So how are ya....?

The last thing I can remember was seeing Metromony at 60 Million Postcards last Friday .... and today is THURSDAY!!!!!!!! This was probably due to the fact that it was indeed another late one, and also due to the fact that I was indeed very much pissed as a lord!

Although through moments of clarity I do recollect a band practice on Sunday. And that we wrote some tunes that were far too clever for their own good. So much so that when we had another band-camp on Tuesday I couldn't remember anything we did. Luckily Lee recorded everything we did using the iSight mic on his macbook - there's not a bad sound on those little things y'know?!

Anyway, Friday was a confusing one for me - I also wanted to go see True Swamp Neglect play their last gig at The Winchester as a farewell to Barney. But True Swamp ended up not playing and were replaced by my MB101 and Dutch Husband. Yet, I was informed, via the marvels of SMS, that James, Scott, Ben, Potts, Christian and James's brother were going to 60M for the Metromony gig. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO BE ON THE SAME NIGHT???? (sorry about the capitals there - my CAPS LOCK got stuck). I chose Metromony @ 60M.
pics...








Click ME to see all pics on flickr

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.

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

End of the month... busy busy busy!!

OK, so it turned out that I'm no longer bored of the internet - just that sometimes it can be a chore going to all my different haunts and checking messages, updates and friends requests. And I know I haven't blogged in a while. Finding time is hard. I could do micro posts, I s'pose, but I kinda do that on facebook: 'Steve is ... doing his chores', 'Steve is ... out with his mates' etc etc.

One thing I thought I was going to blog about was Endorse It In Dorest 2008. It was my first time at this local festival and had planned to edit together a movie. But it turned out that it was taking me forever to do because I'm finding iMovie HD restricing. It's the movie editor that came with my macbook. It's pretty powerful but it's a sequential editor, not a multitrack editor which makes it more difficult to get timings right. It's fine for just stringing stuff together though - I just prefered Sony Vegas. Anyway, all the clips are on Flickr. Check out the slideshow below...



I had a great time at this festival. Although, Saturday had heavy rain throughout the WHOLE day. So me and Lisa decided to come home for that day and go back on the Sunday. It was a wise move!

James Burtn also announced that he'd finally popped the question to Emma. Yep, that's right, they're getting married. So a big congrats to them - such a great couple. They were made for eachother (and Emma has the patients of a saint - not many people would put up with James's ways!) We were in Endorse It when we heard the news via text... they were in France... so we had a drink in their honour.

When they got back we had a massive party at Kai's house. I don't remember much about it thanks to Marianna's homemade Casasha. But I know it was a good one.

Me and Lisa dug deep and scraped together some pennies to buy a shiny new 24" iMac. We had to for several reasons. Mainly because of Lisa's Degree (at least that was my main excuse). My old PC was really started to creak and within the last 2 weeks of it's life it managed to catch a particularly nasty virus. I managed to contain and remove the virus but not before it messed up my OS. I couldn't switch the thing off. Everytime it shut down it would restart itself. And I couldn't browse the internets either. It would load up google but then I couldn't go to any other page! Oh and dodgy pop-ups would appear even when I didn't have a browser open. I ran a virus checker on full deep scan and it managed to detect 27 viruses!! I couldn't trust my machine anymore. I could reformat it but then I'd lose everything I had on it. I'd had it for a long time so it was time for a new piece of hardware. Enter then new 24" iMac with 4GB Ram and 1TB Hard Drive.

After it arrived our bloody washing machine decided to die on us!! Talk about timing! Luckily I'd paid off my credit card some months back and hadn't touched it since so the new washing machine went on the card. So now I'm pretty skint!

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

Digg: Free New Nine Inch Nails Song, "Discipline"

Found on Digg.com (for those interested)...

Trent Reznor is an amazing man, just put your email address in to get the download link and check your email to download Discipline, the new single

read more | digg story

UPDATE: I just downloaded it, listened to it, didn't really care for it much. It was NIN by numbers if you ask me. But you might like it. And as it's a free download that's also DRM free that's a bonus. It's better to download it for free and then decide whether you like it or not than to go buy it on CD in HMV, take it home, listen to it and THEN decide you don't like it.

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.

Pitchfork.tv

Check it out! It's a new video site from pitchfork.com. They have videos of live gigs, interviews, exclusive videos etc of lots of really cool bands. It's currently one of my favourite sites. Bookmark it

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

Radiohead have made a packet out of me!

OK, so In Rainbows is still my most listened to album this year. I think they must've put some sorta weird sub-conscious hypnotism interweaved into this album as it's always in my mind. It was starting to make me feel bad that I'd only played a quid for the download as I was definitely getting WAY more than my value for money.

But then they announced the tour... well I had to go to that. So I ordered 2 tickets for me and Lisa - that cost near £100 after order fees etc.

...and then they announced that the diskbox was about to be discontinued and once the last of them have shipped out of the warehouse that was it: no more re-pressings or re-releases. So, knowing the potential rarity value of it I HAD to buy one of those too. So that's another £40 .... except I accidently bought 2 of them cos I didn't check my basket after my browser crashed during check out!...so that's actually £80 I'd spent!!!! Solution? Ebay!

My conclusion to this is that although a lot of people were thinking 'wow, Radiohead are gonna lose out of lots of money cos everyone's bought the download for free!' it turns out that if I were an average Radiohead fan then there will be millions more like me who would either have bought a ticket, a diskbox, or both! And Radiohead are still the world's biggest unsigned band so all the money goes to them, not the record company! I'd say that they've made a fuckin' mint!!!

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!

Radiohead - Videotape (mojib remix)

Looks like someone's already remixed a track from Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows. It's the last track on the album, Videotape, and it features a sample from DJ Shadow. I quite like it but it has to be said that it's not so much a remix as a mash-up. The original track, due to it's minimalistic nature, is probably one of the easiest to remix. Coulda done it myself!! But you have to give him credit for getting there first.

Check out mojib.net for other remixes including Ian Brown and The Go! Team

Videotape (Mojib Remix)

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!

Friday evening

So we got back from Southampton and got a text from James asking if me and LIsa would like to go down to Urban Beach for a few pints and to listen to some live acoustic acts. We though 'yeah, why not' but by the time we'd sat down after a long day shopping we were both knackered. I managed to rejuvenate myself enough to be able to go out but Lisa just wanted to have a bath and get an early night. But she offered to give me a lift down there, which was cool.

I met up with the guys out in the veranda. It would normally be cold but the had an array of outside heaters to keep the punters toastie-like. I didn't know many of the people there... I knew James, Emma, Potts and Ben and that was it. There were another 6 people there that were friends of James and Emma's. I recognised one of them but I can't remember his name. The bands were pretty good. Sarah Griffin doing her usual folky self-written songs reminicent of Katie Tunslut... sorry Tunstall. And the other act was two surfer dudes called Burning Shepherd (no myspace) still living in the mid 90's singing grunge ballads like Stone Temple Pilots' Plush.



(man, how 90's was that video?!) Don't get me wrong, I love Stone Temple Pilots ... or used to when I was a student anyway... and I thoroughly enjoyed the reminder. After we'd downed 2 pints and shots of sambuca me, James and Potts decided it would be fun to recreate the success of The Knights of the 31st album.

Unfortunately all my instruments and mics etc are over at Andy's in the studio so we stopped off at James to grab his acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, ukulele, USB mic and bottle of red wine. I'm not a wine expert but I know that the worst and cheapest wine to get is a merlot - avoid it like the plague. Which is why I was surprised to see that James, somebody who's pretty cultured and has european tastes, has a wine rack full of fuckin' merlot!!! Sort it out James!! Anyway, it was free wine and I was pissed so who's complaining. We stopped off at an off license to grab a bottle of vodka and some mixers. Pott's offered to pay the shop owner in the form of song. The man grinned but declined.

We got back to mine and started by doing shots of vodka and setting up the equipment. The next 6 hours were a blur... no seriously, they really were!! All I remember is seeing Potts crash out on the sofa at about 5 and getting him a sleeping bag before I went to bed. And that's it!! I don't remember anything else. All I have is nine 10 minute recordings of absolute drunkeness. Some of it is actually quite good. We even managed to record sections of bassline and loop them with some drum loops and then record over that on seperate tracks. Some of it is actually genius and will be nicked for Blind Voyeurs ... but 80% of it is utter pish! It's funny to listen to though ... if a bit embarrasing!

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!