My Musical Journey

Bands

During my youth I was in a number of original bands and cover bands, as a bassplayer, singer and songwriter.

1984-1989 Thanks for the Fish

• Originated in Brisbane, Australia. Played many support gigs to great bands and I’m proudest of our record of benefit gigs for various causes. Moved to Melbourne in early 1988 but did not get much traction and eventually broke up. 80’s indie punk/pop. Made several demo tapes and a single vinyl release.

1989-1991 Colour Jungle

• Melbourne. Formed with some friends, we had the great fortune of enjoying the talent of the remarkable John Lee of the Dingos. General rock and roll. Released a cassette of various tunes.

1991-1992 Caplights

• The Caplights were a Melbourne accoustic/electric band of a similar genre to the better-known Things of Stone and Wood. Toured extensively around Victoria and put out a CD release and promptly disbanded.

1992 The Great Curve

• Formed as a pickup after-hours cover band for The Club in Collingwood, the Curve were a fearless blend of new wave and trashy pop revisionism. They have been known to reform for festive occasions and torment their surviving fans.

Instruments and gear

Chiefly bass, also keyboards, guitar, electronic instruments.

Basses

• Robbie: 2021 Yamaha 735A 5-string active PJ bass with a dark coffee sunburst body and rosewood fingerboard. I decided I needed a more versatile 5er and a PJ that could do a bit more than the SB-2. The passive tone is just wonderful, particularly on the P side but with the pickup balancer middled, its a great J sound too. Active tone is especially good for slap but also very nice for when you want to play right back on the bridge. You get that trademark Yamaha growl, really takes me back to the 80’s, he’s dark and smooth just like the the bassplayer I named him for!

• Perky: 2012 G&L SB-2 Tribute with ghs pressurewounds. My very favourite instrument. Although made in Indonesia, it has virtually the same components as the USA-made ones in a standard package. Mine is the white with a black pickguard, occasionally G&L change these colours. Well, formerly white. Due to what I suspect is a failed polyurethane cap layer, Perky is slowly turning pink where regular contact is made on the body. It’s a form of relicing which isn’t so bad unless it starts to crack badly, and then I’ll need to protect it.

• Boris: Boris is a 2019 Squier Classic Vibe 70’s Jazz bass, black body with a maple neck and fingerboard. As received he has a very punky/trebly bias which can be tamed somewhat but that’s just what I like about him. Very fun to play.

• Blacky: 2003 Black Washburn XB125 5-string active bass. DR Rainbow Neons. Great 5-string for the price, and DR’s give it a lovely warmth. Also made in Indonesia and is also a fantastic budget bass. As you can see by now, Indonesian-made basses, particularly from the Cort factory, are really good value and there’s no reason to turn your nose up at them. However Blacky is a little bit of a one-trick pony, great for reggae but difficult to brighten up sufficiently for anything else. He is also unfortunately very dependent on his active preamp, the passive mode is very weak, basically useless. But in the right context, he’s great.

• Bluey: Red Metallic Riverhead Headless longscale. This odd bass is a Riverhead version of the classic Steinberger shape but in wood! This bass is very old and battered, having gigged a lot and is retired pending a miracle of reworking!

Guitars

• Shona: Epiphone SG G400-Pro. A classic vintage tone, not like your brasher Gibson style, but a much more mid-60’s sound. Really fast and easy to play, it’s a great rhythm guitar and also has the Peter Green out of phase middle pickup position sound.

• Sparky: A 2005 Epiphone SG Junior with the 700T bridge pickup. This one is defintely brash! Needs a bit of work done on it but quite playable and fun just to make noise with.

• Surfy: 2017 G&L Tribute Fallout (currently NYXL strings). This is an amazing guitar. Somehow it has balance pickups between a neck P90 and a bridge humbucker that can be coil tapped and it’s still balanced with the tap and there’s no volume drop in any position (aside from the perceptual one when you lose bass). Can twang which gives it tones between a Tele and a Strat, it covers all that ground and is still original. Fantastic.

• Siobhan: 2015 G&L Tribute Ascari GT-90. I probably have the last one sold “as new” in Australia, the line was discontinued in 2017 amid the CITES debacle. Stunning looks and sound, it’s the perfect reggae guitar or the perfect anything-you-want guitar! Built almost like an LP except wholly out of mahogany, it certainly has that strong midrangey neck feel.

