mahinty

Hi all
I just released an EP with my bro.  I think it might be OK.  Would love to hear your thoughts on it!

You can have a listen here:

https://meech-brothers.bandcamp.com/album/brown-owl

Cheers!

Wow, just back from the best weekend ever!

I loved both Welly and Auckland shows, I especially love the wellington vibe and I was very happy with the set lists even though I didn't get my request, (more like the moon), it seemed like nearly all happy songs, or maybe i was just so super happy to be there

(those are my hands and moonstone ring on the youtube clip lol.)

 

So I got the t-shirt, got the poster, got the setlist from Auckland and was also on their flight from Wellington and they were lovely and awesome enough for me to get this -

 

wilcoa.JPG

 

Yay!

 

Hoping they'll be back next year.

Classic!

And the Dominion Post review of the show:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/performance/8523949/Wilco-sizzle-dazzle-through-great-set

An interesting prediction from the author, that perhaps the band are on a bit of a victory lap - that perhaps the end is nigh.  There could be some weight to that - where do they go now?  How do you top that?

That theory is contradictory to other wilco intel, such as the plan to record a new album this year.  Personally, I think the Wilco machine will keep rolling.  An equally strong argument would be, why stop?  People keep turning up to shows, the band clearly enjoy what they are doing and pulling the wilco brand apart to start something new would surely set everyone back (financially, at least). 

But I guess there could be smaller changes soon.  Mikael's move to California might signal that his time in the band might be coming to an end.  Or not.

Another review in, here:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10875994

eckythump - you are indeed an uber-fan.  I'm impressed. I like the sound of a Southern Hemisphere tour group to Solid Sound 2014.....

What a great concert this was.

I went for the GA option after seeing them seated a couple of times already, and I'm glad I did.

It sounded better, and I felt far more engaged - I was part of it - not just watching it.  The energy of songs like "Shot in the Arm", and the shared experience of singing along with Jeff just intensified the experience.  Shouting the "says I haven't gone too far" line in Via Chicago was downright cathartic.

Other contributing factors were the venue itself, which is a perfect size (not too big, not too small) and Jeff and the band seemed genuinely happy and relaxed.  Perhaps ready to let rip after the constraints of the Sydney Opera House?  Who knows.  

I actually met Glenn earlier in the day, and had a wee chat.  He seemed relaxed and happy to be here.  Couldn't blame him - it was a beautiful day.

All this wouldn't have mattered if not for that setlist!  It was great to hear some Whole Love stuff live, but it was the songs from the back-catalogue that really made my night.  So much from Summerteeth, Being There and even two from AM.  It was great to finally hear the acoustic version of Spiders.  Radio Cure was also a highlight.

Mavis was great.  Great band.  Fantastic guitarist.  Jeff joining her for "You're not alone" was pretty special.

Here's a really mediocre photo:

My first Wilco concert at the Wellington Opera House a few years ago now will always hold a special place in my heart, but this one will be equally hard to forget.   

Wow

A good little interview with Jeff by class New Zealand music critic Nick Bollinger:

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/thesampler

Will be available to listen/download for two weeks only.

All of a sudden I'm quite excited about the show coming up in April (which also has Mavis as the support act)!

That was really awesome. I love how AGIB sounds - it's so warm. I find it really comforting to listen to, but I know others who find it too intense (but I don't get that vibe from it).

There's a lot to be said for everyone playing in a room at once and not processing the hell out of everything. Also, interesting to note that they didn't seem too hung up on bleed between instruments - which makes sense when you think about it. That's how bands sound in real life.

Another factoid of note was that Tweedy used an SM7 - which is a dynamic mic, not a condenser.

Most educational!

Really interesting photos.

Thanks for posting!

I think it will trigger a period of me listening to Summerteeth, Being There and YHF all over again.

Actually, it mostly seems to have triggered a period of listening to “Remember the Mountain Bed” over and over and over….

Down here, near the bottom of the planet in New Zealand, we haven’t been lucky enough to witness Wilco’s evolution first-hand – they only really started touring here properly after SBS. However, a couple of years ago I felt I saw a little bit of the old Wilco when they played as part of Neil Finn’s “Seven Worlds Collide” thing. They did a bunch of Wilco songs as a four-piece (Jeff, John, Glenn, Pat) with Finn on organ, and it was a real joy. The nature of the gig meant that it was always going to be loose, and jammy, and I loved the hell out of it. I think they did too. There was space and a freeness to it.

I felt really privileged to see that side of them. But who am I to say that they should go back to that structure on a full-time basis? They’re my favourite band – I’m not going to tell them what they should do. Every change that they’ve made in their history has often confused, disappointed, or even alienated different groups of their fanbase – at least for a little while. Usually we come around in the end, and we realise that they were right all along.

