The golden GP-100 sitting magnificently at the centre of my old rack
This is part of the “gear that I have owned” thread. I bought a second-hand Roland GP-100 guitar effects processor from a seller on eBay back in 2003 in a whim. I didn’t really need it as I was using a Roland VG-8 guitar system, but I’d read in the past that Robert Fripp of King Crimson had used them and in a supreme case of “monkey-see, monkey-do” I bought this unit in an attempt to search for the “new sound”.
The GP-100 is austentatious in its gold casing and fits in a 1U rack. In terms of sound, I was quite impressed by the COSM effects inside the unit considering it was quite an old piece of kit at that time and had been superseded by other effects units in the Roland range. I used it for parts of my Textures, Without Words and Empty Spaces albums. I tended to use the more unearthly effects that unit could produce and I must admit that I’ve found it hard to reproduce these sounds on my current rig.
While I was impressed with the sounds, I wasn’t so impressed with the editing functionality. The unit came without instructions, so I had to bluff my way through using it and I found the editing side of the GP-100 rather user-unfriendly. But then I had been spoilt by the VG range of units from Roland and their slightly easier to use interface.
I eventually sold the unit after a short period because it had developed a fault that meant it used to freeze up and stop working. The only way of fixing this fault would mean me taking a screwdriver to the unit, opening it up and removing/replacing the battery inside, which would somehow reset the unit back to normal. This took time, and was frankly a pain, so it had to go.
If another one of these came up on eBay for the right price, I’d probably grab it just for the heck of it – though I am wary about the condition of these units now as they are rather old, they do go wrong and the front panel control are a little prone to wear.
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I don’t particularly like living in a shed, but since our incident I have been forced to do whatever recording and work for the shop from this shed. Don’t get me wrong, it is a nice shed. It has a nice rug and decor and lots of flourescent lights. The downside is that it is frigging cold (even with the electric heater on full blast) and I have noticed that something in the shed likes to bite me. Fleas. Yes, fleas. I have this theory that rabbits might be living under the shed, but maybe I was watching the video clip in yesterday’s post too much.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that recording time has been incredibly limited. I’ve done a few things and tried to commit some base tracks to work on, but it has been hard to concentrate, what with the cold hands and the constant whacking of my head on the low beams inside the shed. Also, the cold plays havoc with my bladder, so as soon as I get a creative wind behind me, I have to retreat indoors for a pee. Ahhh, the details of my life on the page. This makes great blog reading, dunnit?
One track I have managed to finish is this item called Slow Drift. I’ve posted the demo of this before, but this is the finished surround sound version. The thing about the recording of this is that the lead guitar part was recorded on my Godin Multiac nylon guitar and was recorded in one take with the drum part as backing. I was just riffing to the track and managed to capture something in one take. On top of this I laid some more guitars and some stuff from my 6-string bass guitar.
It’s a little loose, but I think it works. As there has been a reluctance from myself to sit in a cold shed for hours at a time, I have been attempting to archive old master recordings and remix old stuff. One thing I enjoy doing is surround sound mixing (I’ve detailed this before) and I’ve been coming up with new surround mixes for my older albums. Because it literally takes 10 minutes to do a surround mix (I don’t do fancy mixing with elements flying all over the shop, just tasteful placement of sounds) I can knock off a mix quickly and hence I’ve done it for this new song.
If you want to listen to it, connect your PC or laptop to a surround sound speaker system using your optical 5.1 output (if you have one) and play the music file. Alternatively, you can load it onto your Xbox 360 using a memory card (or stream it) and listen to the track that way via your surround sound speaker system.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
The intention is to produce albums of surround sound mixes for your listening enjoyment, like I did with my Textures release. Huzzah for me!
Not sure if this is genius or seriously messed-up…US Military bunnies kill Al-Quaeda camels, sounds like a great idea for an animated series. Let’s really confuse everyone and call it “Cat Shit One”. Only in Japan…only in Japan…
![HOT3062[1].jpg](https://www.darrenlock.com/mt/archives/2009/03/26/HOT3062%5B1%5D.jpg)
Hoffmann-Gill standing erect and proud in front of his mount.
