Stormcellar at the Royal Hotel, Bondi, This Saturday 23 June
After a three weekend break, we're back with new songs from the new album, at the Royal Hotel in Bondi this Saturday 23rd June 8pm!
After a three weekend break, we're back with new songs from the new album, at the Royal Hotel in Bondi this Saturday 23rd June 8pm!
It's time to adjust the setlist to bring in another few songs from the new album.
Yikes.
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 :-)
Woot - All hail Open Source Software! Our happy little site just had a Mobile template added, so if you're reading this on a Smart phone/iPhone etc, things are going to be easier to see! Go on, whip out your device and try it! Just type our website address in to your in phone browser and marvel at the...err...same list of stuff on the main menu but with less colours (until I get a template package)..
Did I mention it was a free upgrade?
Heh.
It's not every day you get a moment to witness the birth of a new Musical Genre Name.
I was asking local Radio Doyenne (ooh french sounding) 'Salty Dog' Dennis Trevarthen about the word Ozicana, which he used to describe the musical range of songs he had on a recent show.
Saltys taste runs to the same gamut of musical stuff that we write and play, namely, Blues, Roots, Country and Folk.
On Whiskey Talking we did styles ranging from New Orleans stuff to Shuffles to Bo Diddley beats. We followed that up with Chicago blues (little Walter on our Spacejunk EP), Spaced-out Mali-psychedelic-atmospheric stuff with Sweet Misery and Credence meets Pink Floyd on Swamp Monster. On the next album (Nuevo Retro) we tried combining Boogie and Zydeco (Can't Tax Love), Johnny Winters Rock Blues (Roscoe's Boogie) and Australiana/Folk/Alternative on our song about Ned Kelly. By Carl's chair (album 4) we'd completely lost the plot and went all Hill Billy and occasionally Country back to Jazz Blues. Don't even ask me whats coming up on the next album...well..if you've been to our gigs(or listened to the making-of-the-album videos here, you know :-)
Yep, SURPRISE! It's more of the same mix of different stuff!
Believe me, it's made writing a band description a (expletive deleted...sorry, I've been applying for festivals and summing us up in 30 words requires some literary dexterity)
Our music has been played on: Blues Stations, Country Stations, Americana Stations, Alternative Country, Rock and yes, gasp, even mainstream stations (whereforart thou, my indy credibility? for shame). So this kind of makes it hard to pigeonhole us.
After 5 albums (well, almost 5) we can play a full set of almost any of the above styles, just by cherry picking from the albums.
Neither fish nor fowl, Arthur or Martha, a band that relies on songs not solo's, what do you do...
Blessed be the Salty Dog, for he hath given us a name, that we may put in the little 'Genre' box for submission forms, that we can include in Gracenote databases, that will one day be argued about by purists debating whether this particular song or that particular band fits that particular box.
Spake the Salty:
OZICANA - Australian blues/roots/americana/
ust tell em that mixed up kid Salty coined it'
Amen. I will now pass the communion waffles. (This church has Waffles? All right!)