Last week my parents were in town. Mum was keen to catch a show somewhere, so we all went and checked out the Ruby Suns at the Hopetoun. Having come fresh off their tour with The Shins, the Suns played a explosion of psychedelia that brought LSD-assisted 60s pop to mind – think a cross between early Pink Floyd mixed with the grandeur of something like The Polyphonic Spree’s live show (albiet with far fewer members).

Obviously the swirling oddball pop wasn’t quite registering with one of the support acts as well as they thought it should be, and they felt that some adjustments to the mix were in order.

Across the little pub this one individual marched, and delivered a statement which no one should utter if they want to live long on the earth:

“You really need to turn the vocals up”

I was half expecting the entire room (band included) to fall silent melodramatically in a way reminiscent of a face-off scene in a movie. Everyone knows that you don’t tell the sound guy what to do. Ever.

The sound man is the wizard, making it possible for the joys of music to be heard by all. Through his masterful hands does the entire spectrum of musical signals get guided on their merry way to the punters ears, as they stand and revel in his mastery. The sound man is, put simply, the master. Obviously, he should never be told how he should best be exersizing his talents.

A pause.

The band did not stop playing, nor did most of the room notice the sudden spark had just been ignited.

But there was definitely a pause. And then came the response, polite but firm:

“I think the vocals sound fine, thankyou”

The master resumes his rightful place on the throne. The musician retreats hastily. And the rest of the show continues uninterrupted.

Kris, Tim and Wally (collectively known as The Basics) recently embarked on tour of Japan and the UK that will see them travelling around in close quarters for the next two months.

To document their experiences on foreign shores, Kris has elected to make use of his motion picture capture device thingy to post 30 second updates on what the band is up to. At present, the content mostly deals with their coming to terms with Japanese supermarket shelves, terrible karaoke superstars and sleeping in the same room together. It will be interesting to see how their use of the YouTube medium evolves.

I’ve tried to avoid blogging on Radiohead’s forthcoming album (hereafter known as LP7), partially because I’ve wanted to avoid looking a little over-excited about it, and partially because everyone else is doing it anyway, so why do you need me? But at last I’ll momentarily break my “Radio-silence” (excuse pun) and drop a couple of items:

• It’s late. It hit the rumour mill a few days ago, but it looks like it’s pretty much confirmed: the new album will not be released until 2008. This kind of sucks because from many reports it would seem the album is done and just needs to find a label and distributor.
• The kids get involved. In a move which I’ll dare to speculate is influenced by all of the band members entering fatherhood in the last 5 years, this will be the first Radiohead album to feature child performers. Don’t worry, they’re not putting together some kind of schmaltzy duet with an 8 year old choir. Instead, they got a bunch of young music students from the Matrix Music School to record some clapping, and you can check out the site for photos ‘n’ stuff. And purist music snobs, get a load of this: they recorded the event with an MBox 2. Take that!

And for those of you sitting up the back and not paying attention, you can get a 60 seconds catch up by checking out the clip uploaded by Nigel a while back containing chopped up tape of the new songs

I’ve been listening to a fair bit of The National’s newie Boxer of late, which I highly recommend to pretty much everyone. I’ve found it upon repeated listening to be a beautifully presented – if understated – album, combining great arrangements with Matt Berninger’s weighty baritone acting as the key ingredient pushing their sound to something remarkable.

Seems I’m not the only one either - Metacritic lists it as being in the top 10 of 2007’s albums. Given that’s an aggregate of ratings given by most of the high profile music critics out there, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.

The rumour mill is running hot that they’ll be in Australia early next year, so that’s something you should most definitely be looking out for.

Interestingly, I decided the other day to see how much attention they’ve been getting here in Australia. I’m not a particularly keen fan of the radio, but it certainly still determines what sort of general public interest there’ll be in a band to a certain degree. Probably the most reliable cultural barometer on a national (excuse the pun) level is Triple J, so I fired up JPlay.com.au. Here’s what I was presented with:

Two plays. Ever.

Looks like The National have what will herewith be known as the curse of The Basics (that whole saga got followed up again by Syms with this article if you didn’t see it)

My alarm clock informed me this morning that it’s the 8th of August or, as we would write in short form, 8-08. Which kind of looks like 808. Which just happens to be the name of one of Roland’s better known analog drum machines, the TR-808.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the idea of celebrating random bits of musical history before 3-03, or 6-06 (which also correspond to the names of Roland’s classic bass and drum sequencers) – but we still have 9-09 to come yet.

Interestingly, the reason why it’s better known at all seems to be mainly due its de-facto inclusion into the standard MIDI drum set collection that was also introduced by Roland. As a result, most MIDI devices (i.e keyboards) with built-in drum sounds have samples based on this machine built-in.

It’s got a definitive sound to it – highly reminiscent of the 80s, and often responsible for creating hugely infectious beats – and although pretty much every sound has made its way into the public’s sub-conscious via pretty much any genre that electronic music has touched, a few defining characteristics were:

• a kick drum with awesome sub-bass, which has been employed pretty much everywhere
• really snappy snares
• a rather odd melodic sounding cowbell
• pretty much the definitive electronic handclap sound

Due to its use of analog synthesis (instead of samples), the sounds were substantially tweak-able.

Unfortunately, to get the sound of the 808 most of us have to make do with samples, and many people have done impressive work of attempting to capture the nuances of the numerous possibilities offered for each sound (see below). That being said, it’s still a long way from making a perfect representation of the characteristics of an analog device such as this.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia’s article on the TR-808
• Vintage Synth’s write-up
• A full set of TR-808 samples on Roland Clan