“Time to smash the TV to bits?” asks leading professional milk float driver, Daniel Hoffmann-Gill after reading my astoundingly perceptive review of the new series of “The Apprentice”
Ohhh don’t worry, I am reserving that particular pleasure for the moment you appear on Celebrity Skating on Ice or whatever it is called. 🙂
OK, by now you should all know exactly what “The Apprentice” TV show is all about. It is the TV equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion or a lioness bringing down a sickly wildebeeste on the plains of the Serengeti. And so we watch a group of hapless, boasting cocks and cockettes parade around in front of us trying to win the approval of the UK’s leading Nookie Bear impressionist (that will get us a few hundred hits from Google – and this time around I seriously believe Surallen has had cosmetic surgery in order to enhance his overall Nookieness. His hair now looks as if it is the cross between the type of fluff you find on the top of the head of an Action Man and the short and curlies located on your scrotum. Mind you, his face does look like a talking ballbag too – but that takes me back to my old illustration for this show where I superimposed a ballbag on the head of the great man. Ho ho – ain’t I a wit?)
Anyway, the producers got their special selection filter out working again. Got the mouthy asian bird – check. The ugly ginger bird – check. The pushy baby faced bloke – check. But this time around there are a few new stereotypes to include, like the Islamic fundamentalist bloke who’ll have everyone running in the opposite direction when they do the task that involves hijacking a plane (I made that up in bad taste, you know) and the whiny American bird who is obviously going to come a cropper during the mid-phase of the show during a big showdown.
The first task involved them cleaning and they chose to clean cars. Of course, you can approach cleaning in two ways: as volume sales or in terms of securing a large contract. With volume sales, it is head down bang, bang, bang – knock it out kind of stuff. The guys did that with the shoeshine business, but also had a car cleaning contract to fulfill. Both the male and female team fell with the contract work because they weren’t consistent and couldn’t work at speed. It’s cleaning frigging cars, ferchristsake. So we all know that they are inept.
Anyway, I lost consciousness for a while and the boys lucked out and won due to the girls blowing too much cash on supplies. A schoolboy error and when it come down to the boardroom, the wrong person got dumped. Moaning Mona should have been given the bullet just for arguing with her potential employer. But Sugar blew it once again purely to keep her in for future entertaining confrontational appeal. Ho, ho.
So it is the same old stuff and there is a law of diminishing returns, but for the first time the UK series has overtaken the entertainment appeal of the US counterpart. For years, Donald Trump has literally trumped on Sugar with a superior programme, by putting on extravagent challenges, amazing rewards and acting like a big fucking millionaire, whereas Sugar always felt more like a desperate manager of Dixons than some Mr Big Know-It-All business bloke.
But this time around Trump is doing ANOTHER celebrity edition (Piers Morgan won last year’s series) and the celebrities are shit and Dennis Rodman dominates the proceedings by acting like an eight-foot baby who has run headfirst into a barbed-wire fence. The show has been limping along and there’s no real tension, no real action and no real excitement, all be it for Rodman getting drunk, disappearing and trying to beat up his team mates.
So at least Sugar is providing a pure “Apprentice” experience. But who is going to win? It’s too early to say. I’d like to see the little baby-faced bloke win – you know, the one who has the funny walk/run. It is a comedy walk that he’s nicked directly from Shane Ritchie from the recent “Minder” remake on Channel 5. Yeah, he’ll do – though it really is too early to tell. Might be the ginger bird? Who knows!
One of my favourite recordings is an album called “From the Caves of the Iron Mountain” which features Tony Levin, Steve Gorn and Jerry Marotta. The unique thing about this recording is that it is recorded live and improvised down an old abandoned mine. The recording was made by a fellow called Tchad Blake who has made inroads in something called “binaural” recordings. Basically, this fellow wears a recording microphone on his head, roughly where his ears are, and takes recordings like this so that the resulting recording captures the ambience of the location and “feels” as if you are actually standing in the enivronment.
With that recording, Tchad Blake walks around the performers and interacts with the environment so it is a truly unique proposition. Listening to the recording on headphones is a constant joy and something I often return to when looking for inspiration. The album is so open and feels so expansive and full of ideas that I’d probably put it in my top five recordings. Yes, it really is that good.
One thing myself and old ex-recording chum Andrew Osborne share is a love of said album and when going through some old discs recently, I found a recording I’d made that sounds like something from it. Not a pastiche, but something unique, a homage, perhaps? It was recording in 2002/3 and if I recall correctly, Andrew had sent me a short recording of himself playing on a flute he’d bought from eBay. It had a lot of character, even though it wasn’t particularly musical, and I thought it leant itself to such a homage. So I put some acoustic bass and suitably ethnic percussion behind the flute and drowned the whole lot in reverb in a sad attempt to approximate the ambience of the abandoned Widow Jane mine.
Here is the recording:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
This somehow seems to make sense: