End of Year round up.

Well, it is the end of 2014.

It has been a pretty good year.   We released EP6 as well as contributing a cover version to a Mansun Tribute album.



EP6 has been heard far and wide, in places such as Mozambique, Iran, Isreal, the USA, Mexico and many other countries around the world. Which for a duo from Shropshire is both baffling, humbling and totally brilliant.   The internet is a wonderful tool for musicians to get their music out there.
 
We have started work on EP7 (see video at top of the post for an exclusive snippet of a work in progress).

So what of 2015?



Well EP7 should make it out into the world, I would also like to think that we may even venture out and play live again.    Stranger things have happened.

So thank you to all our old and new found friends and here is to a wonderful 2015.  Onwards and upwards.

Deep Down You Know That I'm Wrong!

Let us ease you into the weekend with a delicate blast of the lead song off EP6.

Our release of EP6 as a  bittorent bundle was a surprising success.   I was pleased with the number of downloads we had, but more importantly the number who downloaded the complete package.

After a slight problem at CDBaby failing to send our EP to the digital distributors.  EP6 is now available at the usual online outlets (Amazon etc) and streaming services (Spotify, Napster, Rdio etc).


Work has also begun on another video off the EP.

We have started recording EP7.  We are having a lot of fun writing and recording the new instrumental for it.  It has been nice to record with real amps, instead of emulations and go back to recording with real pedals.   We are not a million miles away from finishing it.

EP7 looks to be taking a more electronic route than previous EPs (at least with the rerecorded old song. (of which this might be the last EP  to finish one, now we have run out of suitable old material to re-record).  But then, we are currently writing, as with previous plans, things will change as we write and record.

I'll try and blog a few of the vine videos we have recorded so far in the coming weeks.

It is sounding good at the moment.

Released into the wild.

We are proud to announce that EP6 has finally been released into the wild.

It will be available from the usual outlets (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Napster etc) as soon as possible.

It is currently available for the pay what you like price at our Bandcamp store or for $2.49 from CDBaby.

There is a very limited amount of physical CDs for sale from the Bandcamp store.  When they are gone, they are gone.

In a first for us, we have also released it as a Bittorrent Bundle.   This is a legal way to download products via the bittorent network, currently being pioneered by the likes of the new Thom Yorke album.

You can download two songs, off the EP, immediately, or for the price of your email address, you can download all five tracks, a book of lyrics and the video for "Deep Down You Know That I'm Wrong".

We promise to not sell your email address to anyone.  You will get an occasional email from us (normally less than one a month) about what we are up to.  You can unsubscribe from the list at any time.

This is an experiment for us, since it is a fairly new distribution method.

We have additionally, set up our own dedicated You Tube channel, to bring together all the Hair Thieves videos in one place, instead of being on our personal channels.

So we hope you will at least have a listen to the new tunes, even if you don't down load them.  We are proud of these songs so would like people to listen to them regardless of whether they purchase them for cash, or download them for free or for the price of an email address.

We appreciate any feedback.

Work has started on EP7, as well as videos for a couple more tunes off the EP.

More on that as work progresses.

 

Strange Familiar World

Re-recording of old Hair Thieves for EP6. A song about going back to your hometown after a period of time and how the place and yourself have changed.

Deep Down You Know that I'm Wrong

Lead track off EP6. You can order the new EP from http://ift.tt/Z5d4Yc for a nominal fee

Moving Pictures Part 1

It looks like it’s that time again - Rollasoc has asked me to write a blog once again. I think he really wanted me to blog about the mixing process for EP6 but he left it too late, that (mix)bus has already departed. Yes, that’s right, EP6 is mixed at last, yay me! Instead I am going to write something about the process of creating a video - just in case there isn’t enough drivel out there on the web already.

My Step-Brother recently commented that it is not enough that we write, record, and produce our own music, now we have to be video actors, directors, and producers as well. If only I could manage even one of those things! Things I’m certain that I’m definitely not are actor and cameraman, for Beijing Morning I used screen grabs to overcome this, probably not a trick I could pull a second time.  Instead, the quest began to find a way of making an animation.

