A chap from Wembley made it for us called 'Brandoni', little Italian man that has bought out all the old parts from italian king's of cool 'eko' and also 'vox'. He's just made a guitar for Chris Martin from Coldplay so I feel quite priveliged to be playing this guitar! Brandoni's warehouse is just full of bits of boddies and necks everywhere, so he's wanged together the body of a gorgeous little vintage classical guitar (a Rio 6) with a flying bridge and an electric guitar neck off of an old 60's vox. I'm having a few issues with the pickup not giving enough signal onstage but he's gonna sort it out swiftish before our big gig at the Carling Academy which you can win tickets for. Click here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=19780163411&ref=ts
Massive massive massive shout out to my management for sorting me out with this little beast of a guitar. I haven't been able to afford one for ten years (no joke) so they have really made me smile!
In other news, KRMB Management have also arranged for me to go over to Germany with them to meet some very important industry folk (namely the CEO of EMI Europe Peter Ende and also Franz Plaza, who's produced the 'Fugees', 'Mariah Carey' and another of KRMB's acts 'Bora'). Check out the size of the desks in Franz's studio:
We are going over to discuss the release of a single in Germany, a market we that we feel fits our demographic pretty darn well. I've been looking into this carefully, and it seems that Germany are ahead of us here in the Uk, especially on the subject of harnessing new technologies. The labels in the uk can't seem to get their little brains around how to combat mp3 piracy, or at least how to subsidise the loss of sales due to such piracy. They tie themselves up in legislation. Germany (and Canada for that matter) however, are really on the ball and have just tried to deal with it, at least in the short term; they have implemented a system where the record companies are taxing the technological companies that mass produce mp3 players / cd burners / blank cd-rs and computers with cd burners, and they are then dividing this tax equally between themselves and the artist. 50/50 basis I believe as well. Pretty nifty eh? Why can't the uk do that? Because the labels refuse to give the artist a 50/50 split? Or because they can't get their little heads out of a dated business model? Thoughts opinions?...
One more thing while i'm at it, just got home tonight from mixing with WILL FREAKIN JACKSON! Oh my good lord! What a historical legend! This guy has A LOT of disks on his walls, he was the man behind the "Pigeon Detectives" first album, "the Music's" first album, and in excess of 1 MILLION COPIES of the Smurfs Christmas No.1 album / single! Haha! He was Mr Friggin Smurf! Crazy! I loved his approach to mixing; he's very like me in the fact he's so anal about his mixes being polished but still sounding live and with energy. Everything has to sit just right in the mix. Everything has to have just enough space to breath. Just enough reverb. Inspirational chap. Can't wait to hear the final mix of our single "Home". It's being released on November 3rd! Go buy it!
Oh, and come to a gig and say hello - We'd like that a lot! This is a live video we just got back from City Showcase 2008, taken in a shop window on Regent's Street London:
