Ivybridge Diary 2

So another week, another blog. This is how the system should work from here on in. And what better way to kick off this week’s addition that with raw insight from Lewis in the form of an essential Ivybridge ’PRO TIP’.

PRO TIP 1: When buying musical equipment, often the best place to start is a music store.

With comments like that, we’ll soon be hanging up our instruments to write books, as we’re sure you’ll agree.
On the song writing front, we went through a change of heart with a couple of compositions this week. The song tentatively titled as Dwayne Dibley went through some drastic changes this week to emerge at the other side as a ferocious, dynamic beast! Whereas before we were concentrating on creating dynamics throughout the song by dropping into atmospherics, now we’ve discovered that by far the best way of doing this is to rock the tune into the ground using insane, cold hard riffage! The other eureka moment came in the form of another insightful nugget from Lewis…

PRO TIP 2: Wherever possible, punctuate your composition with ’Wh-Wh-What?!’ moments.

This golden comment led to the creation of some tight syncopation later in the track.

Another song this week was, for better or worse, shelved in favour of stealing it’s components to create other (hopefully) better songs in the future. But we’ll see how they go in future weeks.

RECORD OF THE WEEK -

This weeks record(s) of the week come in the shape of various genres. Charlie’s been spinning Fleetwood Mac’s classic ’Rumours’ album. According to his Dad, Rumours was the first album in history to be recorded entirely using an Aphex Aural Exciter (great name), a processor invented way back when that basically fiddled with different frequencies separately and made everything sound mighty spiffy. This can be confirmed with just one listen to the Rumours album, which does sound absolutely magic. Recording an entire record with the processor was a rarity, because Aphex charged the use of the unit based on every minute of recorded material.

More information on the Aphex Aural Exciter can be found here.

Lewis has continued his love affair with Lamb of God’s ’Ashes Of The Wake’ album, but at the same time has been flirting with ’The World’s Greatest Drummer’, Buddy Rich on the side. Matt on the other hand has been satisfying his punk/metal/jazz/prog/salsa urges with the excellent Mars Volta album ’The Bedlam In Goliath’. Matt and Charlie have both fallen in love with this album. Anyone who fancies something a bit different could do a lot worse than investing in some Mars Volta (though for virgins, we’d definitely recommend their debut LP – ’Deloused At The Comatorium’. Phew.

In related news, Charlie hit Brixton academy last Friday for The Mars Volta’s insane live show. He came away breathless, and with a 5 star review of the gig. It was, in his words, “Something else!”.

That’s it for this week. Love thy neighbour, love thyself and love thy Bridge. We’ll see you again soon for more exciting encounters of the bloggy kind.

Ivybridge x.

P.S. If you scroll down a little way on the myspace, you’ll see that a new gig date has magically appeared in our upcoming dates section. Bull & Gate, Kentish Town, May 24th, be there, or be square.

Ivybridge Diary 1

OK. So here it is, the first in what we hope will be a weekly (or nearly weekly) diary entry on this page to keep people apprised of stuff that we’ve been up to. Whether that be studio chatter or just life in general.

Lewis’s ‘Starlight Express’ drumsticks.

This week we had our regular jam session at our local practice rooms. Recently Lewis has been rocking some truly brilliantly/disgustingly (delete as applicable) styled drumsticks which he got for Christmas, so let us know what you think of them, and the delicate subject of novelty drumsticks in general.

After we had a month off during January we’re back writing new material, and it’s moving along quite swellingly. We spent the first half of the session polishing parts of a particularly funky new track that we’ve given the moniker of ‘Dwayne Dibley’ for the time being. (This stemmed from last week’s session when Lewis and Charlie came up with the rhythm part for the verse, and it was so damn groovy that Charlie couldn’t help himself from dancing like the Cat from Red Dwarf.) The main part of the track started life as a bass line resembling something a little like The Chemical Brothers’ excellent ‘Orange Wedge’, but after Lewis had put down drums it’s become a bit more Nine Inch Nails. It’s starting to come together nicely – today Matt’s contribution came in the form of a sexy chorus with an interesting rhythmical quirk that happens in the latter half of the song. So it’s beginning to have all the hallmarks of a foot-stomper, which is always nice.

The Cat.

The other half of the session was spent trying out something a little different.

Earlier in the week a text from Matt claimed he had written the ultimate ballad. Now, while it maybe far from a finished song, the licks have a lot going for them. For some reason though, drums and bass were quite painful to write, sooooo we dug out Matt’s second guitar and began constructing a two-guitar arrangement of the material. It’s too early to comment on how the song will end up sounding, but at the moment it’s got kind of a Dire-Straits-meets-mellow-Placebo vibe going on, which is certainly a different tack for us to take. Another untapped resource for us has been the guitar solo. In the past, purely because of the nature of soloing an acoustic guitar on a rock song, we’ve tended to shy away from such things. But if it’s a completely acoustic song, then who knows?!

RECORD OF THE WEEK -

As well as the chatty banter up top we thought we’d also start a bit of a ‘record of the week’ section on these diary entries so you lovely people can get a little insight into what inspires us and what we get our musical rocks off to. Anyway, here goes….

Matt has already flaunted the rules of ‘record of the week’ by citing a couple of albums: Placebo’s ‘Without You I’m Nothing’ and Zero 7’s ‘Simple Things’. Lewis has gone for a broader, band specific approach to his nomination with “Lamb Of God”. It’s nice to see that he’s keeping it well metal. Charlie on the other hand has been revisiting Smashing Pumpkins’ excellent ‘Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness’. Possibly one of the only double albums that doesn’t actually get boring after the halfway point. Discuss?

Well, it’s late, so that just about wraps it up for this entry. Be excellent to each other. And come back soon. We might even spill the beans on the forthcoming EP (finally).

Ivybridge x.