My upright pianos have been used in the latest project by Rich Aitken of Nimrod Productions: “They’re ace. Did the job wonderfully”.

I have ring tones for sale! Go here to buy them. I carefully sampled the bells of Shandon and tried different tunes on them. Not everything works, they’re in the key of C#, and even in the Emu sampler the transposing can take away the magic. Plus, they’re quite rough sounding bells, so almost everything polyphonic sounds too harsh. I chose tunes that retain the vibe of Shandon, even when playing back on the tiny speaker in a mobile phone. Perfect for expats!

• The Fuchsia Band were back, recording their song for the SnaG Ceol ’07 CD. This album went to number one in Ireland last year. We are trying to preserve the vibe and messiness of the demos but with classy performances and studio polish. It sounds like we’ve succeeded! They will be back after the hols for sweetening.
• Tomás has been delving deeply into the possibilites of the Peter Siedlaczek Advanced Orchestra sample collection. Combined with the Emu sample library, we now have a fantastic range of orchestral colours. (Tomás began studying orchestration in UCC. He’s still studying it to this day…)
• Ken is hard at work writing songs for his new solo album, produced by Tomás. He’s working on a Christmas song- he’s on a roll with those at the moment 🙂

• The Freakscene Christmas album “Happy Birthday Jesus” is in the shops now. Check out the packaging, it’s very tasty.

It’s been getting great airplay, including Tom Dunne’s Pet Sounds show. There’ll be a live promo Dec 15th on Red FM, and a gig Dec 17th in The Quad.
• Our boys, The Hopper Brothers, have their own myspace.
• Sales of Carols for Kenya have hit the 1000 mark! I knew I should have signed up for a royalty 🙂
• After a short absence, the Emu CD version of the upright pianos is back in the shop.

• Tomás is working on some new material. He’s working with computer vocals, inspired in part by Johann Johannsson’s piece “Odi et Amo”, and partly by his fascination with music for young children, just like his piece Fairytale, which you can see and hear here.
• Ken is in the process of constructing a new studio, and is currently appreciating the benefits of good monitor speakers and a little acoustic treatment.
• One of our friends and collaborators, gifted guitarist Michael O’Sullivan, has had his first book published. Congratulations Michael! Buy it on Amazon.com Michael has previously been published in several academic journals. He is currently teaching English In Japan, and working on a collection of short stories.
• Some of you may have noticed that we’re fans of the Yamaha TX16W sampler. Here is Tomás’s article on it. And here’s an interesting interview with John Bowen, where he mentions that an early version of the Korg Wavestation used the same filter engine. Don’t get too excited! While very flexible and capable of many filter types, the TX16W filter engine ends up sounding more like 6dB slope than “classic” 24dB. However, it does have an interesting “phaser” filter.

• Naiant miniature condensers.
• Roland SPD-11 drum pads and sound module.

• New article on the Casio CZ range of synthesizers here.

• The Carols for Kenya charity CD was launched yesterday, to fund the maintenance of an education centre in the central town of Lodwar. The CD makes a great Christmas present! Recording choirs is great fun. I used my new naiant omni directional microphones for that. You can see pictures of the sessions here.

• I mastered the new EP from The Citizen, due out in October. Great lyrical imagery, a pleasure to listen to. Beautifully recorded by Robbie Collins at Blue Monkey studio.
• The femmepop EP is almost finished.

• We now have a “vintage” Yamaha DMP7D, an early digital mixing desk. It’s being used as two and a half SPX90s, for classic reverb and chorus effects, via S/Pdif. It came as a package with the MLA7 rackmout 8 channel mic pre. Pretty cool!