If you’ve been through this site memorising everything, then you’ll know that in the seventies I used to play in a folk rock band called Caedmon.

Caedmon played their farewell concert thirty years ago, recorded and released an album and went their separate ways. The album has since become a collectors item and has been called the second best folk rock album ever.

Gosh.

Anyway, to celebrate the thirty year mark, we got together at the weekend and spent three blissful days making music. We’re looking to record some tracks later this year, and in the meantime we’ve put up a web site.

So if you’re interested, check out CaedmonsReturn.com.

Neither is quite true. I’m a shite drummer and the kit in question is the ubiquitous DD502, which can be found all over the place under a variety of different brand names. The main thing is - it’s cheap.

So to help folk who may be thinking of buying one to learn how to play the drums like I did, I’ve recorded a short audio clip to demonstrate what it does do, and what it doesn’t do. You can find reviews all over the web for this kit, including quite a few on YouTube, but I didn’t find any which illustrated the weaknesses as well as the strengths.

For what it’s worth, skilled drummers generally don’t think much of it, and beginners think it’s excellent value for money.

Judge for yourself.

And for those without Flash:

• DD502 review

Well, I’ve decided to learn how to play the drums.

This is an ingenious and cunning plan. Instead of spending hours trying to make my computer sound like a real drummer, it suddenly became obvious that what I needed was - a real drummer!

Now, as anyone who has tried to put together a band will know, the band stands or falls on the quality of its drummer.

Fortunately, good drummers are easily identified. They’re the ones who charge by the hour for rehearsal time. If you’re in the awkward situation of having a drummer you think is good but who doesn’t charge, here’s another tip: they’re usually also the only member of the band who can’t dance. Which is odd.

Now, as most drummers don’t accept credit cards, I had to find another solution. Having spent most of my childhood banging on the dinner table with fork and knife, it was clear to me that I had an innate talent, so I promptly went out and bought a drum kit.

Silent drumming

Your average drum is a round shell with plastic skin stretched tightly over the open ends. When you hit the skin with a drum stick, the drum stick bounces back up, the door bell rings and the neighbour says, “What the f**k is going on here!”

Fortunately, this is the twenty-first century. You can now buy a collection of small pads bolted onto a frame instead. When you hit one of these pads, the drum stick bounces back up, a wire connected to the pad carries a signal back to a small box with lights and buttons (it’s known as a brain - we all knew drummers must have done something with them), the brain recognises the signal as pad 3 and triggers a snare sound in your headphones.

And the neighbours? Well, after about a week, there comes a tentative knock at the door.

“Is your husband having difficulty putting up those shelves?”

So far, my wife has successfully managed to feign complete ignorance.

Dexterity? Pah!

There’s no getting around this, I’m left-handed. The Latin word for left is ’sinister’. The Latin word for right is ‘dexter’, from which comes the english word ‘dexterous’. This is not a word I can apply to my right hand, whose sense of timing, not to mention direction. is frankly sinister. There, that’s confused you. Still, this is an issue all drummers have to face. Each of the four limbs (with the exception of a few celebrated male porn stars who might introduce a fifth) has to be equally dexterous.

Still, like everything else, fixing this is simply down to practice. So for 15 minutes each day, I drum enthusiastically with headphones on. As a result, I’ve already worked what the drums really should be doing on ‘I’m Back’. Once I started playing along with sticks in hand, it was obvious.

But no, listen!

There is a downside to this new silent drumming though. Casual listeners passing by hear a steady clicking sound which varies little over the weeks, whereas inside the headphones, whole new worlds of polyrhythm and syncopation have opened up.

So to silence the doubters, I’ve included an audio file which shows what you can hear outside the studio and what is actually coming through the headphones.

Judge for yourselves how far I have come on.

And for those without Flash:

• Electronic drum kit demonstration

Fergus and I retreated to a health farm and slowly rebuilt our confidence and our wiring. But the good news was that The Clarity and Sparkle Show asked us back.

We surmised that this might have been due to the recent controversy over TV games shows and fixed results and that Clarity and Sparkle were just trying to keep their noses clean, but whatever the reason, we grabbed the chance for a comeback with both hands.

The show was recorded late last year, but finally they’ve sent me a recording of the event and I can now announce that Fergus just barnstormed the whole thing!

It was brilliant! Fergus sounded great and we just couldn’t stop playing. But the amazing thing was that the house band got the buzz as well and we all started jamming right there and then in the middle of the show!

Anyway, they’ve given me permission to post the recording on the blog, so here you go. Pour yourself a stiff drink and enjoy the drama. I know I did.