In Jeff we must trust.

Finally watched "Man in the Sand" last night. Bit of a wankfest for Billy Bragg, cobbled-together footage of him visiting various landmarks associated with Woody Guthrie and jabbering on with Nora. I was hoping for more footage and a deeper look into the actual making of the albums -- writing/rehearsing, recording, etc. -- it was there, but in what I felt were tiny, nondescript doses.

 

Nonetheless, I did enjoy seeing some footage of an era of Wilco that I hadn't seen before, particularly the scruffy, grizzled visages of Tweedy/Bennett. The extended sequence of laying down a track of "When the Roses Bloom Again" was really nice. I really dig this transition period of Wilco, coming off the smashing success of Being There and prior to the sharp left-hand turn of Summerteeth.

Got the box set over a month ago, but only watched the doco last night. I quite enjoyed it. I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of footage of the creative and recording process (after the first 25 minutes or so I feared that it was just going to be shots of Bragg getting his photo taken in front of Guthrie paraphernalia). We also get a glimpse of the friction between Tweedy and Bragg towards the end – and you always want a bit of drama in a music doco.

Mostly I’m glad that it’s taken me back to listening to those original MA albums. I love Jay’s Hammond work and how it is so high up in the mix. I love the looseness of it all. Some of those recordings have the energy of a demo. I think it will trigger a period of me listening to Summerteeth, Being There and YHF all over again.

Whoever is doing the merch and marketing is totally nailing it. Often when a new item is released, or an unusual concert idea announced (a festival in contemporary art gallery!), I often exclaim, “it’s like they know me”. Everything from coffee beans to frisbees to that hipster bike that was a prize in a competition a year or two ago – have all appealed, even if I haven’t purchased (or won) everything. Perhaps I’m not as unique as I thought. I am part of a demographic – but if you are going to be part of a demographic then, I’m proud to be part of the Wilco Demographic.

I gave a Jeff Tweedy guitar strap to my brother as a birthday present one year. It was a really personal and unique gift – which is not an easy thing to achieve. So that was really nice.

My framed Wilco print (the chuck taylor sneaker design) stands up as a piece of art, independent of the band and merchandise – loads of my wilco-denier friends think it’s great.

I’ve also worn my “hitchhiker” tee into the ground.

Man all this talk of merch is bringing out the consumer in me – I’ll be visiting the kung-fu web store tonight!

Here's a song from our EP release gig the other week. It's all true that the camera adds 30 pounds - I look way thinner in real life - surely!

Shameless plug alert!!!

My brother and I have just released our new EP into the world. We worked pretty hard on it over the last year. You might like it.

Three tracks from it are posted here:

http://meech-brothers.bandcamp.com/album/poco

Enjoy!

Read all about it from the horse's mouth:

http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/wilco-a-whole-lot-of-synth-love-from-mikael-jorgensen/147469

Just out today, the Nord Piano 2 – if you don’t need organs, it ticks a few boxes – good pianos (acoustic + electric), Sample Library patches, splits, effects, amp modeling, compressor, weighted hammer-action keybed….

On a side note, @mahinty: I think you're confusing the Alesis Ion with the smaller Alesis Micron.

Yes, yes I was confused. My eyes read one thing, and my brain read something else.

I had a Nord Electro 2 briefly and it was pretty heavenly, except for:

 

(1) Shockingly awful acoustic piano. Shocking.

(2) Semi weighted keys that split the difference between real Hammond keys and piano keys in a way that I personally didn't like.

(3) Lack of an onboard compressor (this would have really helped out the Wurly).

(4) Silly non-three pronged plug.

 

I still miss it, though (it has a good home with another ex-keyboardist of my band). The minute I'm seriously in the black, I'm plunking down the change for an Electro 3 with hammer action keys.

Yeah, the acoustic pianos aren’t the best, but some are passable for live work (but should be avoided for recording). I personally like the semi-weighted waterfall keybed – better than you standard electronic keyboard keybed, and perfect for organ stuff – I think it’s a good compromise. The Electro 3 addresses the piano quality problem and adds some reverbs (also good for the pianos) and extra amp models to the effects section – which would be handy. What would you want a compressor for? To get more honk out of the wurli without a jump in volume? That sort of thing?

It’s a bit of a shame that the Electro 3 is still mono-timbral – it would be great if you could get an organ bass happening with an electric piano right hand – but I guess they need to differentiate their product line. If you really want to split your keyboard then cough-up the extra dosh for a Stage.

That's a really early polyphonic keyboard. The lid-looking thing is a sweepable low-pass filter and it has a pedal to change the amplifier envelope's release parameter.