• Joanna: 2018 Cort Gold OM 06 Acoustic. This is from Cort’s Chinese factory, and it’s the top of the line, yet I paid under $A1k for it, an all-solid mahogany guitar with a sitka spruce top. It’s a ridiculously good guitar, warm, articulate, the most morish acoustic I’ve ever owned.

Drum Machines and Groove Boxen

• Alesis SR-16 drum machine: A drum machine from the early ’90s that only ceased production in 2003! The reason is the excellent quantiser and the solid sequencing and MIDI output. You can input effects and audio to spice up the admittedly unexciting kits, and it’s got some good panning. The sequencer can be fooled to create different time signatures for different patterns which then can be alternated in song mode. It misses some onboard effects but stimulates creativity.

• Maschine Mk3 I needed something better than the SR-16 and more hands-on than just softsynths so after a lot of questing I settled on Maschine and its ecosystem, mainly because its impossible to ignore Kontakt these days and I had to get it. I do want another drum machine thingy though. Maschine is great in its own way though, and when I can get all the synths talking to each other, the synergy between the modx and maschine will I hope be fruitful. Until then, its going to be my beatbox.

Synthesizers

• Yamaha Modx88 Polyphonic digital 88-key synthesizer. This was a very big purchase. I decided to merge two aims, a polyphonic synthesiser with a piano and Yamaha obviously targeted someone like me with this synth. It’s basically a cut-down Montage but still has a LOT of sound-design capability in there if you want to dig into it, but if not, it’s very targeted towards live performance needs. For most people, the smaller keyboards will suffice but for someone who wants the better keyboard, you can’t avoid the 88 to get the weighted keys, but there’s no aftertouch. It’s a fully complient MIDI controller which will be handy later to control other things. The learning curve has been quite steep and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve not bothered with yet but it can be quite useful as a sketchpad for ideas and once you’re up to speed you can get a lot done, particularly connected to a DAW.

• Novation Bass Station II: A monophonic analog synthesizer, it really ticks all the boxes for basic synthesis for me. I love the aftertouch on the full-size keys, and the filter setup is really intuitive. I do find the arpegiattor and sequencer to be the most odd part of the machine, it takes some getting used to. It’s a fantastic little unit for lead lines and silly noises! I’m in the market for a polysynth to deal with pads and some effects and my synthesiser world would be complete. The other really nice thing is that it’s uncomplicated to use as a MIDI synth/controller under several OSes. I’ve not used it under Windows, but I’ve been able to successfully read/write patches to/from it in Linux and use Rosegarden without issues. It’s quite loud, actually, I have to record carefully in Audacity.

Production Gear

• Steinberg UR22 USB Audio Interface: Great USB interface usable under Linux as well as windows/mac. The mono inputs can fool you with panning from stereo interfaces, but its clean DACs are amazing. Very useful in MIDI situations where you want to sync between a couple of machines which can’t do so directly themselves, and important for outputting MIDI data to a DAW.

  At one time before the later 3.16.x series of Linux kernels, linux/sound/usb/quirks-table.h had to be modified for the UR22 in a similar way to that for the Boss GT-10B, but thankfully it’s a standard part of the kernel since then. Depending on your setup, if you use pulseaudio, you will have to kill it to allow native programs like audacity access the ALSA channels to get input. When I’m not recording with it, I use the UR22 as a simple practice interface by looping a line in from the computer to one of the inputs, and plugging an instrument and headphones in. Some music will suffer from the mono input but it does well enough!

• Behringer XR16 Air Mixer This is my new mixer that I have just got and haven’t yet fully integrated my studio into yet, I need a bunch of cables first! It’s basically a box on the floor that you plug cables from your machines into and the interface is an app that connects either by wifi/ethernet and your output ideally is via USB although if you’re doing live stuff of course you have LR main outputs too. The mixer is needed so that the non-electronic instruments I have, have an interface with enough inputs that can do stereo, like my bass DI interface and stereo pedals as well as things like mid-side recording, my H4n Pro, audio from the modx, bs2, SR-16,Maschine, etc. It should enable me to cut down the confusion for my DAW, where I have to literally unplug usbs so it doesn’t have the modx fighting the mixer or the maschine or the bs2 for dominance (ie i can force the modex to just be an audio and standard midi device through the mixer and not through its own USB). Well, that’s the plan. I have to also get a MIDI box to make this happen too!