First and foremost this had to be cost effective, or as it’s sometimes known, free. A quick play with a well known search engine lead me to Pivot Animator http://pivotanimator.net/ ). This is an extremely simple, and also rather brilliant, stick-man animation package. Each frame has to be animated by hand, no tweening here, although the programme provides onion skins of the previous cel to help you. I produced a couple of simple animations of a stick man strumming a guitar which I am rather pleased with, but the thought of doing 3 mins plus, one frame at a time, fills me with dread.

With Pivot out of the running it was time to find something else. I had used Blender ( Blender ) previously to do the cover of EP5 and was aware that it had some good animation features so this has become my next and hopefully final choice.

Oh boy, this is a choice I am going to hate! First off, Blender is free and represents an unbelievable amount of effort for the people behind it so it would be churlish to complain about it. So that makes me churlish.

It is a seriously powerful tool, you could easily pay thousands of pounds to get this level of features in a commercial package. What your money would also get you is a user interface that made sense. I suspect that for a lot of very clever programmers the user interface is the last thing they think about, if they even think about it at all. This program has menus, it really does, in fact they are all over the place. None of them do what you expect. Instead, to use the programme properly you have to learn hundreds of keyboard shortcuts. Not normal shortcuts of course, oh no! [ctrl c] to copy? You should be so lucky! [del] to delete something? Why on earth would you do that when you can [shift x] instead? Still, you can always check the documentation…..don’t get me started.

Blender lets you use external renderers which is another powerful feature, unfortunately the latest version doesn’t work with the renderer that I had used previously so I have to learn the built in render tool - Cycles. This is yet another incredibly steep learning curve that I need to climb.

More to come in Part 2

Drastic

Last week I took a trip up the road to the historic town of Chester, for a convention about '90s band Mansun.

Mansun are one of my all time favourite bands.  Highly prolific in the short time they were together and underestimated in the grand scheme of '90s music history.

I'd only ever been to Chester once before.   When Mansun released their second album called Six.   Being from Chester, they had their album launch party at midnight, in the local Virgin Megastore.

I was one of the lucky winners of tickets to the event.

So it was nice to go back, have a better look around the town and go to the convention.

The convention stemmed form the Mansun's Only Love Song Facebook group.

The convention involved several tribute band, unseen archive video and audio, memorabilia and panels discussing the rise and demise of the band.

As part of the convention, the organisers asked bands to submit cover versions, for a compilation CD.

Over thirty songs were recorded.  Nineteen made it onto the CD.  The rest are downloadable, if you buy a CD.

We recorded one of the b-sides from Mansun's second EP.  A song called Drastic Sturgeon.

I have been playing this occasionally at open mic nights for years.  So it seemed the obvious choice of song.  Also, if you are unfamilar with Mansun, they are one of those rare bands that bundles singles with multiple new tracks as b-sides.  Sometimes the b-sides are better than the lead track.

You can buy the CD Here

Here are a few images that I took with my point and shoot or camera phone last week.

So a storming weekend.   I met some great people and it was nice to hear a new track from the Mansun frontman Paul Draper.  Looking forward to the album now.

Later,

Rollasoc

Drastic turn of events

Summer is upon us and we were initially getting close to finishing Ep6, when I had a moment of clarity.

Back in February, I wrote a song as part of the Fawm write an album in a month.  (I managed six songs in the four weeks).   As a consequence of one of the songs, E wrote a counter song. 

So, my grand plan was given, we have mostly mixed the other three songs for the EP (in record time), was to add the song from the Fawm session, since it obviously should go with the counter song.

So that will put us back a month or so.  So EP6 will now have 5 tracks upon it.




In other news, we are recording our first cover version, which will be released next month in Chester, at the convention for the 90's Britpop band Mansun.   We are in the process of recording one of their early B-sides.


At least it has allowed me to get out my old acoustic for the first time in two years.

More details, once we have finished recording it!



Later


Rollasoc

Instrumental Failure

All of our EPs so far follow a kind of pattern.   This one and EP5 are missing collaborations with others.  But all our EPs finish with an instrumental.

Here are a couple of snippets from the instrumental for EP6.

