Stormcellar Band Home Page

Ok thanks to Caroline for pointing out that I had deleted the merchandise link.

ok, sorted.

For the record:

Redbubble Merch on demand.

https://www.redbubble.com/people/stormcellarband/shop?asc=u

It's back up in the menu. Oops. My bad.

BUT!

As I tested the other link, the one that takes you to the place where you buy our stuff directly via CD baby?

Ahem.

CD Baby retired our music store in March of 2020 in order to place our focus entirely on the tools and services that are most meaningful to musicians today and tomorrow.

(cough) bullshit

hmmm, If I was running an e-commerce store for music and I decided without notice to the musicians to withdraw the direct-to-retail option, I wonder how I might, hypothetically, phrase it bluntly.

Maybe like this:

'we weren't making enough out of this to warrant dealing with retail customers so we're gonna let Apple & Spotify make the $ and we'll make our money charging you to sign up to them. All that 'we're in this together' stuff from our founder is well gone because, well, no one's making enough money out of it. Oh yeah, by the way, your customers can pay more to buy through the retailers while you get less but oh well, that's business, nothing personal kid.'

Obviously I am not saying this is what they meant.

But it would be what I meant, if I said it.

Ohhhhh the timesssss they are a chaaaaaaangin.

Sing it Bob.

It's sooooo quiet.

Sunday Sydney Morning.

I have never seen the air this clean.

It's like the flipside of the smoke and fires from this year.

The Blue is amazing.

Less smog from cars etc. Wow. 

The quiet over the last few weeks has increased as movement has been restricted.

It's a month of quiet Sundays. 

Site Fixes

Thanks to Ch3vr0n and the Joomla forum for guidance.

I took the site from a page load speed of a D to a B.

Db.

Heh.

Sound Technician/Musician joke.

During this process the site didn't explode.

So far.

Streaming Tests

Thanks to:

Ray, Dean, Dion, Monte, Rebecca, Jonesy.

Last night Mr Wizard and I tested out Facebook Video, Discord and Skype.

Discord was the winner so far for point to point.

Mr Wizard needs a better mic and interface. The conferencing system drops sound, when it can, to conserve bandwidth, so that sucks, and it distorts.

The lag time didn't seem to be an issue.

We have three things we're looking to stream, I'll lay it out for ya.

1. Songwriting sessions

It's not just the technical.

The songwriting involves Error and Bad Choices.

Also: 'Full & Frank Discussion'

Also: Losing our way, segues into other songs.

Making a sausage is messy, it's also kind of private.

Self consciousness won't help the process, so I figured it will have to be people we'd feel comfortable having in our living room as we do it.

We'll see.

Not sure if this is a viable thing, but why not give it a go. 

2. The rehearsal

Technically trickier, will need at least a few of us plus a new crew member on Bass.

I'd like to open that up to Cellar Dwellers and the General Public

3. Performance

Yeah well.

The technical issues of combining 5 locations worth of data stream is surmountable.

The lag time between each participant may make it untenable.

Testing.

More testing.

When I'm ready to get some folks in to test the receiving side, I'll post here and on social.

Thanks to Monte & Dion for technical discussions.

Fundamentally, this is the sort of geeky stuff that does it for me. 

On track for some testing of the actual gear this week.

Wherever you are out there dear cellar dweller, stay safe. Stay solo, where you can.

After that Public Service Announcement it's off to the races!

Surf's up at the end times!

The shelves were overflowing with food today. People wore masks, ok so that's a bit freaky. Even amidst the Toilet-Paper-Pocalypse of blank shelves, people are starting to realise that society as a whole has not collapsed.

Yay! 

This whole situation is history happening amongst us.

No one will be centered on the 20th century from this point forward, you were either here for covid or you weren't: welcome to the 21st century.

