Scotland Adventure, March 2003

A small group of us did a four day mountain hike on the Glen Affric ridges, camping out in the snow in March 2003. This is probably the most extreme thing i have ever done, and the experience will stay with me forever, unless of course i better it by doing the same in the Alps or the Andes, he heh! My and Viv went along with two very serious climbers, Alexis Pearce (Lex) and Nigel (Beaker). We were hoping to see the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis), but not this time. Instead however, we were treated to the most amazing full moon with a huge corona round it, which almost touched the horizon. Looking south on the final evening, we could see the Cuillins to the west, the Cairngorms to the east and Ben Nevis to the south. We all had a different bottle of Single Malt to keep us going - never leave home without one! Talk about being the highest people is Scotland on the final night, i can tell you! I had a near brush with death in trying to descend a polished ice sheet, slipped and flew down this steep slope. At the bottom were large boulders and beyond a sheer drop down the mountain. Somehow i managed to stay on my feet without breaking any bones and causing myself very serious damage. Indeed lucky. I had a nice gash in my shin and still have a nice scar. A truly unforgetable experience. We were very lucky with the weather as well, and I was surprised by how hot and sunburned i got. I expect it was the sun being reflected off the snow.

Diving in the Red Sea

During my egypt holiday i wanted to do my advanced PADI course, a natural progression after doing my Open Water course in Thailand in 2002. However, i do not consider myself an 'advanced diver' at all - hell, ive only done 20 dives anyway! But i do consider myself to have bettered my breathing and buoyancy control. We chose a dive school called Camel Dive, at Sharm-el-Sheik. I can now dive to 30 metres, a fact of diving which became all too surreal for me at one point - I had a funny turn underwater at 30m during my first deep dive of the training course whilst doing some skills tests. It seemed to have been triggered by me fretting about touching the corals with my fins. My breathing became erratic which led to a panic attack. I signaled my instructor straight away and we ascended to 20m, and soon i felt normal again and fit to carry on. I and my diving instructor reasoned that i had not drunk enough water, or that nitrogen narcosis was creeping in. For those of you who don't know about scuba, nitrogen narcosis happens when, at depths of +30m, the nitrogen you breathe in your air tank becomes halucinagenic! Cool - Tripping underwater! No, seriously, it was a wierd experience but it didnt put me off doing more dives, although i think i learned more respect. Scuba Diving isn't a game...... The snorkelling just offshore was amazing as well! Did some more dives, including a night dive (pink jellyfish pink jellyfishpink jellyfish....in torchlight lol!) and i did a Peak Performance Buoyancy Dive to finish off my Advanced course. We both opted to do one of our dives on Fish Identification - theres a Global Project going on called Project Aware where divers can join in by sending in their collected data. Sounded good we thought. So i bought a fish slate, and the advanced PADI book - Adventures in Diving Manual. Diving in the Red Sea is a real treat as the visibility is very good, and due to the high salt content, you are naturally more buoyant. There are also a wealth of wrecks there including the SS Thistlegorm. However, parts of it lie at 30m+, so i probably would want to do both the Wreck Diving and Enriched Air courses first. I have not done any diving since Egypt, but i certainly plan on going again sometime. To keep interested, i regularly look at underwater photos from people on Flickr, such as Aquanerds, who last year was voted best Flickr underwater photographer.

Egypt, January 2003

Around this time everyone was very jumpy about Muslim countries, you know, around the time just before the second Gulf War. Because of this, we were able to get a very cheap two-week package holiday in Sharm-el-Sheik. As you may know, this very touristy and also very nice place was bombed by terrorists last summer. Our first week was spent exploring the area, and studdying for our Advanced PADI Open Water course. I will make a separate post about this above. On our second week we decided to hell with packages and nice hotels, lets just head inland on a bus. We had arranged to meet some friends from Chorlton (Johnny & Caroline) in Luxor - this is where internet cafes come into their own! So we met up and stayed at a nice place on the West Bank. On one day, we hired bikes and cycled up to the Valley of the Kings (man, HOW HOT WAS THAT!) and went round a load of tombs and temples. Very impressive stuff - ACE! After that we had a night in Luxor city and went round Karnak Temple - also very cool indeed. And that was pretty much Egypt. Had a great time.
Oh, and it was on this holiday that me and Viv decided we both wanted to have a baby. So we filled up our diaries with many short breaks and trips away, and had sex for England. To put it bluntly.

Scanner Fun

I got a new toy - a Genius ColourPage Vivid Pro II (model no. FB624D) scanner! Well, its not new of course, its been sitting inactive in the attic for several years. It was formerly hooked up to Windows 98, and the driver CD was outdated. After a bit of research, i found the right driver called vp2w2k from www.driverguide.com - you have to join and register as a member in order to download, and i found the site quite user-friendly.

This driver is apparantly for Windows 2000, but it works fine on XP. After installing, i was able to simply import scanned images directly into Photoshop. Very handy! Now i have been scanning photos from my backpacking trips. Up to now, ive done the Egypt set and have started on the Cuba photos. Unfortunately the Thailand photos are glued into an album, so i'll have to give some thought to un-glueing them, lol!