• AKG Perception 220 Condenser Microphone: Best value Neumann-design based microphone. I don’t know what the 2nd version/usb version are like, I have the XLR version. Perfect for vocals and simple accoustic instrument recordings.

• Zoom H4N Pro These nifty little things are so useful in so many contexts, everyone should have them. I could have held out for a 6, but I couldn’t really justify it, it was overkill for me, the H4n Pro was updated to backport some of the better features of the 5, like the mid-side encoder and effects, and a bunch of improvements. I got one of the nice black ones, the quality of the recording is great, records my acoustic guitar very well.

• Boss GT-10B Bass effects processor: Although superseded by later models, this is an amazing deal if you like your Boss effects. There is a utility to be able to reprogram it from a PC. Linux users have to get their hands dirty with a patch to the ALSA usb driver in quirks-table.h. This file is a moving target: in recent kernels the entries for the Boss GT models has been removed. The catch-all entry won’t work because the usb interface has a couple of specific modes, but don’t be frightened, it’s not that difficult a patch:

  First find linux/sound/usb/quirks-table.h and make a backup file first! Then open the original in an editor and search for the Roland section either by name or by vendor id 0x0582. The file is sorted in ascending order by device id, so we want to put our patch after ids 0x0cxx and before ids 0x0exx, which puts us inbetween two Roland Edirol models currently. Search for the Edirol UA-25EX and work back from there. Found it? Good. Fortunately the syntax for usb quirks hasn’t changed, particularly for Roland/Boss devices so this patch should work for a number of kernels in the 3.x.x series. You’ll have to apply it by hand, of course, so select and paste the following code into a text file and copy that just before the leading { of the UA-25X entry:

{
	/* BOSS GT-10B */
	/* FIXME: this driver is assumed to work like its guitar brother the
	 * GT-10, but there may be subtle differences which need debugging.
	 * Standard mode is 0x00dd, Advanced is 0x00dc
	 */
	USB_DEVICE(0x0582, 0x00dc),
	.driver_info = (unsigned long) & (const struct snd_usb_audio_quirk) {
		.vendor_name = "BOSS",
		.product_name = "GT-10B",
		.ifnum = QUIRK_ANY_INTERFACE,
		.type = QUIRK_COMPOSITE,
		.data = (const struct snd_usb_audio_quirk[]) {
			{
				.ifnum = 0,
				.type = QUIRK_AUDIO_STANDARD_INTERFACE
			},
			{
				.ifnum = 1,
				.type = QUIRK_AUDIO_STANDARD_INTERFACE
			},
			{
				.ifnum = 2,
				.type = QUIRK_MIDI_FIXED_ENDPOINT,
				.data = & (const struct snd_usb_midi_endpoint_info) {
					.out_cables = 0x0001,
					.in_cables = 0x0001
				}
			},
			{
				.ifnum = -1
			}
		}
	}
},

The reference to standard mode and advanced is because only the advanced mode works for use with fxfloorboard. Recompile the module and you should be in business. fxfloorboard is invaluable for making backups because noone can remember all those settings for that awesome patch you made.

Current work

I’ve been writing semi-instrumental electronic music for some years, some of it is on Soundcloud and I did a lot on tindeck before that went down, that is now archived here. Most of it is parody songs, some are originals, quality varies greatly!

See also my penguinmusic.bandcamp.com, for which I hope to be writing more music in the coming year.

General fandom stuff

The Beatles were my first great fandom which continues. I would probably count Talking Heads as my next big interest but I was just as interested in Split Enz, the Police, the Cure, Eno, and a number of other post-punk bands, so as a musician I was never wholly in the punk camp. By the late 80’s I became a full-blown Smiths/XTC/They Might Be Giants fiend and then everything changed in the 90’s and the list of Stuff To Like and People Who Get It grew ever-longer. Since the 2000’s I’ve actually had to go backwards in time to catch up with all the amazing changes in the electronic dance genres, to the point where I am now which is not having any idea but just going with what sounds good!