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When I made my last entry, my only regular reader, my grandpa asked what I meant by it. What he said made me realize how banal my feelings were. He told me about the time he was watching the Allies carpet-bombing the factories in Pest across the river. The ground shook as he lay there in the hills petrified when each 4,000 lb. bomb detonated on impact. He was just 14. It's a story he told me a 100 times or more and I can feel how vividly that and countless other wartime memories were etched into his brain. All the fears I hold are mere products of my imagination. His are real.

This June, they found a tumor in his brain. I try to avoid the thought that this might be it and hope he may yet read this one day. I drove to Budapest last weekend to visit him at the hospital. He had just been through radiotherapy and lost most of his hair. Though he seemed to be in good spirit and eating well, the effects of the cancer were visible. He's weak and has a hard time remembering recent events. His thoughts seemed to be centered on his refusal to undergo any surgery, though the doctors ruled that out given his weakened condition. At one point, out of the blue, he looked up at us and said 'that's it, they're not cutting me up again' (last year he underwent surgery and had a very difficult recovery).

Then, the news I got today was not reassuring. I spoke to dad tonight. It wasn't what he said that scared me. Grandpa got transfered to another hospital, apparently to get him in shape for chemotherapy. It's that I can't remember ever hearing my old man's voice being like that. He spoke low, slowly and I could sense that he's only holding on to a faint glimmer of hope, even before he told me about how the prognosis was bad. He's taking it very hard. I talk to him alot now and feel his pain very intensely. And there's something very powerful about seeing your father like that... I can't describe it, my heart sinks so low. I wish I had a magic wand that could make all of this go away.

But we're strapped in for the ride now and there's no getting off...

Just a Quick Thought

I was laying in bed last night not being able to find sleep when this crossed my mind: the most important decisions I made in my life were guided by fear... Scary stuff...

!+%!+"%!+!%!!!!!!!

Yours truly is a major ass:
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=59110

Jeez I feel überstupid now. Just what the doctor ordered for Christmas :)...

Merry Xmas!!!!

Csendes Éj.mp3

Looping It

Here's a little video I just recorded:


I'm playing around with my Boss loop pedal and my new Fender Champ (thanx Mom!). It's a bit long but I hope there's enough going on to keep your interest. :)

"October"

October (1st mix)....

I uploaded this one more than a week ago, but I wasn't really sure if it was good enough to post here. I got a couple of very positive responses (which, to be honest, surprised me a bit), so here it is. It's a song that I put together real quick, just to keep busy and maybe to see how far I could get with a simple idea. BTW, this is the first time I used Guitar Rig 3 on a recording. Hope you like it too.

GIG!!!!

Just dropped in quickly to let you guys know that my band, Radio Daze will be playing on October 24 2007, 21:00 at the Ecosse in Clausen, Luxembourg City...

$$$$$

Money.mp3

This song was stuck in my head all week, I had to get rid of it somehow, so I put it into my sequencer :)... I recorded the whole thing in about 45 minutes and played around with the drums and adding effects for another hour or two, so it's not like alot of effort went into it. I used GR2's tube compressor and studio reverb on the lead vocals and the drums and I think it came out pretty nice. The bass runs through one of GR2's stock presets ("Ballsy Bass", if I'm not mistaken). There's two guitar tracks panned left and right, both played on the Les Paul into my new pocket POD. I used emulations of a JTM-45 and a small Fender Tweed amp.

Pocket POD

Grabbed a new toy today. Finally a way to liven up my solid state amp, it works like a charm. It's loaded with amp models, 300+ presets and cost me under 100 euro... Hope to post audio pretty soon.

Mice

Mice.mp3

I spent most of Friday afternoon recording this track. The song itself is something I've been playing around with for quite some time now. It's been recorded during rehearsal by Szegényanyámhalátna. At that time our drummer was away on a scholarship for 6 months, and we had a guy fill in for him who just got back from Canada and was trying out for orchestras and stuff, so he was pretty good. Anyway, I used the bassline that was on that recording as a basis for what I do here. I also recorded an acoustic version about two years ago but that was very uneven.

The bass became the lead instrument for the first two verses, so I reverted to playing chords on it so as not to overshadow the guitar solo at the end. I must say that I'm really happy with the way my bass guitar sounds. My playing is still a bit sloppy, so it's nice to have that compensated by a pleasing tone.

The drums are made up of a backing loop (dnb 156bpm) from Guitar Rig 2 and some added accents from the LiViD synth. Again the LiViD patterns were manually modified in the sequence.

I used my Telecaster for the comping right up to the solo. I made several attempts at recording the lead with that guitar but it always came out too clunky. The Les Paul's P-90 at the bridge was the answer. Since I had about 30 shots at recording it (no kidding), the solo came out more structured than usual. The section over the verse riff was fully mapped out by the time I recorded the final version, the rest was pretty much improvised on the spot. I feel I'm stuck in a rut with my lead playing. I have horrible difficulties coming up with stuff that sounds original and isn't too repetitive... Anyway, both guitar tracks use GR2's "Hall Warm FX" factory preset.