And for those without Flash:

• The Clarity and Sparkle Show: Episode 2

The survey was conducted during an unusually quiet period on the Bisset blog, which we can now exclusively reveal was deliberately engineered by the blogmeister himself, in order to allow the pollsters free reign. Rumours that James Bisset had in fact just disappeared up his own arse have been vigorously denied.

“Mmmnn mufffnnn nffffllll”, said the fifty-something year old Bisset in a rather awkward telephone interview.

An offficial statement from the James Bisset 50th Anniversary Edition organisation later announced that:

“Whilst the 50th Anniversary Edition was originally planned to produce a full album of songs in a fortnight and has yet to deliver a completed track after three years, our many fans and followers are fascinated by the complex, not to say arcane, process involved in manufacturing the right milieu for a sensitive, creative artiste to produce their best work. Unlike so many investors in pop talent in the music industry today, we absolutely stand by our artist’s right to hone relentlessly the tools of his trade. We confidently expect outstanding work in 2006, erm… 2007, erm… 2008.”

But of course, the downside is that a guitar amp speaker tends to colour the sound too, which is why guitars still get played through vintage Celestions instead of modern hi-fi speakers.

The plan was to use to use the guitar amp simulator in Logic (Guitar Amp Pro or GAP) to simulate the speaker cab I wanted, but I was disappointed to discover that I couldn’t have the speaker simulation without amp simulation too. Which kind of defeated the purpose.

So I posted a little moan on the Logic Studio discussion forum and forgot all about it. The day job and the life domestic has occupied my time since, but this weekend I decided to check up on the discussion thread.

In response, one by the name ‘bdevoid’ had suggested using Space Designer and a link to a selection of impulse responses for same.

[Cue thunder, lightning, light bulb switching on] Doh! Space Designer is a tool for simulating a space like a bathroom or a cave or the Albert Hall (did I mention that I played in the Albert Hall once?). But the space could just as easily be a speaker cab, or for that matter, an acoustic guitar body.

I promptly downloaded the Beamsonic Impulse Responses he’d linked to and discovered a ‘Matchless Chieftain’ amongst a whole lot of other goodies.

You can hear the result here:

And for those without Flash:

• speaker-simulation.mp3

Good News: Now I’ve got good reason to resurrect that ‘make your own hiking stick’ project I started last year.

Good News: Logic Pro 8 looks like being the upgrade I’ve been waiting for - full of Apple usability improvements. This is pissing off the professionals who’ve been using the app day in and day out for the past five years. T’was ever thus.

Bad News: The upgrade is processor hungry.

Good News: With the death of my 20in 1.8gHz iMac, the office dual processor 2gHz G5 is now the studio machine, and it hardly raises an eyebrow when Logic kicks off.

Bad News: nine fans! And this machine is now three years old so the fans are getting a bit wheezy. Good thing my hearing is getting worse!

Good News: We heard back from the Clarity and Sparkle Show: they’re going to let Fergus have a re-match! We’re probably getting the benefit of all these TV and radio competition scandals exposed recently. The show wants to look generous and fair-minded.

Bad News: I’m off to read my ’stickmaking handbook’. You’ll have to find something else to read.

So I’m taking a step back and trying to see exactly what variables we have here.

When I first brought the G5 home, none of the Firewire ports worked at all; this despite the fact that they had all been working fine the previous day in the office. Only by unplugging everything including power, leaving it alone for 24 hours and then restarting could I get any Firewire device to work at all.

So, I started again from scratch this morning by switching off the Mac, unplugging every Firewire device (including the 23″ Cinema monitor with Firewire bus) and then unplugging the power cable from the back too. This apparently resets the PMU (Power Management Unit?) and you can certainly hear a click as if something just switched off when you pull out the plug.

Tonight it’s one step at a time:

1. plug the MOTO 828 mk2 directly into the back Firewire 400 socket, and start up the Mac. Yay! Logic runs fine. Create a little two bar loop driving two instances of Ultrabeat, copy the patterns to the arrange window and switch off the Ultrabeat sequencers. So now we’ve got a little ‘ezylode’ startup file with two tracks.
2. Switch everything off, connect the monitor Firewire bus and then plug the MOTU 828 into the monitor. Start up again. Yup - Heave a sigh of relief. Everything is running fine.
3. So far so good. But remember, all the music is stored on the external HD. So next test - while Logic is running, I’m going to plug the external HD into the Firewire 800 bus. Here goes… As the last time, the sound disappears a couple of times but it eventually settles down. Strangely, one of the Ultrabeat tracks is coming and going, fading out and in again in the second bar. No - it seems to be OK.
4. Plug the iPod dock into the 2nd monitor Firewire port - and one of the ultrabeat tracks has now disappeared altogether. Unplugging the iPod dock makes no difference. I know, let’s try switching it off and then switching it back on again. Well restarting Logic fixes it, and this time, plugging in the iPod dock makes no difference.
5. Let’s push the boat out. I’m going to connect the portable HD via a Firewire socket on the back of the external HD. Fingers crossed… Whew - again the cutouts, the switching in and out, but stopping the playhead and starting again are enough to fix it.
6. And finally, I’m going to restart the machine and see what happens… Jeez - still working. OK, as you were. Back to work everybody. Nothing to see here.

Shit. What was that all about? I think that there is every guarantee that this will happen again. And I’ll need to go through the whole diagnostic process and then suddenly the computer will just decide to start working again.

So, as I explained briefly in the last post, due to the untimely demise of my iMac, I now have a three year old Powermac G5 in the studio. This was a fairly painless installation, because both machines were used for work (one in the office and one at home) and had the same software installed. The only complication (other than the agonising struggle to copy approximately 11,000 tracks back from my iPod into iTunes) was the sudden announcement from Logic Pro that there was an “Error while trying to synchronize Audio and MIDI.”

Instead of hearing my music pounding through the MOTU 828 MkII via Firewire, all I could hear were a few clicks and pops followed by an alert box - “Error while trying to synchronize Audio and MIDI.”

I googled the phrase. I trawled through the Logic Pro discussion forums at apple.com. I stared in frightened awe at the list of ten possible solutions on the Apple Knowledge Base: Logic Pro/Logic Express: Error while trying to sync Audio and MIDI.

Word Clock? MTC? Aggregate Device? I’m just a guitar player!

But fear not, dear readers. For I have found a much simpler solution.

Unplug all your other Firewire devices!

I still remember the thrill when Apple first brought out Firewire as the ultimate solution to the mystic process know as SCSI. No longer did we have to power everything down before plugging in a new device. No longer did we need to to check and set every SCSI device ID and make sure that each was different (0-7). No longer did we need to sacrifice a scrawny chicken on the altar at dawn before adding another device to the chain. Just plug it in and plug it out. In fact I even remember a sales rep who blew up a 20mb external hard disk trying to connect it via SCSI to a running SE30. No chicken, and that guy had egg on his face.

Anyway, thing is that Firewire seems to get a bit shirty as it gets older. This G5 has one Firewire 800 and two Firewire 400 ports. One Firewire 400 port connects to the 23″ monitor which acts as a Firewire bus with two Firewire 400 ports. Into this Firewire network I’m connecting

• an external LaCie HD where all the music files get stored,
• a portable ‘transfer’ HD for transferring work files from the work machine to the home machine and vice versa,
• an iPod dock,
• an occasional backup drive
• and the MOTU 828.

And you know, it’s just like SCSI was. Sometimes I connect the portable HD and the external HD promptly unmounts. Sometimes nothing mounts at all.

So when I got the “Error while trying to synchronize Audio and MIDI” alert, I shut everything down, disconnected every Firewire device save the MOTU 828 and started up again. Sure enough, the music came driving through. Yay! Still, no good without an external drive to save the recordings, so I hot-plugged the external drive.

Immediately, the music cut out - and then came back on again. And then cut out - and came back on again!

So now I’ve got the MOTU 828 and the external drive working. I’ve got the iPod dock plugged into the the back of the MOTU 828, but i haven’t tried the iPod in it yet. And I haven’t connected the portable HD either.

Does anyone know if Asda are still selling those £2 chickens?

Finally we returned to our sweet domestic chaos. I fired up the iMac with a new enthusiasm for the 50th Anniversary Edition as soon as the rest of the family retired to bed, and the hard disk crashed.

Same problem as the last time (when the motherboard, hard disk et al were replaced) except that this time the machine was out of warranty.

Still, the iMac is also my works machine when I’m not in the office, so it was a fairly painless operation to persuade the company to replace it. The office now rejoices in a 24″ glossy Intel iMac, and the previous office G5 is sitting in the corner of my studio with its nine fans wheezing away trying to keep the dual processor cool in the face of my white hot creativity.

Good News, Bad News

So the good news is that I’ve now got a much faster machine to power the studio, and the bad news is that it doesn’t quite seem to understand what I was doing before and keeps complaining that it can’t keep audio and midi in sync.

But the best news of all is that Fergus and I are close to finally cracking the muffled guitar issue. As you will remember, we entered the Clarity and Sparkle Show only to be thrown out with boos and hisses.

I rewired Fergus (that’s my James Bisset 50th Anniversary Strat - stop talking at the back please) with the traditional Fender wiring but including the star grounding just to see what would happen, and all the clarity and sparkle was right back where it should be.

I’ve written to the Clarity and Sparkle Show asking for a re-match.

Fingers crossed.