Festival ticket rush and prices

Just wondering why people madly rush for music festival tickets these days. 110.000 tickets/130.000 have been sold in 45 min for a festival I often go to. 45 minutes! And moreover tickets get more expensive year after year and most of the time the prices are just highly indecent. Well I’m not gonna pay 150$ to see Leonard Cohen… Festival tickets for less than 100$ become the exception… God where do people find their budget to go to festivals all along summer?

lomography and photography: the holga

The Holga is a particular analog camera. The trick about this tool is that its interests resides in its imperfections… What imperfection and why? It’s not difficult to answer that. Every part of this camera is made of plastic, from the lens to the shutter. So it has a lot of lens “aberrations”, distortion, color saturation and so on. Oh and when it gets a little old, you can have light leaks. One characteristic feature of a holga photograph is the vignetting. As you can see on the image, the edges are darker than the center. And the colors: holga likes the skies and is providing magnificient blue tones.

But it’s not always easy to make a nice holga shot: because it needs a tone of light and is sometimes very approximate in focus, plus there’s just one shutter aperture and speed.

But when everything is set up, you can have some great results and effects you can’t get with another regular camera. If I had more budget for it, I would shoot a lot more holga pictures. But as it uses 120mm it’s quiet expensive to process.
Here’s a picture I did when traveling Japan, it was taken in Nara, one of Japan ancient capitals.

premiere

On saturday I’ll play live with my new project, it’s going to be the first time I’ll play most of these songs in concert and the first time I’ll play them with a whole live band. So I’m really excited and nervous as well. (Of course) we did a middle-average-maybe-bad rehearsal on tuesday but we still have one tonight. But as one says: bad last rehearsal means good gig. Well maybe it’s psychological: if you play really bad on the last rehearsal, you’re 200% concentrated during the gig because you know you can f*** up the song real bad, so you’ve got this strength to survive… By playing really bad, I mean you know the songs because you played them a million times but can’t help being bad.
Anyway we’ll be 6 on stage, not necessarily everyone at the same time: electric guitar, drums, bass, acoustic guitar, keyboards, discrete laptop, alto saxophone for one song…
I can’t wait to be on saturday, because I haven’t played live for a long time, recording and recording again in my own intimate little world… We still have a general rehearsal tonight, so that’s nice. Maybe that’s going to make me cool down a little bit.

treasured instruments: the fender rhodes

Fender Rhodes are highly considered among keyboardists. Since its commercial release in 1965, it has never left the modern music arsenal, from jazz to folk, from rock to electronica. Every synth that tries to imitate it can come close to its sound, but not totally mimic it.

It has this mix of mild medium sounds and bright glockenspiel-like textures that makes it useful for a lot of styles. Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock used it a lot in jazz. In folk-rock music, mixing it with acoustic guitars is always creating a nice effect. In alternative rock, Radiohead makes an extensive use of this instrument for example.

Technologically, we can understand why it sounds the way it does: a hammer hits a tine – very likely the kind of tine you find in a glockenspiel – and the sounds is captured by magnetic pickups, the very same technology you find on electric guitars.

I don’t own a Rhodes myself, because until a few months ago it wasn’t manufactured anymore. But the studio in which I’ve recorded owns one, so I was lucky to be able to put onto tape the “real thing”. So otherwise I’m using the virtual instrument devoted to it on my garageband and I have to say that it sounds really good and close to the real instrument. Most of the time, I would not be able to tell the difference, it’s when you hit the notes hard for example that you hear that it’s a fake one… So it’s kind of my Rhodes for the poor… By the way I’m still amazed of the sound quality of garageband instruments, as this software is already integrated when you buy your mac.