Longcat Hadron Collider version 2 chapter 1

Longcat Hadron Collider 2.1 from longcat on Vimeo.

there's an owl that toots at 7:45 am...

it woke me up...

so i came to see if chapter 1 of that large scale improvisation had uploaded...

and here it is x

great tits & apple blossom

apple blossom time

i'm down in blewbury for the weekend, came to see the blewbury opera which was great, noye's fludde by benjamin britten...

it's been a long time since i was here at this time of year, the apple trees in the garden are all in different moments of blossom, a couple of them are bright white with dashes of pink... lovely...

reminds me of the old song that's been floating around my head for a month or so anyway...

this house was built on one half of an orchard, cleared of most of it's trees of course, so i've always been around apples, and i love them...

but i was eating an apple last night and i couldn't remember the last time i'd had an apple...

it's just me & mum & dad, dinah was due to come down but she couldn't in the end...

i've been relaxing, developing sounds in my mopho which i decided to bring in the absence of the piano that used to be in this house but is now in me & dinah's flat...

went up the hill earlier, watched the sunset justlike i used to...

as i was walking up i was listening to this week's improvisation - recorded on thursday but not yet in video form... just me & D (drummer) me on the mopho...

a couple of times i'm playing a repeating line while changing the filter, the sound opening out...

and both times the sun came out from behind a cloud...

so i'm walking, with the sun behind me, and as the music expands outwards the light comes out on everything... the sun close to the horizon... everything i can see is lit up by this lovely bright spring sunshine...

quite something...

today i've been imagining doing a gig on my own, with all my sounds... with sequences from the mopho mixed with piano or organ, maybe singing and playing a harmony line on the organ...

imagination such a rich ground to get music from...

x

Longcat Hadron Collider version 2 chapter 2

Longcat Hadron Collider 2.2 - Yr3wk44 from longcat on Vimeo.

it took me so long to get this together, well, actually, just over a week, recorded last tuesday and brought to you here on this thursday...

it doesn't sound too bad does it...

but it's way late for last week's improvisation...

so today, i did an improvisation with lovely D, the drummer from the last LHC i did, also the man i bought the moog off... but it'll go out next week, this week's improvisation will be the 1st half of the LHC (2.1), so that in the future, i'll be improvising with at least a week to go before it's going out to the world, giving me time to deal with it all...

such a mad time of it i've had...

the other lovely D, omnichord player on both LHC's, helped me mix the one you see above here... both mixing and teaching me about mixing it was...

i recorded D's drums today and i'm quite confident i can mix them myself this time... using the drums we mixed together as a template...

so much time has passed and so much has happened... what to tell?

on the day after we did this improvisation i cycled down to the studio to meet a piano tuner, (who was great), but my bike decided to take that opportunity to completely lose all of it's brakes... leaving me midtown, no brakes...

so i gradually drifted down to the river, leaving it by waterloo bridge (the ladies bridge) - returning for it the next day with P who i'd been teaching, cycling with her along the river, slow enough to be able to stop with my feet... her playing tunes on her phone - including "rock me amadeus" by falco...

left overnight for a brake service in pretty much the only bike shop i trust these days and picked up the next day, good as new...

a consignment of tea arrived, a joint venture between me & spski... dilmah all the way...

floopy & T's cat cleo passed away on tuesday which has hit my beautiful dinah quite hard, cleo being the cat they had when she was a girl... and now that floopy & T are away she would normally be going round to feed cleo... sad times...

cleo is the cat who inspired my song "hunka munka poo bum"

yr3wk43

yr3wk43 moog rogue, mopho, piano from longcat on Vimeo.

recorded last tuesday... the day before the moog rogue went home to HK (and indeed the opus 3 came home to me)...

x

yr3wk42 mopho & rhodes

yr3wk42 rhodes & mopho from longcat on Vimeo.

from last wednesday, not an april fool...

unlike my post on that day, but what can you do? old traditions surely are worth keeping hold of...

anyway, the improv recorded at the studio, the 1st one in ages on the rhodes...

i just hope i can take advantage of the studio to let out all the musical ideas i have all the time x

piano geek

so the musical is going well,

just hitting it's stride with tonight's performance, the 5th, although we've got a long break before the next show...

i'm still making tiny mistakes and it irritates me, so i've set myself quite a grueling practice regime in which i do 2 handed scales just like i get my students to do, but while i get them to do a major, natural minor & harmonic minor scale on each note (gradually, throughout the year),

i'm getting myself to play all the modes of the major scale on each note...

i've been doing it for some time now (tonight) and i'm not quite half way through,

i do it in the order suggested by W A Mathieu in "harmonic experience", where each change of mode adds one more flat, staring with lydian:

lydian,
ionian (major),
mixolydian,
dorian,
aeolian (natural minor),
phrygian,
locrian,

i'm working on a tune at the moment and i've got my gigging keyboard out with the GEM module being the piano, insane, what with the piano right there, but that's the weird place i'm in right now...

i was just playing through the same list of modes, but improvising while holding down notes with my left hand, not to sound the notes but in order to free those (imaginary - digital) strings and let that strange reverb ring out... as in this section of this improvisation...

the tune is currently called hay fever, but that'll probably change, i can't decide if it's right yet, or whether a certain section needs changing, but i love it, i play it whenever i can...

being paid to improvise

so i just found out that a very large music management company really like my improvisations and they've offered to pay me £1000/week for improvising...

so i can give up my day job and concentrate on the improv's...

and indeed anything else i may want to do as improvising only takes up a day - or a day & a half, out of the week...

so i'm not going in to work tomorrow (today) or indeed the next day, i quit, effective immediately...

x