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 Sturgeon (Mansun Cover)

Cover version of the Mansun EP2 track Drastic Sturgeon. A rare outing for the Mandolin at least....

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