The Tripods Trilogy - John Christopher

Who remembers this from around 1985? I was mad for it, as were my peers at the time. John Christopher write the Tripods Trilogy and the BBC televised it, although series three called "The Pool of Fire" was never made. Worse still, only Series 1 is available to buy on DVD or video. However, if you know someone who recorded it off Sky during one of the repeat cycles, then you can see it in all its nostalgic glory. I know such a person, and now i want to read it all over again. Time up update my library membership methinks.

Goyt Valley, Derbyshire

While I've been out of work i've been using my time sensibly! Been doing lots of DIY, mainly wallpapering & decorating my studio room. I've also widened my loft hatch, purely so that i can fit more junk in the attic! Also very much been enjoying the extra contact with my son, Jake, who turned two in January. Anyhow, My partner has taken some holiday time off and we have done some cool day trips. On this occasion we went to the Goyt Valley in Derbyshire (Peak District), specifically to visit Eerwood Hall. Ive been here many times before, mainly before Jake was here, at all times of the year. The best time to visit is around April when all the different colours of Rhodedendron bushes are in bloom. The walk we used to do was to cut along the top of the ridge by Pym's Chair for a mile or so, then dive off down to the left over rough ground, through the trees and finally joining one of the paths which leads to Eerwood Hall. This part of the hike is pretty cool in Mid-Winter after a heavy snowfall. Well, these days are a bit different, its just not practical anymore with a toddler! Here are some of the pics from the 'family version'. Look out for the smallest church in Britain, a quaint round little chappel not far from the road.

Music Software

This is one of my current songs (you can hear it by visiting this link) which i composed using Steinberg's excellent Cubase SX3, Propellerhead's Reason 2.5, and a virtual sound module - Wizoo's Hypersonic. When the mood takes me i launch into producing mode and do very little else! Unfortunately, due to the demands on my time i do not get as much quality producing time as i would like. The reason for this is probably due to this cheeky chappie, and having a houseproud partner who makes me do DIY and cleaning all the time. Cubase is wicked, its definately my studio and sequencer of choice. I first got hold of Cubase 2 on the Atari back in 1994, and its been nice to see how far it has come over the years. There are plenty of Virtual Studio sequencers around :

• Virtual Studio




• (Sony) Acid


• (Ableton) Live


• (Apple) Logic Pro


• (Cakewalk) Sonar


• (Digidesign) Protools


• (Steinberg) Cubase SX


• (FL Studio) Fruity Loops


• (Propellerheads) Reason

• VSTi Plug-Ins




• (Wizoo) Hypersonic


• (Wizoo) X-Phraze


• (Native) Battery


• (Native) Absynth


• (Native) Guitar Rig


• (IK) Sampletank


• (GMedia) impOSCar


• (reFX) Vanguard

• Mastering Plug-Ins




• (IK) T-Racks


• (iZotope) Ozone


• (Waves) Platinum




• Audio Editors




• (Steinberg) Wavelab


• (Sony) Sound Forge

Cubase just works for me. I know it so well now from teaching the damn thing for years that i dont see much point in learning any others. I might get into Ableton Live and Pro Tools one of these days however. Protools is just about the best Audio Sequencing and Virtual Studio application in the world. Those of you that use Cubase SX might be interested in checking out this Cubase forum. You never know when you will need it!

There are many software synthesizers and sound modules available on the market which can be bolted onto Cubase, Logic, or Pro Tools, some of which are amazing, some of which are appauling. Native Instruments do some very good ones, as do Wizoo, Steinberg, reFX, IK Multimedia and GMedia. Also, dedicated digital audio editing software is good to have, such as Wavelab or Sound Forge. Last but not least, a good selection of mastering plugins are available. Three i have used are T-Racks, iZotope, and Waves.

Synthesizers

Any sound engineer or producer worth his or her salt loves to mess about with synths. Some like me and others i know are almost geeky about it. We will happily explain to you about Oscillators, Waveforms, Phase Offset Modulation, Pulse Width Modulation (especially!), Frequency Mod, Ring Mod, LFO, Envelopes, Filters, the list goes on.....! Anyway, heres a synth you wont find many places : This is a home made drum synth i built in 1989, out of a kit. It won me a 'Distinction' for my GCSE Electronics project. Years after i sampled the hell out of it. Its got a few dry joints which i fixed recently, but otherwise, still works. Its got a piezo-electric pick-up, blue tacked to the side to trigger it and also a audio input. I used to feed it closed Hi-hats and synchronize it with a Yamaha RY30 drum machine.

I also had a good condition Roland Juno 106 to play with at work. What a sweet machine! As a kid, i always knew i wanted to mess with synths as soon as i was old enough to recognise my own name splattered across all kinds of sound boxes. My favourite trick with the juno back then was to stick it through a Drawmer DS201 in stereo, one side on Gate, the other on Duck. Pan the outputs left / right and pass a 16th hi-hat through the key input. Hey Presto! You got an autopanner. Heres a cute little number, a Wasp synth i bought from a colleague years ago for £180. It must be worth a lot more than that now. I believe there is a device called a Spider which can be used to synchronize it.

