crazybobbles

Sorting out 500 muse photos

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

I dislike deleting photos I take, these days when I come back from a gig I have about 500 shots that I need to sort out, pick and then upload onto flickr. Now usually in gig environments you’ll discover that there’s a high ratio of crap shots and good shots purely because of crazy fans pushing you, random hands in the way, or the band moving too fast etc but once you throw all them out you have about 100-200 shots of nice shots.

Now what happens next? Do I upload them all? Now if all shots were unique then hell yeah, upload them all, but this is from one gig. A magazine doesn’t show millions of photos for one gig so neither should I. It’s only best to strip out all the similar but not as epic shots and only keep the epic ones. That means comparing them against one and another and SLOWLY killing the photos off. It usually takes hours to do and is a toughie when the photos are all sharp and presentable. I do have a few rules of deciding which photo goes through, usually judging on how interesting the lights are, and how dynamic the musician’s pose is. Once we’ve declared the winners, we start killing loads of photos that are simply “bad duplicates“.

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Muse Royal Albert Hall Review

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

I was able to grab a ticket at the last minute and go see the band play at a very respectable and epic venue, the Royal Albert Hall, which is renowned for it’s awesome acoustics and dazzling lightings (saw a few musicals there beforehand). It was all part of the Teenage Cancer Trust charity and made everyone feel happy inside that they’ve donated some money from it all. Anyway, I’m sure most of the information can be found at Musewiki so I’ll get straight into the review.

Oh and I spoke to a ticket tout (to research on how much they were charging) about buying Muse tickets and he said £70, tut tut. He was willing to go lower but I left since I was quite disgusted.

The gig was spectacular. They did a lot of new things, a lot of right things and all in all it was a rocking gig. When Take a bow came up I immediately gave them the nod of approval knowing full well that if Take a Bow was the opener, Knights of Cydonia will be the last song (which I prefer a lot). The acoustics were amazing as well as the lighting. Their choice of songs were really good, introducing a few new riffs as well as playing some old songs such as Fury which really lighted up the stage for the die hard fans. The highlight would be when Matt got up to the organs and played Megalomania. Really making use of the venue’s facilities. Makes you wonder if that could have been an end song? (Epic but not rocky). From the gig you would have thought Matt had learnt some new facial expressions because he was pulling all sorts of faces during the gig. The highlight songs would have been, Knights of Cydonia, Megalomania, Fury and Bliss. The balloons coming out, although old, felt like it wasn’t done in a long time, probably because you rarely GET to play with the balloons on venues such as Wembley Stadium etc. It reminded me of the Brixton gig due to it’s size and everything.

Anyway, enjoy some photos! I uploaded about 50 shots so be sure to check them all out on my flickr page

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Muse cover: Supermassive black hole

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

I’ll be having a nice 1 week + holiday so I won’t be blogging much / at all, during that period. So yeah, thought I’d be nice and release one of my slightly hidden covers that I did last year. This is using pro tools so it’s slightly cooler but it’s all recorded pretty live which gives it that very raw edge. Unfortunately I sing in this one, this is probably the only cover you’ll ever hear me sing. I don’t like singing because my voice sucks and I don’t think it’ll get any better so yeah. First ever song where I really went all out on trying to get mixing and mastering done right, my first shot at it and all so I’m still learning. So yeah, I’ll be up north now, enjoy.

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Muse Haarp Dvd Released

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Well folks, I’m sure you’ve all been lovely people and bought yourself a copy of Muse Haarp DVD. Would like to know what you thought of the DVD. I unfortunately am steering clear for it for now since I’m still savouring the vue cinema experience and all. Will hopefully get it soon or something and will report back here. Other than that, what did YOU think of it, a predictable poll would be in order but I’ll save that in a bit

Muse releasing singles?

