MuseWiki:News

I think it’s time to delete some of the old change logs for Musewiki. This should help make backing up a lot easier since the database is becoming pretty epic, though I suppose the main cause is actually the photos but nonetheless, a purge is in order. I shall propose to do it on the 15th of July (because I like that number) So make sure you’re not leaving out anything that needs restoring.

Lately I’ve been pondering, Muse have seriously become one of those bands where some fans just can’t get enough of the band and have to see them more than once during each tour. Of course, Muse are reknown for making stunning performances on stage and have won enough awards to pretty much be one of the best live acts in the Uk. But what makes a person take a nice plane to another new destination to see the band?

Now, to get some perspective on how dedicate some people are, I know people who’ve been to about 22 gigs for ONE TOUR. Not their entire gig list, just for one tour. I’ve seen the elderly females travel from the other side of the pond to catch an extra glimpse of the band and I’ve seen the ridiculous folks who came all the way from Japan to see them (wait a sec, that applies for all bands (and I’m still confused as to how the Japanese go on holiday so much, I hear that they seldomly use their holidays)). Feel free to beat those figures, I’m pretty sure there’s someone mad enough.

So yeah, this is more of an ask the readers on why they do it. Two of the staff on the Muse board crew are going to see Muse at Dublin so I wanted to see what your opinion is on gigging abroad, and whether it’s worth the effort of going.

I can understand people who’s hometown is hardly recognise which forces them to go other destinations but some people like me live in the city which makes it incredibly easy to catch the band a shed load of times. Anyway, get commenting.

Don’t forget to take note on the witty photo caption haha

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“.

Once all that is done, next thing is mining out rare gems. Sometimes you can take perfect shots and they require very little photoshopping or editing to make it good, but there are cases where you actually need to crop or “black and whitify” the photos in order to make the photo nicer, usually killing distractions or focusing into the musician, and sometimes these cropped or edited photos beat those natural ones. It’s more apparent with gig photography since you need to immediately focus people’s attention on the band so sometimes it’s important to get that kick and draw nailed.

So yeah, an example is this bad boy.

It’s a nice shot, but the background is quite distracting, it’s wide because when shooting, I wanted to shoot him and his foot on the pedal. But when it came on the screen, it wasn’t really that interesting, and when zooming in, I discover that the shot is pretty sharp so I was able to actually crop this and focus on just the top half of Matt, and here’s the end result.

You’ll notice that this photo has a better impact since it focuses on the subject more. The crowd is quite distracting but meh, they’ll stay for now haha. This crop was done a day after uploading the photos, I was slowly swotting down photos that people weren’t keen on looking at to keep the photo count down, but this one seemed like one of those “hmm, if i cropped it, perhaps it will look better”, and it really did. It’s definitely tough work post processing these bad boys, at the end of the day I tend to stick with about 20-30 photos (the amount you can take with the disposable camera usually) I broke the boundries with Muse but hey, it’s Royal Albert Hall :p.

So yeah, when sorting out photos, it’s a pain, but if you put the time and effort you’ll yield excellent results. I hope you all enjoyed the photos, thanks for commenting on them and all.

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

The best shot! It looks epic in big!

Looks like Matt has on tooth here!

and why not, some Matt pouting, he did this pout right after Butterflies and Hurricanes, it’s weird to think you’d make that face at the last note of it.

Anyway, what did YOU think of the gig? Post your review and experiences, how awesome was the organs for you?

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.

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

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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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.

Now let’s get into the meat, I was quite pumped for the “gig”, the fact that 75,000 people were clapping their hands to Starlight made you want to conform to the others and clap along. The mood was certainly there, the problem is, “is everyone going to let themselves go and pretend it’s the gig all over again?” Sadly the answer is no, so although you’re getting the full on experience and sound, unfortunately the atmosphere of a cinema simply means you won’t be jumping along and doing all the air guitar bits when Matt does New Born or Invincible. Granted this was the cinema I went to and not really speaking for everyone else, however I’m certain about a few things that we all shared, and perhaps I should just list them:

The fans depicted in the movie were hilarious, if they were Muse fans than boy have they turned emo. I guess they cut the scenes where fans were overexcited about the gig and do more headbanging than the usual head banging Tom, Dick or Harry. Notice the kid who had his eyes covered and him mouthing the words? Or the numerous amount of girls with thick eyeliners mouthing the words with such passion that it can almost be deemed as love making? Or that random chav crowd surfing? The list goes on…

The movie was broadcasted from Belgium. Someone suggested that you might see the buffering going on or the progress bar sliding away, better yet a youtube sign or something to really give it that streaming quality. It was pretty decent, especially when it was all in HD quality (again, Matt’s face shouldn’t be in HD). There were about 3-4 times where the streaming cut off, one noticeable one was when the riff to New Born kicked in. We started cheering each time that happened. Had to be done I suppose.

Chris did a lot of smiling and giggling during the gig, bless him

Quite a lot of saturation and contrast going on, works pretty well but adds that emo tone towards it, especially when contrast is a girls ultimate weapon when taking photos of themselves (in myspace poses no doubt (do people still use myspace?)). The colour was nonetheless rich and pretty.

As predicted, the camera work did involve a lot of crazy zooming, I believe plug in baby had the “shaking camera” effect to get that rock and roll feeling going on, most of this has been done during Absolution and Hullabaloo so nothing new there, I suppose the effects, HD quality as well as super lighting makes up for it all.

All in all, it was a good visit, getting tickets was funny because you hardly get guestlisted to cinemas haha. We had a few annoying women in front of us constantly yappering and going on about how good muse are, not to mention two oddballs who got taken out of the cinema for recording the show. Pretty eventful night I must say. Let’s hope more bands do this because it can come out really well, especially for landmark gigs such as the Wembley one. Now all you need is a decent home cinema system to relive that gig once again.

So yeah, share your experiences, on the scale of 1-5, how would you rate it?

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

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

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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