Violectra Electric Violins

This is a 5-String Violectra Electric Violin, similar to my own model. I had it custom-build (to exactly match my accoustic violin) a few years ago, 1998 i think. The violin maker, name of David Bruce Johnson, was a real sound guy and a Canadian ex-pat. During the Christmas / New Year of '97/98 he took me down to London to a Violin exhibition, where i was treated to beholding some truly magnificent fiddles! At the time, my father was dying from lung cancer, caused by breathing asbestos in the 60's, and my parents put up the money to buy it for me, bless them. As you can probably imagine it was quite an upsetting time, made all the more poignant by me and my brother playing violin and cello at his funeral. Still, life goes on.
Also at the time i was living in Manchester, working by day as a Studio Maintenance Technician, and a Sound Engineer by night. I had loads of free studio time on my hands and i would regularly stay up all day and all night at the weekend doing my own music. Actually, i did this most weekends for 2 years, and finally, after an exhausting weekend working saturday morning till monday afternoon, with no sleep and living on beer and junk food, i collapsed on the stairs at home going up to bed. It all helped to deal with the grief, but my health was suffering!

Anyway, im drifting off the point here... i had my violin made with a pickup under each string on the bridge, connected with a 7-pin DIN plug. David had been experimenting with his violins and MIDI, and had a guitar synth adapted for violin connected to it through a little DIY interface. This was a wicked idea! When i got my violin in the studio i was playing all sorts of sounds and synths over MIDI. The set-up was not without its problems though, the pitch would never remain constand, MIDI controllers were all over the place, and you had to finger each note on the fingerboard EXACTLY to pitch to get a level MIDI note. In short, it was too unstable to do anything with.

The reasons for this are better explained by experts, but when i researched into it, MIDI Violin technology was still in its infancy. Sadly, not long after this, my MIDI violin synth packed in, and fraustrated, i returned to playing as normal. The electric signal from the pick-ups is naturally trebly and thin but can be fixed easily enough in the studio with some EQ. It sounds mint with a good Lexicon reverb on it and a touch of chorus or delay. In fact, someone i met got me into Ed Alleyne Johnston. Check him music out! If anyone reading knows anything about MIDI guitars, or violins, and thinks they can help me here, please let me know, i'd love to hear from you.

Creating Documents

Just thought i would make a post about a couple of documents i made using MS Word. I guess i just wanted people to see an example of my work. This image is a link which downloads the first proper reference worksheet i created, which i gave out to students new to using computers and audio production software. It gives basic information on file management, navigating Windows and a network, backing up, and all kinds of stuff. This particular page gives guidance on how to search for audio clips on a central store of Sample CDs, in order try them out in a piece of music. To see just the image full size, click here. Here is another one - this is a screenshot of a page from a set of teaching meterials i used this year. As part of my teacher training course (City & Guilds 7407 Level 4 Stage 1), i was asked to design, use, and evaluate a resource, and present a series of assignments for Unit 4 - Teaching Resources. As it hapenned, this lesson was also observed, and i had the students coming up to the whiteboard and drawing in Audio / MIDI cable links between the various pieces of equipment. It worked well, i had a good report for it! To see the image full size, click here.

Working On A Track

Ive been lazy with producing lately so ive knocked this up in about 3 hours. Its just one Hypersonic and 2 x A1's, and all the usual FX suspects. Damn it - the strings didnt fade out towards the end. Must have forgotten to click the Read Automation button. See what you think. Please leave a comment below - all suggestions appreciated!

Moochy In The Dark :
You should be able to see the player just above. If all you can see is a white strip, it's likely you need the flash plugin installed - get it here. If you want to download the track, just click the link on the sidebar for MP3 Unsigned. Its far from finished but i will be working on it over the next week. Bear in mind that if you navigate away from this page, the audio stream will stop. Suggest right-click and choose to Open in New Window.
By the way, i have stumbled upon an offer for a free iPod! Cool - i've been wanting one ever since i lost my Philips GoGear in France whilst on holiday. Try this link : Free iPod Offer.

Cicada Insect & It's Weird Call

This is a cicada insect with a very strange mating call. I heard it in the Jungle in Thailand a few years ago, in a National Park called Khao Sok. I did a jungle trek for 4 days, sleeping in hammocks and eating out of bamboo plates. At the end of the afternoon all the species of cicada would broadcast their mating call. The strange thing is, one species starts up and has their 10 minutes, then another pipes up, and the whole effect is really wierd to say the least!

80s Cartoon Themes

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s will no doubt remember a heyday of brilliant cartoons. Everyone seems to have some common ground and it can be fun to compare the ones we missed. Here are some of my own favourites - I guarantee that some of these will have you jumping up and down in your seat and calling your mates over!
Raccoons :
Thundercats :
The Mysterious Cities of Gold :
Gummie Bears :
Many thanks to all at 80s Cartoons for giving us all a big boost of nostalgia!