Kitchen Groove

This one came along as a series of accidents. I initially wrote the underlining bass groove in 4/4. As I was setting things up to record it, I accidentally set the metronome to 7/8. I tried it that way and it worked out, so I kept it. It then took me a good couple of days to figure out the guitar parts. I accidentaly stumbled upon a video review of the Roland JC-120 amp on Gearwire. The guy was playing those jazzy arpeggios between chords, something I still couldn't get my head around after all these years. I saw that he was pretty good at responding to questions posted on the site, so I asked him how that works. He told me to check out diminished chords and scales. I googled it and found a website with a basic introduction. Reading that article, I realised that one of the riffs I'm playing on the bass in this song actually matches the "whole-half" scale. That's how I ended up playing the corresponding diminished chord over that part. Recording the lead part there was pretty uncomfortable, my left hand is locked into the pentatonic box thing. It took me about 10 takes to get an acceptable result.

For the recording I used my Magix Audio Studio software. I built the drum track with "LiViD", a synth that is included in the DAW and did some manual editing to fit the bass track. All bass and guitar parts were done with Guitar Rig 2. I used a Jazz amp with a Psychedelay a synthlike effect on the rythm guitar. The main bass groove uses my own preset, all the others are stock, namely "Vocode Bass" for the bass solo, "No Holds Barred Lead" for the cleaner lead guitars (the distortion is turned off), "Stepping Gates" for the parts over the diminished chords and the lead guitar following the bass solo (the tremolo rate was adjusted to fit the song). The latter part is doubled on another track with the "System of a Crown" preset from the Metal & HiGain bank (wah pedal on, controlled by the input level modifier). Enjoy:

Kitchen Groove.mp3

Super Andrea

Hilarious:

So Easy v2.0

Here's a new version of the song I did based on comments I got on various forums. There still might be some room for improvement...

So Easy v2.mp3

So Easy

Yeah, right! I spent the better part of three days putting this thing together and I'm still not entirely happy. But I guess this is as good as it'll get without starting over from scratch. Check it out:

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6orange Rollin'

I finally have some half decent recordings of my band to show you. The stuff below was taped last week during rehearsal. Of the 12 songs we did that night, I picked four which I consider my favorites.

"Social Vein" is the most recent of this lot and features some neat shifts in time signature. I really get off on the almost brutal middle bit ("But when you're middle class..."), pure energy...

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"Beautiful Jails" is one of the earliest numbers from this project. The song, goes through three riffs the key of A, F and G. The song then goes into a bridge section, borrowed from "The End" by the the Doors. The idea came from our drummer, Mel Goulding, after we jammed that part with our former singer, Kewin Moret (who left us just a week before this rehearsal). With Kewin out of the picture, we might substitute it for something else (Hendrix' "Third Stone from the Sun" was brought up as an alternative).

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"Famous Faces" is typical Mark Theis (keyboards) composition. Check out the bass riff in the verses, I think it was Matyas Zlatnik (our former bassist) who came up with that one. But my favorite part is the "outro" section with the chugging V-IV-I chord progression.

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"What's Your Style" is again a thing Mark came up with. His original version didn't seem to hold up well, so I sat down with it at home. I rewrote the lyrics around Mark's ideas, added a part (verse 2: "Because you were so frustrated...") and that was basically it. It's also the only song I play in dropped D tuning.

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The band that you hear on these recordings is composed of Diane Frisch (vocals), Mark Theis (keyboard, vocals), Mel Goulding (drums, backing vocals), Zsolt Pataki (bass) and yours truly (guitar). All four songs were written by Mark with each one of us adding their own bits and pieces here and there. The recording was made in stereo using two ambient microphones. You'll hear some clipping, we had a pretty hard time setting levels.

Bass Riff

I came up with this while practicing...

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Kubica

That he walked away from this one with only minor injuries is astonishing...

F1 - New video => Crash Robert Kubica
Uploaded by Deutschland-Uber-Alles

Singing At The Street...

I just have to put this up here. One half of Szegényanyámhalátna (God rest his soul) and the bunch singing on (sorry, at) the street in the headlights...

Barcelona

Just got back from Barcelona, where we spent most of the week. Here's a video slide show of the pictures we took:

Ocean Bound

This is my latest recording, the first to feature my new bass, an Ibanez Artcore AFB 200 (pictured). The song itself is pretty old, I wrote it about ten years ago after seeing a TV documentary about how coastal areas will vanish due to global warming. I always had a hard time singing it, but since I since I've been using a capo, I finally found my range: I can hit just about any note at a decent volume when I play at the third fret. Initially, this was supposed to be a single take, I recorded myself singing and playing guitar with my USB condenser mic. However, I found the results good enough to add other instruments: I first recorded a second guitar, which developed into the part that is played with an electric on this final version. I used my Telecaster through a simple Guitar Rig 2 (GR2) preset comprising a Vox amp emulation and a stereo tremolo effect.

The bass was also recorded with GR2. The instrument itself was an unexpected find. Since I never actually owned a bass, I always relied on BG's lent by my bandmates, so it was time I got my own. I went to a guitar shop here in Luxembourg, called Stage Music, and tried several instruments. I picked this one up purely based on its look but was surprised to find that it felt the best to me. It's all passive, the action is pretty high and the neck isn't exactly a modern slender cut but it just felt right. It has a very down to earth acoustic tone that reminded me of what I heard on Beatles records.

Anyway, hope you like the song. It still needs drums but I didn't want to ruin it with fake electronic stuff. Maybe someday I can get someone to record live drums for it... Enjoy:

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