it was gonna feel like I was in a proper band, not a pretend one from granny-capital Bournemouth. Hahaha!!

It was good fun hanging out with the other bands backstage. Before we started some of us were a bit worried about a couple of things - the size of the venue and the projected visuals. We thought the place would be too big and the fact that we didn't have a white sheet to project our visuals on were concerning. I maintained that there was nothing to worry about. The other guys were flapping and saying we should've at leat wore white t-shirts. We told Kat our concerns and she tested the projection for us.... it looked effin' amazing! You couldn't wipe the grins off of the guys faces.

The actual gig went well. I know that I made a few fuck-ups here and there, and the guys know that they did too but they were just minor details.... except at the very end of the very last song Scotts bassdrum pedal fell apart, so we had no bassdrum for, like, the last half a bar! Nobody noticed and, to be fair, looking at the videoclip you really can't tell. Speaking of video clips, here's a couple from BHone...





We produced 50 CD's for that gig, all limited and numbered, and we didn't expect to get rid of many. In fact at the beginning of the night we put about 20 of them around the venue and a further 10 by the front door, thinking that we would need to collect left-overs after the gig. But to our amazement when we came of stage we had people asking us for CD's as the ones that we'd put out had all gone!! We gave out the remainding 20 and even then there were still people that wanted a CD!!!

All the other acts played well too. My favourite bit was at the very beginning when Chris (Little Boat) started playing. Everyone was stood at the back when he started and by the time he'd finished his first track about 30 people had creeped up to the front - it gave him a scare. He said it was like some kinda Zombie film and got everyone to give a Zombie-like moan.

All in all, It was one of my favourite gigs we've played!

Grooves on the Green

I was proper pissed off that I missed it this year! Can anybody tell me what it was like?

The reason why I missed it was cos we were practicing for a Blind Voyeurs gig at the Central. It was part of an after party band bash organised by bhone.co.uk with Sancho and Toupe.

It was good to see The Central back on the circuit as a venue to bands to play. If they book some good bands - y'know, proper touring bands - it could have the potential of being a great venue. Give it about a year and a small bit of refurb (lick of paint, bit of carpet, some locks on the girls bog doors!) and it could be great. Don't fuck it up, boys.

So, yeah, I enjoyed playing that gig. Had a nice sized, open minded, listening crowd. I think we played pretty well, had good comments anyhow - even an offer to play Strawberry Fields festival next year. Ace!

Here's a clip of us lot playing The Mockery. Sorry about the poor quality - it was off my mobile phone. Also, another apology for some of us having our tops off!!

Neglect is an ugly thing!!

Ok, it's 11th June, so here we go with what now seems to be a MONTHLY blog post! Why am I leaving it so long to actually post something I do not know. Will have to sort it out. The thing is, I've done sooooooo flippin much in this last month that if I sat down to go through it all it would be July 11th!

So let me summarise what I've done in real quick fashion...

. Me and Lisa were going to have kittens (YAY!)
. The Kittens died! (BOO!)
. Lisa's parents came down to stay for 10 days. It was nice.
. My band played a gig at 60 Million Postcards. It was nice.
. We've written some new tunes. They are nice.
. My mum bought a new TV. It's bloody HUGE! (47" HD-LCD!!)
. Mum complains that she STILL can't see the TV!! WHAT?!
. I'm growing my hair!
. Went to a local mini-festival organized by the Fire Dept. It was great!
. Went to bhone's all-dayer at The Gander before it closed down. That was amazing.
. Discovered Tarantino/Rodriguez's double bill film called Grindhouse! Excited.
. Enjoyed reading the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels vs Betika nonsense on solidair's message board. Ridiculously pointless but heart-stoppingly entertaining.
. Bought Tomb Raider Anniversary! Totally amazing!!
. And finally met up with Kim and Paul on Friday after work and had a wicked random night out in town.

There! Hope that covers it all. There are lots of pretty pics in my flickr account covering a few of the above events. Go check it out.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and keep this up to date.

Sat on the blog...

Fuck me it's been such a long time since my last post that I decided to start this post off with a four-letter f-word shocker!!

So what have I been up to exactly. Well, since my last post (the one about my lovely new macbook) I've been up to Wales to see Lisa's parents. We must've brought bad luck with us cos during the course of our stay we witnessed a sheep giving a difficult birth, a tree falling down across their neighbour's driveway and their TV packed in! Since we left Wales we've heard that their fridge and dishwasher had packed in too!! Oh dear.

Lisa's taken back the goldfish. Me and Scott have been looking after her goldfish for about a year and now Lisa decided that she'd like to have her around her place for a bit. I'm not bothered mind, but I kinda miss the little bugger swimming around in the corner of our lounge.

During the weekend just gone, Lisa and I drove up to Worth Matravers to see James and co for a birthday drink. James, Emma, Potts, Summer and friends were staying at a cottage for the weekend to have a murder mystery weekend. I was invited (along with Lisa, Scott and Lottie) to go too but none of us could afford it. Anyway, we went to this little pub called Square & Compass. It's a great pub with great atmosphere. There's chickens wandering around the grounds, people playing harmonica and guitar, some people go there to make sculptures, real ales straight out of the barrel and it had the worlds smallest bar (I don't know if it's actually the official worlds smallest bar but it was pretty darn small!) Such a chilled out hippy vibe. Loved it.

My band, Blind Voyeurs have just released a YouTube channel called Blind Voyeurs TV (or BVTV for short) and it will eventually have lots of video clips of us lot. We're planning on having clips of gigs, clips of us practicing and generally larking about. Right now we've only got two videos uploaded but that's only cos we've just got started. In the favourites section we will have a whole load of videos that we like from some of our favorite and influential bands. If you get bored or there's nothing else on TV head on over there to see what we've got. If you've got your own YouTube channel add us as friends or subscribe to our channel to keep up to date.

Joiners Gig for Blind Voyeurs

Yet again, I've not updated in a LOOOOONNNNNGGGGG time - so I'd best fill people in on what's been going on!

My band, Blind Voyeurs, had a gig at The Joiners Arms, Southampton supporting Maps and The Longcut. Tone from BHONE has done a full review of the gig. The nigth went really well and we had a great reception from people who had never heard of us before. One guy said we blew away the headline act! I wouldn't have said so in my opinion but thanks all the same.


Taken on my mobile during soundcheck









Below is an 8 minute video clip from the gig taken by Tone from BHone. In it we're playing The Christening followed by Pale Blue Dot. Apologies for the darkness of the clip!

New toy!!

Yesterday our band's new toy arrived. The Boss SP-303 sampler. I've got one thing to say - it's wicked! You can do sooooo much with a sample once you've got it in the memory. It's so easy to mess up and distort and twist sounds completely out of recognition. For example last night I was just sampling me saying something random into a microphone taking small sections of the sample and looping them forwards and backwards and mashing it up with weird effects! One of my favourite FX is the 'Lo-Fi' effect. It emulates a real basic 8-bit sampler, sounds much like an SK-5. And then there's the 'Radio Tuner' effect that makes it sound like some sorta detuned radio. Oh and the 'Vinyl Simulator' with adds crackle and flutter to a sound to make it feel like it's coming off a record! Amazing. Now all I have to do is learn how to use it properly! For more information read THIS.