At the moment it is called The Fail Song.

This song has a long history.  It started as an arpeggio on acoustic.  Many years ago.  


This tune was originally scheduled for EP5 and had the intention of having lyrics.

I then showed it to E and taught him how to play it. 

He then promptly wrote the first section as a strummy section and the arpeggio was kind of lost as I liked how he started the tune. (see first video)

If I remember, it might have been called "Fear of New York" (not to do with the "Exploits of Elaine" song honest!) originally.   But we were never happy with the lyrics, so it was shelved and brought out again for EP6.

I had another go at lyrics but failed. Possibly due to the time signature being slightly odd rhythmically.  More likely the lack of inspiration.

So we decided to make it the instrumental.

The original argeggio, in a slighly altered and slower form now makes it way into the middle section of the song as a piano and at the end of the song on acoustic (see the 2nd video).


It thus became The fail song, since we failed to write lyrics for it.

This is currently being mixed.  Hopefully, we will put it up on Soundcloud soon!



 

"Can't seem to settle down no more."

Quick update on the progress of EP6.    Three of the four songs are now, we believe ready for mixing.

The lead track, is the only one left to finish recording.   Lyrics are 95% there.  Drums / percussion has been done.  Guide guitar tracks completed.  We still need to add bass and solos.

So we are very happy with the progress.

As the video shows, like all the previous EPs we have re-recorded an old song, from before E joined The Hair Thieves in 2006.

This is a reworking of the 2002 tune "Strange Familiar World".   It is a personal look of how I view going back to my hometown and the changes in the people and places I grew up in.

The original idea was just to replace the drum  and acoustic guitar sound from the original.  Leaving the solo, bass and  tremelo guitar from the original. 

So essentially, E wasn't planning on playing on this.   But the more I dissected the original audio, the more I realised how little I knew about recording at the time, with bad editing, causing pops at edit points, so I decided to re-record everything.

So I made E record a tremelo guitar part (his least favourite effect), as can be seen in the above Vine video.

Right, back to working on the final track left before we meet up tomorrow.

Later,

Rollasoc

Epic Fail

 Greetings from the land of the Hair Thieves.

Due to holidays and more holidays, things have been a bit slow of late.

But progress is actually being made on EP6.

We have one tune ready for mixing.

The instrumental is taking shape and near completion.  It is currently called The fail song (hence this blogs title), due to us failing to write lyrics for it, so after a couple attempts it has been morphed into an instrumental, keeping the bare minimum of the original song.

I've taken a couple days off to work on one of the other tunes.  The aim is to get that ready for mixing, before I go off on holiday later in the week.

We have music for the final song, though no lyrics as yet.  So that will be our focus for the coming weeks.

E has even built himself a new music PC.  I'm awaiting new drum software to make my life a lot easier!

So all in all, not doing too badly and there is a good chance, this EP will see the light of day this year.

later,

Rollasoc

Remixes, Animation and EP6

Things have been a little slow in Hair Thieves land for the last month or so.

This has manly been due to me partaking in a Songwriting course from Berklee College of music online.  Which I passed with the odd score of 102.2%.

E has been busy remixing Beijing Morning off EP 5.  Have a listen here.




I have  purchased some animation software.  Here is a little test snippet of a proof of concept.

I am awaiting a modder to release to me  a manikin mod.  So I can make videos with our unofficial mascot.  Much like we used (back in 2007, which is ages ago) in the video for Shorewards from EP2.




I will probably make a video for Invisible Wall or possibly the instrumental Bathmophobia in the next month, though it might not look anything like the snippet.
  
In the meantime, we are back in writing mode for EP6.  We are currently working on the instrumental and I am about to start lyric writing for a song we have music for.

Right, I'd best get on with those lyrics.

Later

Rollasoc

Low Hanging Fruit

We seem to have discovered Vine.

Vine being the latest annoying social media craze, that lets you record 7 seconds of video and tweet it..

Now I thought it might be useful to show a few quick snippets, occasionally, of progress. 

Here is a video of E playing with some effects prior to recording.






So expect more videos from the recording of EP6.   Though Facebook have just done a new video thingy that lets you take 15 second clips