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Muse’s new direction of wanting to exclusively release singles instead of albums. If not head to nme and read their article. It’s quite a unique move, but there are obvious pro’s and con’s attached to the idea. Lets run through them
Pro’s

• It’s unique, I’m sure it’s done in the past but to be fair, it’s not the norm now is it? But hey, you can’t make an omlet without breaking some eggs, and by eggs i mean the songs in an album, and by omlet i mean an album? I don’t know, to be honest I actually just wanted to use that phrase in the entry
• Shorter times for song delivery, songs are released more sparodicly due to the lack of dependancy to release a batch of songs colletively.
• More raw tunes? I’m predicting this move will generate more spontaneous and raw tracks, the thing with releasing an album is you have loads of time to redo a song if needs be, so if you’ve recorded track 1, and halfway recording you go “hmm, perhaps we could add arrppegios on track 1″ and bam, changes made, this can be considered a pro or a con if you ask me since adding stuff to a song can welcome in the double edged sword theory (felt like saying fury but perhaps too cheesy?)
• Muse can technically make more money with singles than an album since the only way of buying the song is to buy the single, with the album you can pretty much scrap the singles unless they put B sides on them (and not stupid live tracks)

Cons:

• There’s no “collective” feel. Albums can generally have themes and atmospheres attached to theme, releasing just singles won’t have that same feeling.
• Fans will have to pay more to collect all the singles
• Not much impact compared to releasing an album, even the HAARP dvd seems to be bringing in attention and whatnot, having it released one by one will lose that build and wait that some of us love
• We’ll miss epic listening parties that sometimes the fans can share, I dont know how many people went to the Absolution listening party but that was beyond epic. It was played inside the London Planeterium and it really captured the feel of it with the visuals etc. The Muse HAARP at vue screening was also another epic event.

There’s probably more which I’ll add if I can think of many, suggest some too In my honest opinion, I would rather have the band release album to generate more momentum when the album is released, the bummer is when these albums get leaked and distributed before they are release and unless you are reviewing the album, it’s just not cool anymore.

So yeah, another poll on whether or not this is a good idea…

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Review: Muse HAARP at the cinemas

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

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Matt’s face is clearly not suitable for HD, I’m sure most of you living in the UK (and some of you fanatic types) went to see Muse’s epic Wembley Stadium gig at your local theatre. If not, shame on you, if you have a valid reason, shame on them for airing it in one date (granted I can picture someone “touring” the entire country to watch the “movie” over and over again). It does the justice of showing it in the cinemas I must say. We begin asking ourselves whether or not this was just a memory jog for our experience at Wembley Stadium or was it an actual reliving the gig experience. The question is whether or not it replicated the atmosphere and mood that is when you’re gigging. I’d say not enough, but it’s really close. Having the damn thing blaring at you in 5.1 surround sound is pretty epic. The beauty now is that you can get a better view of the band and appreciate the subtle things such as that little robot that carried Matt’s guitars or Matt doing all sorts of gestures and noises on the mic.

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Muse remix: Butterflies & Hurricanes

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Another back catalogue release, don’t worry soon I’ll do some new stuff but for now, feast your eyes on this.

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This was my first muse remix that featured vocals. I used some very sly techniques of obtaining this bad boy which was why I took extra care in making the sure the cover sounds fun. It’s filled with crazy random arpeggios (you’ll notice it’s a trait in my remixes) and some thumping drums hehe. There’s one bit where I kind of screw up the synth work but I’m sure you can forgive that one mistake. The bassline is also a lot more “intense”. I dont know, just listen haha. Comments are welcome as a green snake in a sugar cane field

Musewiki forums?

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

So linking back to the previous post regarding musewiki, should there be a forum for it? Granted I’m a fond user and moderator of the official message board and quite reluctant to change,the idea is still nonetheless a floating one and is considerable. The only doubt is that there’s not enough social side of musewiki than I’ve hoped it would be. It would be nice to be able to add more opinionated and social comments about Muse related things, I could see huge discussions on Muse Haarp or them playing at V or something.

Of course this would have to be fully separated between factual and thoughts / perspectives. This is where perhaps a forum could be implemented, to really speak out to people and get some intellectual posts going on. I don’t think both the official board and other sites have too many good posts without being polluted with n00bish posts. So yeah, this is the idea, I’ll get some feedback from you guys and from there we’ll work out the feasibility of it all, if the plans go ahead I will get a donation thing going to actually purchase the board. I am not fond of the free boards out there (phpbb comes to mind) since they require constant care and are open to attacks so a full license to vBulletin will be needed which comes at a hefty £90 for the license. So yeah, quite a lot of things to consider. I don’t think there’s enough of a demand for a message board but who know’s best see what you guys think and we can work from there.

If you have any thoughts on a musewiki forum, feel free to comment here.

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