Film: The Spa Loop

Over the last few months I’ve been making a short documentary about the local railway line.

Advertisements

“Exit Review”: Vox VDL-1 Dynamic Looper

The Vox VDL-1 looper has been a major part of my violin pedal set up for some time now. I bought it in August 2011 and have rarely done a violin gig without it. This is a review based on those 6 years of use and to explain why I think I need to get something else now.

As I wrote in 2012, there’s no such thing as a perfect looper. They all have their plus and minus points. Which one works for you depends on which plus points you need the most and which minus points annoy you least. I assembled this list of pluses and minuses for the Vox looper based on those 6 years of near constant use.

Good points

• Two loops. They can be either synchronised to each other or not as you want. The mode is easy to set when you record the second loop and was one of the main reasons I looked into this looper over others available at the time.
• Loop Effects. The VDL-1 has loads of effects that you can add to loops after they have been recorded. This is a great feature, you can pitch shift, add filter effects, stutters … oh all sort of things. You can also vary those effects with the footpedal while they are being applied to the loop. It’s such a cool feature. You can overdub effects over other effects too.
• Live effects. You can also apply effects to the live signal that are independent of the loop signal – though they do get recorded onto the loop if you record it. I hardly ever used this as you can only have one live effect per preset.
• Foot pedal for controlling the effects. Another great feature I think, it allows the loops to become something more than just a static background effect, they can make loops really ‘live’ and evolving.
• Stop modes fade/delay and stop. In practice I only ever used the fade and stop options as the delay sounds cheesy. Again the fade option is a major feature for me as it allows me to change sections of the music gradually rather than suddenly.
• Uses a standard 9V pedal power supply. It’s a minor point but useful when you have a lot of pedals and power bricks lying around!
• The price. It’s only £199 new. It was that price when I bought it 6 years ago and seems to be the same now. It’s very good value.

Good points that I never used

• Microphone input (with trim). It has an XLR socket on the back for a dynamic microphone. I never used it though.
• Metronome/bpm option. Actually for me this was a bad feature as it’s quite easy to switch it on by mistake and I never needed it. When it was on, it forced loops to end on a whole beat – which was useless to me as the looper never knew what speed I was playing at so it just left empty space at the end of my carefully crafted loops!

Bad points

• It has a gate built into it that you can’t bypass. When I first wrote my piece on loopers I thought it was the Vox being noisy. This isn’t true, it’s the BOSS RE-20 that hisses (it’s emulating a tape delay – rather too well). But the looper’s gate makes that noise come and go in a very conspicuous way when playing pizzicato. UPDATE: It does seem that the Vox was aggravating the RE-20 noise. Now I’m using the Pigtronix Inifinty looper it’s all gone quiet!
• For arco playing it’s much less of a big deal to be honest, but once you know about it it starts to annoy.
• No loop level control. Loops always play back at the level they were recorded at. You can assign the footpedal to control the loop level, but it counts as an effect so you can’t have any other effects applied to that loop unless you overdub the loop at a lower level and then change presets.
• Changing presets causes a momentary dropout in the live channel. This one of my biggest gripes with this looper. If you want to change preset while playing … DON’T. You’ll get a glitch of about 1/8 of a second in your playing. The loops continue to play fine so I don’t know why it can’t keep the direct channel going too. It’s really irritating.
• The effects are often of low quality. The pitch shifts and distortions are quite ropey if I’m honest. and the delays are quite basic sounding. They are nowhere near as good as the ones I have in dedicated effects pedals. For the price I suppose that’s to be expected, but it does make them less useful than you might like. Generally I mostly used the reverse, stutter and filter effects.
• It’s complex to operate. There are quite a few operations where you have to press more than one switch at the same time … with your foot … without falling over … and playing a violin. With practice I learned to do this, but it does take practice.
• It’s big. really big. Not heavy. Just big. There’s no way this would go on a pedalboard, unless it was a huge pedalboard with not much else on it. So you do have to carry it around separately. This also means it always has to be at either the beginning or end of the signal chain.
• Low build quality. I think this has become a major problem for me now. The footpedal need regular tightening to stop it just flapping around and returning down to the ‘toe’ position all the time. The push switches fall off occasionally and when that happens the tiny springs disappear into the undergrowth of the carpet or blackness of wherever you’re playing. The internal boards come loose and the whole thing stops working until you kick it … then it works for a while and you need to kick it again. Then you need to take it to bits and just reseat everything because it’s been kicked around. Its not fun.

Things that other people have mentioned not liking that never or rarely bothered me

• There’s a stupid bug where if you record a loop and don’t use it immediately (go to STOP rather than PLAY), it puts a small gap at the end of the loop, adding time to it so you lose sync. I only hit this once playing a piece written by someone else.
• Only 90 seconds total recording time. I very rarely hit this though I’ve come near to it quite often. For others it’s been a deal-breaker though.
• No way of saving loops. I always play live.

So I’ve been looking around at other loopers that might take its place. Current favourite is the Pigtronix Infinity – watch this space, I might review it in six year’s time 😉

 

“Don’t Drone Alone” – tape release

Sometime ago I was approached by small local label “Don’t Drone Alone” and asked if I would like to make a release for them. Apparently they had heard my set for “A Working Day of Drone” and liked it 🙂

Once I saw “ripples” by genesis plays in our hearts on their website I knew they were going to be my kind of people, I’m a huge Genesis fan, so I agreed.

That release is now available to buy, you can get a physical cassette or a digital download. I do recommend the cassette, if only for the awesome artwork that Christian Harrop did for it. All my albums have had ‘artwork’ done by me and as I’m no artist I’ve generally used photographs … but I’m not a good photographer either. So it’s a real delight to have quality artwork drawn by a quality artist!

Side 1 is based on the sort of show I tend to do live, it’s mostly electric violin with lots of effects pedals. I’ve used the Blofeld synth on there to fill in some textures but there’s actually a lot less synth on there than you might think on first listen … I can get some great sounds from those pedals. The title “From The Carboniferous” refers to an abandoned quarry near to where I live that allegedly has strange creatures living in it.

Side 2 is a short ‘sci-fi’ style piece played entirely on keyboards. The Yamaha Montage to be precise.

Both tracks were recorded in a single take (with a little editting to remove the occasional pedal pops and bangs) from ideas I already had. Although they were done in one take, they are not necessarily the first take!

The tapes are limited to 50 copies so be quick if you want one of those. I should have some to sell at a gig I’m playing on the 27th of July at the The Fenton in Leeds.

CSMA Session at Red Dog Music

… and another video of ‘Black Cheese’. This is a live set we played at our favourite local music shop Red Dog Music in Leeds. It was done for Facebook live so I can’t embed it here, you’ll need to follow the link.

It’s not exaggeration to say that I have spent a lot of money in that shop, all the gear I was using in that set (apart from the Raspberry Pi and a few cables) were bought there!

 

Link: https://www.facebook.com/RedDogMusicLeeds/videos/1336160253132777/

New CSMA video – album preview

There’s a new CSMA video online …

OK, that’s not a huge event in itself as we often put work-in-progress or weekend synth jams online, but this one is a preview of the new album which we hope to release in July.

The album is quite an advance on the last one I think – and for the same reasons as the Helicopter Quartet album: I’m learning to play keyboards ‘properly’. So there are actual tunes and recognisable chords in the music. It’s much less abstract.

The video is below, and also we filmed a ‘making of’ video too (where you can see Stuart fall up the stairs while trying to follow me with his DSLR!) The link to that video is in the notes of the main one.

Helicopter Quartet – 2017 album

On Monday (March 27th) we released our 6th Helicopter Quartet album “The Birds Discover Fire”. I’m very pleased with this album, it marks an evolution in style and quality that I hope we can continue with and build on.

I’ve saying for years that I wanted more synths on our albums and this time we’ve actually achieved it – without, I hope, detracting from our Unique Selling Point of being a violin & guitar band. It turns out that the best way to get synths into the music is to learn how to play keyboards. Who’d have thought it – knowing how to properly play an instrument increases it’s usefulness! Shocking I know!  The piano lessons are paying off in most areas of my music these days, including composition and arrangement.

There is no intention of turning Helicopter Quartet into a synth band; violin & guitar will continue to be the main instruments but I think the synths add an extra level of texture that’s hard or impossible to get with any other instrument, even with the SY-300 ‘guitar’ synth on the violin.

There are two main synths in use on this album. A Roland System-1, borrowed from my boyfriend, is the main ‘keyboard’ synth (despite having a terrible keyboard but is excellent in every other way), and a TB-3 which is more sequencer-based and provides the pings on ‘Seanet’ and the rolling bassline on the title track. The System-1 is now replaced by a Novation Ultranova of my own which has a lovely keyboard.

I made a video for ‘Seanet’ too which you can see below. The reason for choosing that track was mainly because it seemed the easiest to film. Trying to do “The Birds Discover Fire” sounds a lot like 2 years worth of animation to me! The film was made by using the ‘GoPro on a stick’ technique 😉

and the album is on bandcamp in the pay-what-you-want format as usual

One minute documentary

In a vain attempt to win an massively expensive video camera I have made a 1 minute documentary about the rehearsal studios where Mike & I rehearse and record Helicopter Quartet.

I need views to get into the final judging rounds so please watch – it’s fun and literally will only take a minute of your time!