Another observation, and I'll keep my soapbox small, is this:

Given how thoroughly the Australian Government has restricted movement, enacted fines and upended the entire world in order to survive Covid,

After all the massive change,

all the change that probably can't really be undone,

the unintended consequences that we can't even begin to foresee from here...

after all that, 

has it dawned on you that we really can fix pretty much any thing we 

want 

to?

 Like climate change

Pollution

Poverty

yeah.

When we decide to do it...

it gets done.

They just...enact a law and enforce it.

All it takes is the will.

And to borrow and paraphrase from wiser minds, nothing so sharpens the mind as a close call.

COVID, the bushfires, floods, anyone getting the message?

Ok not that message. 

The message that when we stop playing magical numbers games with money and start counting our rolls of toilet paper, what really matters becomes evident.

It also becomes evident how much power we really do have at the ballot box.

Who you elect to lead you is who you are entrusting to help you when History yells out 'surprise!'

Meanwhile, in other Moments Of Levity - life outside the trenches

Regular Cellar Dwellers may know that this blog was originally setup for friends and family who were serving & living overseas.

I am positive I have told this story before; I'll chance to repeat it.

When I asked Dad about his correspondence when he was deployed, he said he wanted to hear about the ordinary.

The mundane. Home life. A link to somewhere outside the jungle, somewhere safe. And we keep on doing it now.

Looking behind the curtain

This is a time to hold fast. the science is simple. stay put. 

To help with that, I am going to open up a little more of the behind the scenes stuff that we are up to.

As you know, or may know, we were in a rest period after the US tour finished in Feb.

The Global Shutdown sort of coincided with scheduled downtime anyway. Except for gigs, which have all been cancelled. Ok so that sucks but hang on. where was I? Oh yeah.

We were due to try our first streaming show on the 11th of April. So we're sort of on Schedule.

Of course being in Super-Duper-Triple-No-Backsies-Lockdown presents a new set of challenges.

Streaming Steps

Thanks to Dion, Monte and my other mates of note, I have now come up with the next streaming hardware test thing.

In a nutshell, I have to connect things together, I have been working out which things connect well.

With luck we'll have a shot at it this week. Will be looking for cellar dwellers to test the streaming platform and also to rate sound. after sound we'll work on vision.

Songwriting for multiple projects

SC12 is in mixing. is it an EP? A full album?

Dunno.

There are songs written in the US we didn't get time to track.

SC 13 is theoretically anything that's not SC12.

unless it's from the 'Salon' Project

Oh yeah.Is that SC14? Who bloomin' knows

The Salon Project

 As we figured we'd have a 'quiet' 6 months after the US Tour we thought it was time to go back to recording.

Of course that didn't account for the random emergence of SC12 on tour. oops.

The idea of the Salon project was to do the same thing as we had done for Kansas City Gold, except this time, here.

That meant collaborating with a bunch of our local mates.

We started that off with CrossFire with Den & Christina, writing something in a fusion of their styles. I really dig it. here's a reminder.

 That took almost...9 months of producing before it occurred.

12 months maybe?

Anyway.

Having  had the idea to do it, we had begun writing songs to suit some of our favorite local muso mates and we were expecting to start when we got back.

So I did and I am.

Phone calls have gone out...of course now that we're restricted in access and travel we have another challenge.

Ah. Ok.

A years worth of work

Finishing what we already started could take us the rest of the year.

I tend not to talk about the next thing we're doing until we get into it because:

A: they take forever sometimes

B: they sometimes get a bit explodey.

But as we all seem to have some extra time, perhaps a trip to the development lab is in order.

if I get my tech together this week, I'm on it.

Stay tuned and keep grooving on your apocalypse. Things are never gonna be the same, so to quote Mr Bowie, let's face the music and dance!

This restriction of association to 2 people present a challenge for rehearsal. And for any streaming live show plans.

Theoretically, as this is work, we may be entitled to do it differently.

But no.

For the time being, everyone's in a big Time Out.

Stay safe out there, and a very big sending of positive vibes to all our mates in the US Midwest.