I think you can just get an app for it these days

A couple more IDs:

That's a Nord Stage in the centre, and to the right a Nord Lead sits on top of a Korg CX3.

And:

That's a Hammond A100 on the left (same electrics as the famous B3, just different woodwork and a built-in speaker) with, I think, a Korg M3-20 on top of it, and again there's a Nord Stage in the centre.

Derry DeBorja from Jason Isbell and the 400 unit was using the Nord Electro 2 as well. Seems to be a popular keyboard. I'm still toying with the idea of getting a keyboard myself but can't seem to pull the trigger yet.

I have an Nord Electro 2, and it's great. If you want electric piano (wurlitzer, rhodes) sounds for a gig, it can't be beaten. It's Hammond sound is pretty good too. It has been superceded by the, wait for it, Nord Electro 3 which has a better Hammond engine (as well as vox and farfisa organs), better acoustic pianos, and you can load in sounds from the Nord Sample Library (which includes some pretty cool stuff, including Mellotron samples). If you haven't got budget for an NE3, then there should at least be a few cheap NE2 keyboards turning up on the second-hand market. The Nord stuff is great quality.

In the "Art of almost" promo/teaser clip, I'm pretty sure I spotted the amber back-lit pitch-bend wheel of an Akai Miniak amongst Mikael's kit - it has the same engine as the Alesis Ion (mentioned above by ginandcigarettes), but with a few more knobs.

 

Actually, just re-watched that clip, and those glowing mod wheels probably belong to a Moog Little Phatty (which you can clearly see later on in the clip) - not a Miniak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdTn0hXzVZU

I bought a microKorg a couple of months back and love it. I wrote it off for ages because of the ridiculously small keys - but you get use to it. It will give you some pretty good analog-ish pads (although, keep in mind that it is only 4-note polyphonic) and leads, and knobs for real-time control of the most likely parameters (filter cutoff, etc). The arpeggiator is also pretty sweet and intuitive.

In the "Art of almost" promo/teaser clip, I'm pretty sure I spotted the amber back-lit pitch-bend wheel of an Akai Miniak amongst Mikael's kit - it has the same engine as the Alesis Ion (mentioned above by ginandcigarettes), but with a few more knobs. I played this, and a bunch of other 37-note, VA (Virtual Analog) synths during my hunt and surprised even myself on settling on the MK (I must admit that, I liked the character and retro-styling of it - from the wooden end-cheeks to mini-moog-type knobs).

And if it's good enough for Neil Finn, it can't be too bad

Yeah, it’d be nice to think that bandcamp will be around forever, but that’s fairly unrealistic. Just look at myspace.com, and mp3.com before that. Nothing is forever. Especially on the internet.

Bandcamp is great for making your music available for all to hear/download/buy, but it doesn’t really provide the full band website service. It has slowly expanded from that core music service though, first with the gig guide relationship with songkick.com, and then more recently with the addition of the short artist bio and photo. But I don’t think they’ll go too far with this sort of stuff, as it is at odds with their clean and simple design aesthetic. Which is great – anyone seen a myspace profile lately?.

It seems mad that every band should keep re-inventing the same websites over and over, though. I reckon, what you want is some sort of aggregating service that pulls together content from whatever other fashionable websites you are currently using to host your stuff (eg music from bandcamp, photos from flickr, blog feed from blogger, gig guide from songkick, etc). I haven’t really played with it much, but flavors.me looks like it could do the job.

And do we still need our own URLs? Do people still bookmark links? Isn’t the first thing that people do to find a website, is to just google it? So if your service de rigour (eg bandcamp) is doing a good job, then your stuff should be near the top of the google results anyway.

And ckc – I’m not trying to do you out of a job here. There will always need to be custom, professional websites for big bands, and businesses. It’s us DIY/indie musicians who will always look for something free and flexible that might somehow, miracuously connect us with an audience.

I use to use a Roland KC-350 combo amp with my Nord Electro 2. Sounded great. It was loud enough for small cafe gigs, and also good as a personal monitor for larger gigs when playing with a band (I'd DI to the PA as well).

Eventually, the weight of it was a killer for hauling around to shows.

I recently bought a Wharfedale Titan 12A powered monitor. It's loud enough, and at least 10kg lighter than the Roland. I don't think the electric pianos sound quite as good through it as they did through the Roland, but the organ and acoustic pianos are better. All patches sound good enough in a live situation, though.

I think, for a keyboard that does a few different sounds, like the Electro, you are best to go for a clean amp that doesn't colour the sound too much. Sure, the wurli, rhodes and clav are going to sound awesome through a Fender tube amp, but a lot of the other sounds, like the acoustic pianos, won't.

BTW, I'm super jealous of you NE3. I'd love to upgrade, but difficult to justify at the mo'.

Good luck!