Howdy Folks.

Good gig on Saturday night, some excellent moustaches in the audience. OK, one in particular, but there you go.  Now I have moustache envy.

It took a while to get folks dancing but we got there :-)

We're still working the new songs from the album in and it looks like its time to investigate some new technology.

On 'Country radio' and 'South of the Border' I'm singing in a lower range (like in Yamanote line) and the vocals sometimes find it hard to clear the rest of the instrumentation. Pete suggested we look at a vocal compressor to keep the vocal levels up when the lower stuff kicks in.

I started looking into pedals that I can manage from stage and found all sorts of neat things, such as boxes that will boost, add effects, auto harmonise and yes, pitch correct on the fly. That's right, forget all that singing in tune nonsense, you can just gargle your way to awesome vocals using some diodes, a small piece of meteorite, a neodymium insert , some software and a 9 volt battery!

Who needs the lungs of whitney, the range of mariah, the lips of Pavarotti and the schnoz of Durante when you can plug your mike into a box and voila, instant fabulousness.

I have resisted the lure of the Dark Side of the pedal board, I mock guitarists (Ha! I mock you!) for their 55 pedal board setups, I have remained, pure, unsullied....oh....Except for the delay pedal for the harp effects, cos that's really cool and....

NOoo!!! I have succumbed!  Oh well. Once again, my credibility dissolves at the thought of new, shiny, plastic boxes with buttons. BUTTONS!!!

Where was I? oh yeah, we played at the Bald Rock, it was neat. Cheers to Big Daddy and his new flatmate, Shane, Wayne, Jane (I am not making this up) and all the folks that spent the evening with us. 

Now I want to go google vocal effects pedals.... mmm......switches and dials. (EDIT NOTE: Thanks to Rosie for hipping me to spell check fail :-)