My Hometown - Official Video.

Forgot to blog this back in August.   So here is the official video for My Hometown .

Hope you all have a Happy New Year.  Expect EP10 from us sometime in the spring.

The Distance (Official Video)

We are pleased to show you all, our new video for "The Distance".

This has been a bit of a labour of love, using Muvizu.  

The big, third party, sets did not play well with the animation software, so it was a case of rendering bits of the video out and hoping they worked, since I was unable to re-open any saved files.

As a first attempt with new animation software, we are pleased with the results.

Expect some more Muvizu videos for other new and possibly older tracks over the coming months.

EP8 is now available on all decent streaming sites, Amazon, iTunes and Bandcamp


Enjoy

Lies

The last few months have been a bit topsy turvy in the world of The Hair Thieves, due to some family and work commitments plus holidays.  So progress has been a bit slow.

EP8 has been recorded and is in the process of being mixed and mastered. 

This will be out in January 2017, though we will try and get the first track "The Distance" out around Christmas or New Year.

EP9 is currently being recorded.  A couple songs are close to completion or completed.  The first of these is the track "Lies" which has been released onto Bandcamp and a video has been made using the game Kerbal Space Program.

Lies has also been released as a single to Amazon / Spotify etc.

As you may notice, from the picture at the top, this release does not feature our usual manikin character.  We have decided to retire him (and her) after ten years of being on our covers.  (Nothing to do with Kate Bush using one on the cover of her live album).  We used to photograph physical manikins, before computer generating them for the last few covers.

As some of you may know, I (rollasoc) dabble in photography.   E suggested we use some of the smoke photography I did between 2007 and 2012.   So the "Lies" image is from that period.



I recently spent two evenings doing some new batches of smoke images.  So I now have about a thousand images to choose from for further covers.  The first has been edited.

This may very well be the cover for EP8.  

I doubt it will be the last we see of the manikin though.  We shall see.

As we may have mentioned proviously.  EP9 is likely to be all instrumental. 

Failing that, we might just gather the 8 instrumetals from the first 8 EPs, the four tracks written for EP9 and some really old Hair Thieves songs (Tilly, Fables and the Deconstruction, Cases of Conscience, Silverpit etc) and release a compilation of instrumentals as an album.

We are undecided at this point.

E has started writing for EP10.  We have a little buffer of songs we could use, so we will go through these and see what is worth salvaging.

Next blog will be about the song "The Distance" the lead song of EP8.

Love Is Overdrive Video

Well EP7 is almost amongst us.

It will be released on November 20th.

You can preorder it from our Bandcamp site.   It will be on Spotify, Amazon and all other streaming and download sites shortly thereafter.

We have made a video for the lead track.  "Love is Overdrive".  

We had such a laugh shooting the video.  Hopefully, that will come across in the video and everyone takes it in the silly way we intended.  It is made up of lots of the 800+ photos we took on Sunday afternoon.

We are rather pleased with how it turned out.

In other news.   December, I believe, is the official 15th Anniversary of The Hair Thieves.  So Chris might go out and play some very old Hair Thieves songs during the month at open mic nights in and around Shropshire.

We have four of five songs now in various states of finishing for EP8.   More news about that in the coming months, with holidays coming up and Christmas, it will be slow going until the new year.

Love is....

making a music video....

The big house move has occurred and we have reconvened working again on EP7 and beyond.

Last weekend, we shot 800+ still images for a music video for the song "Love is Overdrive".

We had such a laugh shooting the video.  Hopefully, that will come across in the video and everyone takes it in the silly way we intended.

Hopefully, the video will be ready to be shown to the world as soon as the EP has been mastered and approved.

Mastering of EP7 is taking place this week.  Artwork is yet to be decided.  I'd imagine we will release this either late October or early November.

We have started work on EP8.

We still have "The Distance" left over from the writing session in February.  Chris has resurrected a happy tune from 2010, which we have started working on and E has two ideas for new songs that he is toying with.   

Which just leaves the instrumental to write.  Which may or may not be Reverie Part 1 (given we have already released part 2).

Due to work commitements, E was unable to join Chris when he played a thirty minute set at Bridgnorth Music Festival last week (photo courtesy of Ashley John Roberts).  So yes last week was busy!

So now we both live in the same town, hopefully, we will get out an play a bit more often live.

Things are currently good in The Hair Thieves world. 

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.

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